Jump to content

Steverinho

  • Posts

    9
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Country

    United States

Retained

  • Member Title
    Newbie
  1. My post a couple of days ago, which seems to have restarted this discussion about whether the JB has good or negative effects on sound, was actually about getting the darn thing to work at all. (I have since Googled and come across others who have had similar experiences of incompatibility.) Before I quit thinking about it, I wonder if my experience might have implications for how we understand what the JB does. As esklude says above, the JB "is something." My experience confirms that it definitely is and does something. Here's the phenomenon in a nutshell: if I have the JB in a USB port and plug a portable hard drive into the JB, no functioning of portable hard drive. But if I plug a mouse into the JB, mouse works fine. I have to conclude that the JB suppresses some of the power output from the USB port, which matters to the hard drive, but not so much to the mouse, which presumably doesn't need much power. Perhaps this affects me, and not most others, because my USB ports are putting out less power than is normal in the first place. In any case, the JB is doing something which quite possibly has effects on sound for those who get it to work.
  2. I'm curious to hear if anyone has experienced the same non-functionality from their Jitterbug as I have, and if so, whether they found a solution. I was so hopeful, but it seems my Jitterbug just doesn't want to play nice with my dedicated music PC (Windows 7; JRiver Media Center 16) and/or Benchmark DAC1 Pre. First level of frustration: with normal installation, i.e. the Jitterbug in PC's USB port (and btw I tried all of them) and then USB cable from Jitterbug to Benchmark, Media Center usually won't see Benchmark as a device in the output mode options. (Occasionally it did see the Benchmark, and Media Center would appear to play, except I wasn't getting any actual sound.) Everything works fine without Jitterbug in the system at all. Experimenting, I tried something else, just using the Jitterbug to pass through the USB connection to a portable hard drive: hard drive didn't power up. Hard drive works just fine with Jitterbug removed. Second level of frustration: following a suggestion on the AudioQuest website ("If your DAC doesn’t enumerate (visibly appear in the OS settings), or if you experience severe and obvious levels of distortion, adding an active USB hub will more than likely repair the issue"), I bought a powered USB hub. Weirdly, this has produced new symptoms, primarily that Media Center will now see the Benchmark as an option, but won't play music with ANY of its output options -- not Wasapi Event Style, or Wasapi, or ASIO or Direct Sound or anything at all. Bafflement. If anyone has any wisdom, I'd so appreciate it.
  3. Emily White's behavior isn't much different to that of most young music fans since the 1970s. When I was about 15 (i.e. 1974) I got a cassette recorder for my birthday -- a typical portable mono thing. I'd record music from the radio (with a microphone! and later with a cable) and thus compile a music library on cassettes. That's what those cassette recorders were for: what else would you want to record but music? Later, with a proper stereo cassette deck, I'd record LPs borrowed from friends or from the library. Everyone made mix tapes and copied albums for their friends. I'd be surprised if most middle-aged CA readers didn't grow up discovering and sharing music that way. If you are too young to know those days, read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (which everyone should read anyway). I did buy quite a few records, perhaps because cassette copies weren't as good as the original vinyl. But for a long while I had a bigger music library on cassettes. What's changed between my and Emily White's generations is the technology of music copying and distribution. Digital music can be copied and recopied indefinitely, and above all can be shared over the internet (which is not, btw, how White got most of her music: she did it the old fashioned way, copying from the originals in the library of her college radio station.) So what has changed isn't the young consumer but the technology. The question of whether music-copying is bad for the artist goes way back. I've always assumed (or perhaps rationalized, to assuage my guilt) that my adult obsession with music grew out of the time when music was "borrowed" and exchanged so freely among friends. I now own thousands of LPs and CDs (far in excess of the music I copied illegally as a teenager and college student) and have spent more money on stereo equipment than I care to calculate. In the long run the music industry has surely benefitted by feeding my habit when I was young. I don't think we know if the same "long-term payback" will happen with White's generation. Part of her argument is that it will if the music industry allows it to. She's not as attached to the artefact, to owning the original LP or CD, as I am. Instead she wants streaming access to all the music ever recorded, which she'll happily pay for as long as royalties go to the artist. I think she's probably right: that is what young people want, and when they're older they'll probably pay for it as happily as they'll pay for TV and cellphones and internet service.
