Jump to content

Audio_newb

  • Posts

    77
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Country

    country-ZZ

Retained

  • Member Title
    Freshman Member
  1. Audio_newb

    Class D

    I think class D is really coming in to its own now to the point where it will give other topologies a run for their money, not only because of heat/ power/ size concerns, but also simply based on sound quality. Mark Levinson's new reference amp is based on class D and the well regarded Devialet D-Premier is an interesting hybrid A+D design. As has been mentioned already, the ncore reference boards are really just starting to make the rounds so products are still likely months to a year away. I think the Theta Prometheus shown at CES might have been the first commercial amp shown using ncore. Certainly not in the non high-end price range, but you'll also want to note that hypex will continue to make their current ucd modules, marketing ncore as a higher market product. I myself just picked up a pair of used Channel Islands D-200 monos, which use hypex modules and I've been thrilled by them. I don't think there will be production amps any time soon, but I know Dusty from Channel Islands was at least looking in to the NC400 so you might want to keep an eye out there for something priced a bit more down to earth.
  2. The Classe CP800 should be dropping any day now and seems like it would fit the bill nicely.
  3. Eloise: Design is indeed subjective and I'm glad to hear that someone likes them. Certainly the audio world is filled with worse designs and I'm a bit of a design stickler. In fact upon seeing the reference Ayre gear for the first time up close my first thought was not how beautiful they were, but that the finish and angles made them look too industrial for my tastes. I'm sticking to my guns on wifi. If mid fi (sonos, logitech, etc) components can do it so can the high end. In fact my reasoning for its inclusion is precisely because said brands will tell dealers to add a wifi bridge as necessary. I'm not saying they should take out the wired ethernet option, but by internalizing the wireless, they can at least minimize any issues with smart data retrieval and buffering. Also didn't mean to malign the larger DSP models as I only heard the baby. I really do think it is a great system, but probably still not for the audiophile nervosa no matter how good it sounds (just not enough to tinker with). Scot: Was too busy listening and being herded in to and out of rooms to take any pictures, but I'm sure Definitive will post a bunch. Also had to reread my post to see where you got the "talking points" comment. When I said the rep was trying to deafen us I meant that literally. He had the volume cranked up so loud that I think one person left the room because of it. I was, however, also thinking of writing something along the lines of your comment. I actually thought the Meridian dealer did not do the best job selling his system. The 3200's were connected to a Media Core 200 via an Audio Core 200. In presenting the system, the rep suggested it was a steal coming in at under $13,000, but when I asked, admitted that configured as it was for audio only the Audio Core was bringing nothing to the party and could be left out. He was also using the remote for the Audio Core while his Sooloos ipad controller sat unused in the corner. If I were Meridian I would be pushing Sooloos first as a core whole house solution, but perhaps that's just me.
  4. Just got back from Music Matters 6 in Seattle. Thanks to Definitive Audio for putting on a great show and all the dealers who came to demo their products. Here are some thoughts from the evening. These are just my impressions and as I'm relatively new to the whole world of high end audio take them with a large grain of salt. Although being in my 20's I was something of an anomaly, it was very nice to meet some industry players as they were all exceedingly nice. Now on to some thoughts from the rooms. Classe and B&W: Classe demoed their new CP-800 and I came away very impressed. It sounded great, looked beautiful, and had lots of great technology. They had it paired with a CA-2300, two subs and a pair of 805's. Didn't see any airplay in action, but playing from an iphone via front usb sounded fantastic as did the rest of the demo, which was done via usb from a macbook pro. USB implementation also sounded really well thought out as Chris has mentioned previously, using not only asynch but also a unique clocking mechanism. Someone threw down the gauntlet and suggested it could not be more advanced than his DCS stack, but Dave Nauber held his ground. Dave also told me that volume control is all analog (for those of you who get the cold sweats thinking about digital volume attenuation). He also said the subs and 805's were running full range, but seemed to suggest that if he had some more time and his full calibration