Hey guys, as I've noted over the last while, I've been in Asia over summer. I spent some time in Taiwan, then China, and ended the trip in Vietnam. As usual, when I travel, I keep an eye open on interesting technology sights and sounds, especially what's new and available in the world of audio; if anything.
For fun, here are a few pictures and comments from the places I visited that might be
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MUSINGS: A Technophile's Breeze Through Asia 2016...
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RETRO-MEASURE: 2006 Apple iPod "Classic" 60GB 5th Generation
Here's a very cool Steve Hoffman forum thread I came across a few months back which "inspired" this post.
I appreciate the iPod. It was quite the gadget back in the day, foreshadowing the rise of touchscreen "gesture" devices. I remember being impressed by the intuitive scroll wheel (introduced in late 2001) which over time transformed to the "touch wheel" by 2002 then the "click wheel" by 2003
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MUSINGS: 4K UHD TV, HFR, 3D, HDR, etc... Thoughts on video technology and the consumer.
As you saw a couple weeks back, when in China, I visited a number of electronics stores, especially the "big box" places in Beijing and Guangzhou. Many of these stores had on display a whole floor of 4K TVs made by all kinds of brands (many local China brands like TCL, Hisense, Skyworth, Changhong as well as the usual Samsung, LG, Sharp, Sony, etc...) and one could easily walk around and
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PREVIEW / SET-UP: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B & HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro
As you know from discussions a few months ago, I'm a fan of the credit-card sized SBCs (Single Board Computers). I've already spent time discussing the inexpensive but powerful ODROID-C2 and the setup of this computer as a streamer to my TEAC UD-501 USB DAC using Volumio 2 including the excellent measurements one can get with this combination.
Today, let's talk about this very affordable
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MEASUREMENTS: Raspberry Pi 3 & HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro (Audio Streaming)
Last week in the preview, I introduced you to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro HAT board. You see above a picture of the boards assembled but in the "naked" state before installation in the case. As I mentioned it doesn't take much time to put this all together on the hardware side, and just a bit of tinkering with Volumio 2 was all that was needed afterwards to get the
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An opinion about Audio & MQA by "Agitater"... (And a few words on DACs sounding similar.)
I suspect many of you hang out at the usual audio/audiophile message forum "watering holes" as I do. Among the chatter, every once awhile though, I run across something that a thoughtful poster obviously took time to compose and express such that I cannot but wish the message could be shared in a broader context beyond the individuals visiting the thread.
Last weekend, as I was reading the
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MUSINGS: Keeping it simple... MQA is a partially lossy CODEC.
Connoisseurs of French cuisine will know this guy...
In the last few days, I noticed my inbox containing a number of questions again about MQA... Presumably due to a combination of the last blog post with Agitater's comments and I guess some news on MQA after the recent Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2016 where a number of companies were playing MQA and apparently allowing A/B comparisons of
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MEASUREMENTS: HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro, PCM5122 digital filters & further thoughts on filtering...
A summary slide from this presentation slide set. Just a reminder of the general desirability of digital filters providing higher accuracy compared to analogue...
Thanks to Jim Ambras in the discussion of the measurements for the Raspberry Pi 3 & HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro for pointing me to some settings available! So in the "Wait! There's more..." department, there are some "advanced" settings
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MEASUREMENTS: Crystal Cable CrystalConnect Micro 1m Interconnects... Differences vs. Generics???
Alright guys... As you know I've measured cables in the past - why audiophile magazines never seem to get around to this is anyone's guess :-). And as I summarized here, there really hasn't been evidence of a meaningful difference between various cables of all sorts.
Over the years, I have tried to measure cables which are considered "audiophile quality" when I can get my hands on them. You know
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Moving on to 4K: A look at the Sharp LC-75N8000U UHD "HDR" TV.
As you can see above, I made the move to a larger 75" screen 4K/UHD-TV from my 55" LG 55LW5600 purchased in 2011. Not sure if it's as appreciable in the image above, but the extra 20-inches diagonally make a huge difference in the movie watching experience from the sofa! (The camera focal length and perspective clearly makes a big difference in pictures...)
This is the Sharp LC-75N8000U. As I
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MEASUREMENTS: On the value for ethernet "galvanic isolation"...
