MUSINGS: A Technophile's Breeze Through Asia 2016...
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...
View ArticleRETRO-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...
View ArticleMUSINGS: 4K UHD TV, HFR, 3D, HDR, etc... Thoughts on video technology and the...
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...
View ArticlePREVIEW / 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...
View ArticleMEASUREMENTS: 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...
View ArticleAn opinion about Audio & MQA by "Agitater"... (And a few words on DACs...
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...
View ArticleMUSINGS: 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...
View ArticleMEASUREMENTS: HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro, PCM5122 digital filters & further thoughts...
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...
View ArticleMEASUREMENTS: Crystal Cable CrystalConnect Micro 1m Interconnects......
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...
View ArticleMoving 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...
View ArticleMEASUREMENTS: 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...
View ArticleMEASUREMENTS: What does a US$500/watt stereo amplifier sound like? (Vitus...
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...
View ArticleMEASUREMENTS: 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...
View ArticleMUSINGS: End of 2016 - Video Encoding (HEVC 10-bits, the HDR "Trinity"),...
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...
View ArticleQUICK 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...
View ArticleMUSINGS: 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...
View ArticleMEASUREMENTS: Raspberry Pi 3 as USB Audio Streamer (with recommended CRAAP...
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...
View ArticleCOMPARISON: TIDAL / MQA stream & high-resolution downloads; impressions &...
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...
View ArticleMUSINGS: On the ongoing push for high resolution audio... and the...
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...
View ArticleQUICKIE 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...
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