kit, he might have implemented the crossover in the CP-800. All in all Classe really seems like they know which way is forward. Wilson: Saw the Sasha's with Audio Research gear including USB via the DAC8 and the Sophia's with an Ayre system. Needless to say there was no dragon slaying tonight. These rooms were the most expensive of the night, but also sounded the best. I'm not going to compare the systems for many reasons, least of which because I was in a non ideal seating position for both of them (not to mention the heavy breather in one of the rooms). I will, however, say that I was very impressed by both sets of speakers. So much so that were I to be in the market for a pair of Sasha's, I would definitely also audition a pair of Sophia's (possibly with a pair of subs, a concept to which I'm quickly warming to). Meridian Sooloos: Mixed feelings on Meridian. First, the good. Sooloos was a great buy for Meridian and is really a very capable, well designed system from the interface to the components themselves. Add to this Meridian's active speaker system and you have a killer combination. True blue audiophiles might blanche at the thought of connecting their components with cat5 networking cable, but for those people who want set it and forget it great sound, this is a compelling option. Meridian was demoing their DSP 3200 monitors and they were quite good. They aren't going to replace a reference system and they weren't designed to. Having said that, the single wide-range driver puts out a lush midrange and the woofer puts out a stupid amount of bass for a speaker of this size. In a high end house these make for great second/ third zone speakers. Now, my issues with Meridian (aside from the rep trying to deafen us). Their design looks like it comes straight out of the 80's. This is not a compliment. The speakers are fine, but the components look dopey. Note that this does not apply to Sooloos components, which look fantastic. The problem is that the new Sooloos components look like Meridian components. In reality the new Meridian components should look like the old Sooloos components. Meridian's high end quirks. I'm ok with your base product shipping with a 500gb hard drive, but don't pretend like bigger drives don't exist (or that you use something other than standard hard drives, which you don't). Either let me replace the drive myself or let me pay a little more for a larger capacity drive. Note that forcing me to buy another entire unit is not a solution to this problem. Wireless N is plenty fast for streaming music so stop pretending like it isn't (or design a better buffer). If you tell me some people don't like wireless radios in their high end components then fine, I'll tell you to leave a wired networking option that disables the radio, but this is 2011. The future is here and it's wireless, get with the program. I think I'll stop here for now. There was also an interesting demo with a surprise ending from John Atkinson of Stereophile, but I think I will leave that for another night. All in all an enjoyable evening of audio goodness.
  5. As stated in my above post I totally agree that the mass market will go streaming for most media, however I think this will actually be a pretty rough time for related industries. There is a reason music and movie studios have been fighting this transition tooth and nail. Far from making a fortune off of not pressing discs, margins on streaming services are incredibly low. Media companies have traditionally made a lot of money through selling their wares multiple times (more true for movies) and packaging discs isn't as expensive as you might think. Meanwhile, consumers have gotten used to the idea that streaming services should be free or extremely low cost (pandora, spotify). Thus it will be even harder to recoup lost money from sales as more and more people get their media from such services. Not to mention the impact all this will have on brick and mortar retailers. Bottom line: buckle up. The death rattles of Blockbuster and EMI are just the beginning. Who knows what impact this will all have on the promotion of quality music. We might be stuck with Justin Beiber for the next two decades.