Ponderous. That's the adjective that comes to mind so often when I visit audiophile sites and come across yet another tweak suggestion. Over the years, there have been many such nuggets... Ideas like using a battery to power devices to make them "sound better" in supposedly very significant ways. Switching mode power supplies in general are said to be "bad". USB carries with it significant
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MEASUREMENTS: What does a US$500/watt stereo amplifier sound like? (Vitus Audio SS-010)
Behold!
That white item on my floor my friends is a Vitus Audio "Signature Series" SS-010 25Wpc solid state Class A into 8-ohms stereo integrated amplifier. It came out circa 2007 and had a suggested price of US$13,000 at the time (hence the ~$500/W stereo channel calculation in the title). Of course, the audiophile press had a crack at reviewing it. For example, here's the Stereo Times
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MEASUREMENTS: Yamaha RX-V781 Receiver (a look at the pre-out quality)
With the upgrade recently to a 4K TV, it was alas also time to upgrade the surround receiver system I was using. A number of years ago, I bought a used Onkyo TX-NR1009 which I wrote about. It has served me reasonably well over the last few years but not without some issues. The most bothersome was the fact that the HDMI board died last year and it had to be sent back to Onkyo for a board
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MUSINGS: End of 2016 - Video Encoding (HEVC 10-bits, the HDR "Trinity"), Multichannel Streaming, and Other Thoughts...
For those of you into video, I suspect you're already very excited about the "next generation" H.265/HEVC encoding format. About a year back, I already made mention of the impressive results I was seeing with playback of HEVC on the Skylake HTPC I was putting together. A year down the road, we see the ongoing development of software harnessing the power of the new encoding technique - even
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QUICK COMPARE: AVC vs. HEVC, 8-bit vs. 10-bit Video Encoding
As I mentioned in the last blog post on HEVC encoding in response to "Unknown" in the comments, I do believe there are potential subtle benefits to the use of the 10-bit x265 encoder in Handbrake even with an 8-bit video source. I figured I'll run a very quick test to show what I've seen...
What I did was record a 6 second video using my Samsung Note 5 in 1080P of the sky one afternoon with a
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MUSINGS: On the Digital Music Collection, Metadata Tagging, and Hygiene...
Happy New Year everyone! I hope the holidays went well and you're ready to take on 2017.
Today, I thought I'd spend some time talking about something extremely important and one which I'm surprised I don't hear more about looking around forums and audiophile watering holes... It's the topic of how one creates a collection of music. The difference between a collection and just plain hoarding
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MEASUREMENTS: Raspberry Pi 3 as USB Audio Streamer (with recommended CRAAP config & TIDAL/MQA arrives)
A few weeks ago, I got this question from Josh Xaborus in my previous post on the Raspberry Pi 3 + HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro measurements:
Have you measured the USB output from the RPI3 to a USB DAC to see if it's "clean" like the ODROID?
Good question Josh, and perceptive as well. I had not posted anything on the Raspberry Pi 3 specifically, whether there was any difference to be found streaming to
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COMPARISON: TIDAL / MQA stream & high-resolution downloads; impressions & thoughts...
As I mentioned last week, and I'm sure you've seen all over the audiophile news, TIDAL has started streaming MQA audio and has embedded a software decoder into the Windows/Mac desktop player. It will basically take a 24-bit 44kHz or 48kHz stream that's encoded by MQA and spit out an 88kHz or 96kHz data stream to send out to your DAC; whether the internal one in your laptop, or a fancy
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MUSINGS: On the ongoing push for high resolution audio... and the virtualization of media.
Thanks Sony for this BS diagram... Except for the most primitive non-oversampling (NOS) DAC's out there, more likely than not, DACs these days utilizing antialiasing filters of course do not output their analogue like these stair-stepped waves. Sadly, these kinds of diagrams often become the marketing material used to push hi-res! Can good outcomes result from marketing with dubious claims? (
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QUICKIE POST: Yes, cables matter... (for HDMI 2.0/4K/60fps/HDR...)
Well, of course cables matter! Without them there would be no sound or image! The key of course is to be wise enough to have a concept of what is needed, and how much difference the cables/wires can make.
Just a reminder, if you have not seen it yet, here is my summary of tests and thoughts on audio cables over the years if you're wondering about that.
As for today, given that time is
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