  4. In post #2 above, wgscott mentions Amazon. That's an interesting business model, in that it thrives on independent reviewing. Just about everything you look at on Amazon is inseparable from previous buyers' opinions of it. Not all kinds of product are reviewed usefully on Amazon, but many are. Amazon doesn't merely tolerate these reviews, but displays them prominently and encourages more of them. Apparently Amazon long ago figured out that people buy more stuff when they have some confidence in what they are buying. In the audio world, I've long been impressed by the HeadRoom website, with its starred reviews of the headphones and amps and other stuff it sells, and its selection guides: Ten Best Headphones, Best headphones for iPod, and so on. I've bought several pairs of headphones from HeadRoom and found their evaluations trustworthy, and that keeps me coming back. Again, discriminating reviews make me buy stuff. The opposite, to my mind, is the Audio Advisor catalog and website. I'm not knocking Audio Advisor's customer service or prices or return policies, I'm just observing one thing: the blurbs and quotes from reviews in the catalog have no credibility, and thus I've pretty much given up looking at the catalog when it arrives in the mail. (And please, I'm not blaming Audio Advisor for this. They have every right to manage their business that way and they've probably figured out what's best for them. I'm just saying it doesn't work for me.) If there was an online retailer of high-end audio that was more like HeadRoom is with its headphones, I think it would transform my buying habits. Maybe I should be glad there isn't such a place.
  5. I've let my subscriptions to The Absolute Sound and Stereophile lapse. I still subscribe to three car magazines and two photography magazines. All those magazines review expensive consumer goods; all carry many pages of advertising and depend on advertisers for a huge portion of their revenue. All want to draw advertisers and subscribers, and thus all have to negotiate a conflict between pleasing readers, who want honest and discriminating reviews, and pleasing advertisers, who want only the most positive reviews and who are unlikely to place their ads in an environment that says their products are inferior. The reviews in the car magazines discriminate, very clearly, among competing products: cars are tested head-to-head, and reviewed with strong and conclusive statements from several drivers and with measurements of performance. Cars are ranked against their competitors. It's normal that cars from big manufacturers (and advertisers) are judged inferior to their competition. In other words, the reviews are useful to consumers and fun to follow even when you have no intention to buy (i.e. it's more interesting to read about the new Lamborghini if you trust the reviews than if you think they're all hype). The photography magazines are also usefully consumer-oriented. This Canon is a better buy than that Nikon, or vice versa. There's a new Sony that rivals its competitors in some ways but not others, and so on. These magazines' reviews are characterized by many objective measurements and also subjective, user-experience comparisons and sometimes a bottom-line star rating (5 stars, 4 stars, 3 stars, etc.). The audio magazines (especially the U.S. ones) rarely try to tell their readers that some products rise above the pack, while some others are overpriced and don't cut it. The bottom line of almost every review is that the component sounds great and compares well to competitors that cost a little more. Like the kids in Lake Wobegon, everyone's above average. It's true that sound is subjective, but what if a product was listened to by five reviewers instead of one, and products were reviewed head-to-head? For example I'd like to know the opinions of five listeners on a collection of DACs in the $1k - $2k price range and after that I'd like to know how those compare to DACs in the $3k - $5k range. I'd like to know that all or most of the reviewers liked one more than another, or couldn't hear the difference. If the audiophile reviews don't much help the consumer (and thus don't draw me into consistently subscribing to the magazine), I have to presume they are designed to please the manufacturers/advertisers. But here's what I think is the paradox: the endless good reviews don't help the industry. They don't make me buy things. When you can't hear products for yourself (how many of us live near audiophile stores that carry a variety of high-end equipment?) you depend on reviews and you buy by mail. But when the reviews are useless, on what basis do you pull the trigger? A 5-star camera tempts me and lures me into upgrading my camera before I really need to. The same happens after years of reading that the Porsche Boxster is hands-down the best car in its class. Useful reviews feed my consumerism; untrustworthy reviews make me spend more conservatively. I buy used, through eBay or Audiogon; I don't upgrade very often because I don't know what to upgrade to. I often read that the audiophile business is in decline: specialist stores close or shift their emphasis to video and home entertainment. Some of the business shifts to online retailers like Audio Advisor. My comment here is that manufacturer-friendly reviewers aren't serving consumers or the industry very well at all, and they're thus a big part of the problem. If reviewers were more discriminating, I'd buy more. Perhaps there's a question here: why aren't audiophile reviews more discriminating?