  6. There are two threads in the responses so far that I'd like to pick up and run with. They are what mid fi will look like in 10 years and what the high end will look like in 10 years. First, the mainstream. Honestly, even in 10 years time I don't see high bitrate (24/96 and up) going mainstream. Music labels don't need to strike back at anything. Boutique sources of high res music will continue to release mostly classical and world music with the occasional high profile recording (mostly through the impassioned dedication of some recording engineers). On the other hand I'm not so pessimistic to think that everything will stop at lossy mp3. My guess is that most people will get their music from the cloud, streaming lossless, but 16/44 quality files to both mobile devices and home gear. The biggest shift in audio over the next 10 years is that people will by and large stop buying music in the traditional sense of ownership. Whether this means subscription or ad based revenue streams for music labels I don't know, but they better figure it out fast. On the hardware side, integrated units will continue to get better. A combination of class d amplification, cheap high quality dacs, and improved digital volume control will mean that small integrated stereos will pack quite a punch. As to the high end, software will continue to shift. As itunes improves and audiophiles get more comfortable with computers, programs like amarra will earn their keep with serious room correction and crossover capabilities. Maybe sony will even join the party and allow for high end straight DSD releases. The digital hardware revolution will continue for the high end as well, just with more custom ic's. Expect to see more active digital and wireless speakers in the high end realm, packing all the electronics right in with the speakers. All in all the future looks good unless you are a music label. Or were hoping for your favorite Britney Spears album in 24/192.
  7. I just got my Streamer II the other day and I'm a big fan. To be fair to the other products on the market I haven't really compared it to any other dacs, but it sounds high fidelity to me and I'm very much enjoying it. Also bought a male/male usb convertor from monoprice so I can just skip the usb cable (be warned however that the monoprice adapter glows blue when connected). The other product in this range is the devilsound which has also been reviewed quite favorably and I doubt you would go wrong with either.
  8. Coming to a point in my audio setup where I stopped to pause and enjoy, I felt I might share some thoughts I've had along the way. But first, a bit of a disclaimer. I'm possibly going to tread on what for some might seem sacred ground. Know firstly, that I very much enjoy being an audiophile and mean no harm. These are only my opinions, but I do still believe most of us are capable of disagreeing while still having big boy (and girl) conversations. As such I hope that any rousing arguments I might stir up will remain civil. Now on to the meat and potatoes. I just added an HRT Streamer (2011 model) to my setup and will soon boot up my 4-bay Onnto Datatale for backup storage (still waiting on drives). This finishes (for now at least) a few years of system building to a point that I'm quite happy with what I have. These forums have been a great resource and I thought I'd share some thoughts (mostly for the beginners but everyone is welcome to chime in). Let the heresy begin. I think the HRT Streamer is great (more about that later), truly I do, but adding it to my system made me realize two things. Firstly, it made me realize that even via the analog headphone jack of my powerbook with a $10 rca splitter my system rocked. Is the HRT better? Do bears shit in the woods? But honestly, not by leaps and bounds. Some might call me deaf. Some might question the resolving power of my system and how I have it setup. All these are valid concerns and to be fair my system isn't in a dedicated listening room and my speakers aren't ideally placed. Even so, it did make me think of priorities in an audio setup. So consider this my blessing to those building a system using a headphone out. Despite all the talk of dacs and cabling, put some money in to a nice pair of speakers. And maybe an ipad. For that was realization number two. The biggest leaps in my system (that made me most content) were nearly all in usability and convenience. Tweaks that made it all that much easier and more enjoyable to get to my music and enjoy it. Repurposing my powerbook as a music server. Using apple remote app. Sorting my music collection with proper tags and high quality cover art and making a collection of playlists. That's why I'd get an ipad as my next component upgrade. Remote app on the iphone is great, but I can just imagine sitting around with friends and tooling around with it on an ipad. For me (and I think many others) that's the great thing about computer audio. Some specific component thoughts to that effect. I had a NAS and all told I found it to be a bit of a pain in the ass. I know some of you have super huge music collections that are the limiting factor here, but I've become a big fan of local storage. I use Chronosync to keep my libraries the same and I find it much easier. No streaming, no muss, no fuss. I also bought a Kingrex pre-amp. It sounds great. It has no remote. If I had to do it again I think I'd go for an Emotiva USP-1. It has a remote and it has low and high pass filters for easy addition of a sub (a feature which I'd love to see on more stereo preamps). On the plus side, however, I thought the Streamer