The Ill-Tempered Audiophool

I was poking around the USB cable thread and saw reference to this, so I went a hunting, and found the following claim:

By applying a two million volt signal to a cable at a specific pulse modulation, and ultra high frequency for an exact duration of time, we transform the entire cable at a molecular level through a phenomenon called Quantum Tunneling. This process is performed on all TESLA Series cables, from Galileo Basik Strings and Au 79 and Magnetic Tricon to Apex, and can be ...

I decided to put this someplace other than my sig line.





Source: 2010 Mac mini



Digital interconnect: glass toslink or Halide Bridge



DAC, pre-Amp, (Amp): Peachtree Nova



Amp: Class D Audio 254 X 2



...

Work in progress: Shell scripts to turn off a bunch of services --

I'm just shy of two years into this hobby. The new year is often a time of reflection and assessment. So here we go:

Good: I've benefitted from an enormous amount of helpful advice and generosity from folks here, have been introduced to new music, DIY projects, and new ways of looking at things. Listing names seems slightly tacky, and toxic if I manage to forget someone. That should not in any way detract from my sense of gratitude.

Bad: I find myself repeatedly ...

More slightly off-topic stuff.

Like many Mac mini owners, my audio server is also a video server. My attention span is better suited to a CD than a two-hour movie, so I seldom sit still long enough to watch movies on TV. But others in the family like to, occasionally. So I have Front Row on the mini, and then I have an ATV2 as well. The mini seems to prefer its HDMI hose to connect directly to the TV, whereas the HDMI from ATV2 goes to my AVR (Marantz NR 1402, which, for a $350 ...

I felt like starting a thread on remotes (rather than a blog topic) would be off-topic, but most folks here are presumably users of remote control devices, and probably have a lot of experience.

Edit: I did not see Chris's review of RedEye here until now.

I feel like my remote-control system is adequate, but sub-optimal. It is good enough for me, but the rest of the family doesn't really appreciate my approach very much: Incompetent, often incontinent, psychotic dwarves ...

When I first started out, which was about April of 2010, I bought a year subscription to the B&W Society of Sound, for about $60. After letting it lapse between April 2011 and now, I just renewed it yesterday.

In addition to two selected albums per month, you can download a bunch of stuff from their back catalogue.

The recordings are for the most part 24-bit, 48 kHz recordings. The technical quality has been quite uniformly good, even if the sampling frequency ...

Once again, I find myself burned by purchasing high res music that ... clearly isn't.

This time it is two Neil Young DVDs, and it isn't the first time this month.

These are from Le Noise and from Chrome Dreams II, both DVDs, each of which purports to be a 24-bit, 96 kHz recording.

I bought them from Amazon.com. The Le Noise DVD is an "amazon exclusive".

So I contributed customer images:

[img]http://www.computeraudiophile.com/files/Screen ...

http://theaudiophileswife.blogspot.com/

This deserves a Nobel Prize for Literature.

One of the first things I learned when I first visited this site about a year and a half ago was the following:

iTunes (on OS 10.6.X at the time) will only play a track bit-perfectly if Audio MIDI Setup's sample frequency matches that of the track in iTunes. Otherwise it (or core audio?) up/down samples. I was told that in order to play a 96kHz track without resampling directly after playing a 44.1 kHz track, it was not enough simply to reset Audio MIDI Setup, but one had to first ...

I made this for 10.6.X, but most of it still works on 10.7.X. However, there is lots more to do for 10.7.X, and I haven't had time to put into making a newer version. Meanwhile, feel free...

Here is the shell script. Please read through it first (a good idea):

http://sage.ucsc.edu/downloads/shellscripts/audiophool.zsh

Download it to (say) the desktop, and if the name offends, sorry, just rename it.

Then run it by opening the terminal ...

I wrote this on Amazon.com, but I thought it might be of some use here.

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I've had this for almost a year, and in general I am extremely pleased. In terms of getting bang for your buck, this is an exceptional value. You could easily spend $5K or more to get comparable-quality separate components. (If you already have a pre-amp and amp you are happy with, you would likely be better served with a stand-alone DAC.)

This unit is an ...

Here is an OS X pkg file to make installation easier:

New 64-bit version:


Old 32-bit version:



Here is a link to Comprehensive Instructions on my (non-commercial) wiki. It will have the most up-to-date information and links.

Overview

This is a bit half-assed and hackish, but permits me ...

The problem:

iTunes by default creates its files in the user's home directory, in the Music subdirectory.

We like to keep everything on an external drive.

If, due to disk arbitration or any other glitch upon startup or login, iTunes does not see this external drive, it reverts back to ~/Music and starts creating stuff there. Moreover, if you re-load stuff, it will start moving and organizing on the internal drive under ~/Music.

The solution: ...