  6. Like many CA readers (most, probably) I've faced the problem of a not-at-all silent PC in my listening room. Intolerable. A deal-breaker. I've addressed that by moving the PC two rooms away, and around a corner. That has required a 15-foot USB cable which runs through holes drilled in my walls to get from PC to DAC. My experience is the same as spdif-usb's post above, in that a long, no-name brand USB cable has made zero audible difference as compared to a short no-name brand cable. I have never compared a high-end/expensive cable. So, I now can't hear the PC from the listening room, and I have to step around the corner to change the music. Answers to the original questions: 15 feet, generic USB, run through walls from another room.
  7. Thanks, folks. It's going to take me a while to work through all this. For those interested in my first-world problems, I've just tried Foobar with the WASAPI plugin and I'd say it sounds identical or nearly-identical to J River, which confirms I don't have an actual problem with J River. I'm not suspicious of the Benchmark DAC for several reasons: it got and continues to get good reviews; when its sound is criticized, it's not for characteristics like those I'm complaining about; and above all when I play a CD player (digital out) into the Benchmark, the sound--though less good all around--is generally less boomy/murky and in that sense less problematic. Given those observations, I probably have to play with USB cables, ports, and more. So thanks again. It'll take a while but if I have any clear discoveries I'll certainly report back. Steve.
  8. Thanks for these suggestions. I will play with Foobar and the plugins within the next day or two. I've just taken a quick glance at the Fidelizer website too, and that seems an intriguing idea. I think I've been assuming my original question--can I improve the PC end of the chain beyond what I'm doing now?--was probably a hardware question. The suggested experiments with software should help me determine whether it really is about hardware or not. If J River really isn't the issue--and I assume it isn't--I'll be back to asking something as simple as whether a CAPSv2 running J River will sound better than a generic PC also running J River, when outputting to an external DAC.
  9. After many years of audiophiling and several years of tweaking computer-based music and learning from this forum, I have a PC setup that I would have thought was just about right. But I'm not completely happy with the sound, and I'm wondering if there's something else I should be doing. I'll try to explain what I have, and what I'm looking for, as concisely as possible: A couple of years ago my son built me a PC for my music server. (There's nothing special about the way it's built in audiophile terms. It could just as well be a basic Dell or HP PC.) Currently my operating system is Windows 7, 64-bit, and I play my music on J River Media Center 16, which I'm pretty sure is set up optimally: Wasabi Event, USB cable to my Benchmark DAC1 Pre. My music files are primarily in FLAC format, properly converted with EAC and so on. I'm really not concerned that my dissatisfaction is related to Media Center settings or to my music files themselves. So, PC to Benchmark DAC1 Pre. My amplifier is a Moscode 300 hybrid, recently extensively upgraded by George Kaye, the amp's original designer; it's lovely. My speakers are big Krell Resolution Ones. The sound I get from that combination is in many ways pleasing and impressive: recordings vary of course but in general I have sound that is warm, room-fillingly big, and not fatiguing. I used to be one of those people who can hardly enjoy CDs because of CD-harshness, graininess, as compared to a good vinyl setup. These days I'm stunned that digital sound via computer can be so superior and so different to CD sound (even on good CD players). But here's the problem. I also have a good vinyl setup (Linn LP12, with good arm and good cartridge and excellent Melos tube phono preamp, into the analog input of the Benchmark and of course the same amp and speakers), and it exposes the flaw in my PC sound (which I think I would feel even without comparison to the vinyl). Compared to good vinyl, music on my PC relatively lacks clarity, is slightly muddy or boomy or soft, or tends to be fractionally rolled off at the top end. I don't want to exaggerate this, but it's warm and resonant and friendly at the expense of precision. I like warmth (and tubes) and what I've got with the PC is way better than when I played CDs on a CD player. It's not the warmth that's the problem, it's the lack of space between the notes; it's a tiny bit as if a blanket has been thrown over the speakers. Again I don't want to exaggerate. If my vinyl setup was a bottle of wine I'd score it about 96 points; the PC "only" gets about 90. I hope all those adjectives convey something. If they do, my question should be fairly clear: with my vinyl setup my Benchmark, amp and speakers produce sound I'm in love with (i.e. I don't think my problem is with amp or speakers). Is there something I can do to move my PC setup towards the combination of warmth and detail and clarity I get with good vinyl? I'm wondering, for example, if a C.A.P.S. v2.0 would be that kind of improvement over my ordinary PC. And I'm wondering if anyone else feels that what I have described as the sound of my PC setup (Windows 7 running J River into decent external DAC) is what they feel they experience too. Thanks, especially if you think about and respond to all this.
×
×
  • Create New...