would lock down volume control in remote app. I was happy to see that this is not the case. While master volume is locked, remote app can still tweak itunes volume which I find quite useful after I've set a main level on the pre. Cables. Don't underestimate your desire for flexibility. I changed out some super stiff cables for Nordost Blue Heaven and life became so much easier. Also, they say the best cable is no cable. I know this won't work in most setups but I bought a usb male to male converter from monoprice and plugged my Streamer right into my Powerbook. Boom. I was going to go on, but perhaps I'll save some for my forthcoming book. In the meantime allow me to redeem some audiophile cred by saying that I love me some 24/96. Sadly, it isn't yet worth it to me from a content standpoint. There's only so many times I can listen to Rumours (a lot of times, but only so many). More on the Streamer after I break it in some, but for now I'll just see if anyone has actually read this far.
  9. I'm with Chris on this one. There is no way we will see lightpeak on dacs in 6 months. If we look to usb3 as an example we will be lucky to see it on anything in 6 months. As to its inclusion on dacs, I just don't think there is really a big need and it will simply add cost. Even though you can run standard usb and firewire protocols over lightpeak (which should theoretically speed up adoption), there aren't really huge bandwidth or distance worries right now in the majority of cases. And there are certainly cheaper ways to galvanically isolate the computer. I'm sure maybe in a year or two it will show up on pro gear, but other than that I don't see it making big waves for a while.
  10. That's ok. I certainly can't afford every component I have an interest in. Although I'm still a bit surprised they didn't try to keep it down at least below $1500 for the American market. That would put it in contention with Wyred4sound and the likely soon to be released HRT streamer HD. Have you seen (or heard) one of these mythical beasts yet?
  11. Not to open up a whole new can of worms, but what's the story on the Young, Keith? Saw your post elsewhere and started getting excited for it. Or was until the $1800 sticker price popped up on tweakgeek. When it looked like it might be closer to the 1K mark I was in, but that's a little steep for me. Especially if (as the pictures seem to suggest) they are sticking with a wall wart. Not that I don't enjoy the options of an upgraded supply/ battery source.
  12. Didn't mean to blast the Sabre, just on the chance that you were only planning on using it as a dac, which does not seem to be the case. Just got my parents an apple tv for the holidays so I became pretty familiar with its setup quirks. For the price it's a great little unit, although apple needs to beef up their content deals.
  13. Unless you are really paranoid (or have really mission critical data that needs frequent backup) it would stand to reason that you wouldn't use RAID 1 in addition to another backup. I think most people who are looking at a NAS, at least in SOHO use, are not planning another unit for nightly backup. If you are planning that, however, I personally might still think twice about RAID 0 on a NAS. Because in this case the network is usually the limiting factor speed wise, you probably won't gain that much of an increase in RAID 0. Thus, although it is clearly the least glamorous mode, you might just be good with JBOD. This way even if you lose a drive, you don't have to do a full rebuild. Also, god forbid you get a bad sector on your nightly backup, JBOD would be much easier to deal with then a failed multidrive RAID 0 rebuild. Just my 2 cents though as I'm no IT guy.
  14. Not that it isn't wonderful, but I'm a bit curious and confused as to how you have this whole thing setup. What purpose is the Nova serving in your system? Does the Nova have HT bypass? I'm just trying to get a handle on how all this is slung together. Without knowing all that, however, you should be able to force the optical out on the apple tv while maintaining hdmi for video. There is a setting for doing this. Having said that, however, it seems a bit of a waste just to use the nova as a dac. In fact from what I've read about the Nova, the dac stage is the weakest of its parts (as opposed to the pre and amp capabilities).
  15. Some great albums have already been listed so in compiling my list I thought I might stray a bit off the beaten track. In no particular order here is my somewhat eclectic collection of must own albums. 10. Tears for Fears - Tears Roll Down 9. Counting Crows - Films About Ghosts 8. Dido - Life for Rent 7. Dave Matthews Band - Crash 6. Guster - Lost and Gone Forever 5. Frou Frou - Details 4. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank 3. Front Line Assembly - Implode 2. Yann Tiersen - Amelie 1. Vienna Teng - Waking Hour
×
×
  • Create New...