Hey folks... It's summer and I'm in and out of town doing a bit of R&R mixed with the day job.
I sent my friend with the Mytek Brooklyn and Fireface ADC a package of the MQA "Render" tagged files for testing. As you can see above, that's what the MQA filters look like with the Mytek Brooklyn serving as "Renderer" for the impulse responses. If you look at the top row, we see that the
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MEASUREMENTS: MQA Filters on Mytek Brooklyn & Thoughts on USB Doohickeys
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INTERNET BLIND TEST: MQA Core Decoding vs. Standard Hi-Res Audio
Introduction:
Well my friends, the time has come... Yes, it's another Internet Blind Test!
As a "more objective" hobbyist blog, within these pages I try to demonstrate facts, figures, and opinions as best I can with the hopes that it educates the typical "audiophile" out there who loves music and wants to at the same time understand the hardware and technologies used in the world of
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MEASUREMENTS: The AudioQuest Dragonfly Black MQA filter set...
Good movie from the 90's!
Just a quick note while we're doing the MQA blind test!
A few weeks ago I posted on the Dragonfly Black and the MQA filter impulse responses. I noted that based on Måns Rullgård's work, although there are potentially 32 filters available when "Rendering" with upsampling to 192+kHz, I only showed 0-8 in that previous post.
Well, using the same kind of
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REVIEW: SMSL A6 integrated amplifier - Part I: Overview and Subjective Listening (and briefly about USB cables)
SMSL A6 at home in my living room system with Tannoy Mercury Mx2 speakers. Doug MacLeod's Break The Chain (2017, Reference Recordings 24/176.4 downsampled to 88.2kHz, DR16) playing over Logitech Media Server.
For many years, my father's audio system consisted of various CD players, a Sony turntable and vintage pre-amplifiers. This then fed a tube pre-amp which then sent the signal to
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MEASUREMENTS: SMSL A6 as DAC (Part II)
SMSL A6 Integrated Amp - playing through USB 24/352.8kHz signal. Notice the matte/satin finish of the aluminum case. Probably need to wipe it down once awhile if dusty.
As I mentioned last week with the initial review of the SMSL A6 integrated amp, this is a versatile device. It features an AK4452 DAC first released in 2015 which though not "top of the line", does perform very well with a
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MUSINGS: The 3 Main Home Computers 2017 (Workstation, Server, Gaming) & Thoughts on Gaming Consoles (like the upcoming Xbox One X)...
In the heat of summer, it is nice to get some time off to fix up around the house and do something that I typically take no pleasure in - rebuilding computers and reinstalling the OS & software! It requires a level of "Zen and the Art of Computer Maintenance" that I can only muster up every few years :-).
If you're like me, at home, you might have a little cadre of computers for work and
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MUSINGS: Increasing the Dynamic Range of compressed audio with DSP... (And is this why vinyl DR is higher!?)
Sadly, the good doctor's diagnosis applies to too many of the recordings we listen to these days.
I mentioned last week a recommendation for July Talk's Touch album at the end of that post. There are a number of catchy and enjoyable tracks on there... However, if we put this album through the foobar DR Meter, unfortunately, we see an album with really nasty dynamic range compression - DR4.
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MUSINGS: How much amplifier power do you really "need"? Why not test for yourself?
Much has been discussed about amplifier power over the years; here for a short primer, here for a contemporary take with advice from Crown, and here for an oldskool audiophile take on the matter when dinosaurs and tube amps ruled the land (notice the positive sentiment towards even low power transistor amps compared to the low-wattage tube jobs in this article!).
We often hear the question:
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MUSINGS: Evidence of digital player jitter with asynchronous USB DACs? Melco N1ZS20/2 review in HFN&RR...
The UK magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review is interesting. Like Stereophile here in N. America, it includes objective measurements. Over the years, I've seen times when they have criticized questionable "hi-res" downloads showing nothing more than upsampled music. But they also seem to like "showing" rather meaningless measurements such as a few years ago with their USB cable roundup.
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MQA Core vs. Hi-Res Blind Test Part I: Procedure
Introduction:
As you are probably aware, through the last 2 months on this blog, I've been collecting data to determine the audibility of decoded MQA versus the same piece of music originating from the "master" high resolution source. Please refer to the Test Invite article from mid July 2017.
