Saturday 28 January 2017

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 limited this week, I just wanted to put up a "quickie" post mainly about some 4K HDMI cables I tried over the last couple months in setting up my 4K TV (a Vizio P75-C1).

Saturday 21 January 2017

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? (Didn't seem to help Pono, did it?)
I didn't have much time this week for any experiments/measurements. Alas, will be busy for a little while still. Which means it's a good time to put up a "MUSINGS" post based on comments and questions. Always fun to take some time to think and hopefully flesh out ideas a little more. In the post last week, I found these interesting comments worth spending some time on:

Saturday 14 January 2017

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 external DAC with options for "Exclusive" mode which allows changes to the appropriate samplerate (I know this works well on the PC, have not tried the Mac).


If you're not using "Exclusive" mode, you can tick "Force volume" to set it to 100% volume so the internal mixer/dither routine hopefully doesn't mess with it. "Passthrough MQA" should be ticked only if you have an MQA enabled DAC or want to purposely hear MQA undecoded (I'll say it now that this is not recommended). My assumption is that if you do have one of these MQA DACs and passthrough is on, you should either make sure "Exclusive" mode is ticked or if not, manually make sure the OS samplerate is correct (ie. 44kHz or 48kHz at 24-bit depth) and that the volume is 100% (either with "Force volume" or making sure the computer volume slider is 100%). Otherwise, it will not be "bit-perfect" and the DAC will not recognize the MQA encoding. I suspect this could be confusing for some.

Saturday 7 January 2017

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 the same USB DAC as compared to say the ODROID-C2. Let's have a good look at this and see if we can arrive at some facts and come to some conclusions...


Sunday 1 January 2017

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 is of course the discipline of organization involved in the collector's hobby. The collector knows what he/she has. The collector has mastery over the collection. Though responses may be variable, I believe a friend or even complete stranger would be able to appreciate the time and dedication that a collector has put into achieving this mastery as opposed to a sense of revulsion when faced with the hoarder (this is honestly the feeling I get when looking at this "collection").

Over the years, I have seen a handful of articles like this one which also introduces one to Picard, the free MusicBrainz software that will do the job in an automated fashion. If I were to start putting a new collection fresh today, I'll probably do something like this and grow from there, adding customizations, and checking accuracy along the way. However, I have been collecting CD's since the 1980's and over the years, especially after 2004, I have migrated all the "physical" music over to my music server. Through the years, although I have gone through multiple hardware servers, the data from the music collection really has not. It has been essentially rip once into a lossless format, and the CDs packed up in storage thereafter. As the years go on, I suppose like every collector, one develops a unique way to archive the albums, manage the directory structure, and a way to tag the files in a fashion that "works" for oneself.

Let's start the new year with a look at one way to manage the music collection (my idiosyncratic way :-). It has served me well and maybe some of what I do will resonate with you as well...