Over the last couple of years, I have been curious about the MQA technique and followed the
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MQA Core vs. Hi-Res Blind Test Part II: Core Results
As you know, Part I - Procedure is now published. Within it, I laid out in detail the test, how it was constructed, and how data was collected. Today, we'll embark on the exploration of the data itself. While I will try to conclude with some general points by the end of this post, I will not have had time to analyze everything quite yet. I'm currently anticipating at least another couple of
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MQA Core vs. Hi-Res Blind Test Part III: Subgroup Analysis
This is Part III of the summary and results of the MQA Core decode vs. standard PCM Hi-Res blind test following from the "core" results last week.
At this point, we know that if we look at the "big picture", evidence suggests that there are minimal audible differences. So if we dig into the data set a bit further, let's see if we can ask questions based on the subgroups identified. I'm sure
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MQA Core vs. Hi-Res Blind Test Part IV: Subjective Results & The Wrap Up...
After having gone through the "core" results and subgroup analysis from the MQA Core vs. Hi-Res PCM Blind Test, let's review and post some subjective comments gathered in the survey. This provides an opportunity for us to see how people described what they heard and since we know what the preferences were, put them in the context of whether the descriptions referred to a bias towards the MQA
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MQA: "Final" thoughts... On Politics & Paradigms.
Cartoon looks about right and reflective of MQA... From article here.
In the last few weeks as I was preparing the series of posts discussing the MQA blind test, I noticed The Absolute Sound (TAS) ramping up the hype again in September with two articles in defense of the value of MQA. Let's use those articles to close off discussions about MQA among other ideas at least for a bit here at The
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MQA: FINAL "Final" comments... Simply put, why I don't like MQA.
Looks like an interesting art exhibit :-).
I know... I said the previous post was "final". But I just had to kick the horse one more time. :-) Seriously, if you're sick of MQA chatter already, don't bother reading this - you've been warned!
This past week, I added my views to this thread on Computer Audiophile (from about page 198 in an epic thread with >5000 comments!). I know that
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HOWTO: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 overclocking to 1800X speed while maintaining power savings...
Greetings from Asia.
Okay with all the recent chatter on MQA, let's take a little break from audio for a bit and talk about something much less controversial :-). In fact, this is downright basic for all the computer overclockers out there...
Remember a few months ago, I upgraded to the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU. As discussed in my previous article, I upgraded to a computer with this processor
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MUSINGS: On DSD, tagging, compression and conversion... Time for WavPack 5.
Many moons ago (back in 2013), I discussed DSD audio. While over the years I've talked about DSD from a a number of different angles (eg. JRiver realtime conversion listening, PCM <--> DSD conversion, conversion 2015, equipment DSD playback measurements like PonoPlayer / TEAC UD-501 / Oppo BDP-105 / Oppo Sonica DAC), concerns from that very first discussion about DSD still irks me these days
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HOWTO: Integrating WavPack 5-compressed DSD into Logitech Media Server (LMS).
piCorePlayer streaming WavPack-compressed DSD128 (1-bit, 5.6MHz) to TEAC UD-501 from recent nightly version of Logitech Media Server 7.9.1.
As I mentioned last time, it's great to see that DSD compression and metadata tagging are available in the form of WavPack 5. Starting from the post by michaelvv on the Squeezebox Forum, I decided to spend more time on getting WavPack-DSD working in LMS
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MUSINGS: Thoughts on fake 4K, post-truth and film "format folly" (70mm film & Christopher Nolan).
Since returning from my Asia trip. I see that new toys for Christmas have now been released including the new Xbox One X (which I mentioned a few months back).
Although it seems like there may be issues that need to be fixed, one nice feature of the Xbox One S
and X machines is the ability to play the new Blu-Ray UHD disks which
have been available since March 2016. Though there are a
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MEASUREMENTS: Oppo Sonica DAC and Bluetooth 4.1 (Low-Complexity SubBand Coding) Audio...
Merry Christmas everyone! Hope things are going well out there.
As you know, earlier this year, I had a look at the Oppo Sonica DAC including measurements with the "fixed" firmware. Over the last few months, I've actually sold the device to a "more needy" audiophile buddy. Remember, the DAC measured and sounded fantastic, but truth be told, it is to the point where I personally am not able
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