TheRocker

A little piano music this evening: Rob Rio - Boogie Woogie Gold and Roger Shields - The Age Of Ragtime

A little late on this one, but thanks for the review, especially the comparison to the SRH-440 which I have and find to be very good sound for the money. I do find they get a pressure point from the headband on the top of my head after a while but that may just be the shape of my head! Good to see your review used a couple of tracks I am familiar with (Iron Man and Lowdown) too, thanks.

Last nights listening: J. D. Wilkes & the Dirt Daubers - Wild Moon Not exactly a hi-fi recording, raw Blues-Rock.

One of the most blatant note-for-note rip-offs must be Deep Purple's Child In Time. Have a listen to "Bombay Calling" by "It's A Beautiful Day". However, I believe credit was eventually given, and IABD didn't bother with litigation as they were in a dispute with their record company at the time.

Yes, Play is good! I have been using it since I ditched Windows for OSX, and I agree it sounds better than iTunes - maybe something to do with Play using 32 bit precision internally?

Listening to a couple of New Swing albums: Artist: Alien Fashion Show Title:Alien Fashion Show Genre: I would call this 'Cabaret Swing' Recording Quality: Sounds good to me! Good tracks: 1. Slim and Sally, 3. Detroit Swing City, 6. Crazy Moon and 12. Crawfish Pie (my favourite) Alien Fashion Show Artist: The Atomic Fireballs Title: Torch This Place Genre: Neo Jump Swing Recording Quality: Good but seems to be at a quite loud level. Good Tracks: 5. Lover Lies, 8. Hit By A Brick (my favourite), 12. Starve A Fever Torch This Place

Hi Mark, long time, no hear! Yes I am up late, I sacrifice sleep to find time to catch up on the gossip! I always seem to have too much other stuff to do and not enough time to trawl forums! Work is getting in the way of living! I am still gradually digitising my vinyl using the Duet, but again, it is a time consuming job that I really don't get a good bite at.

Artist: Michael Powers Title: Onyx Root Genre: Delta Blues Good songs to sample: Successful Son, Another Man Done, Psychotic Reaction Recording Quality: Sounds good to me!

In Audacity prefs, 'Quality', set the default sample rate to 96000, leave the format as 32 bit float. Then when exporting to WAV, select 'WAV & other uncompressed formats', click on 'options' button and 'format: other...' , 'header: WAV (Microsoft)', encoding: signed 24 bit PCM'. The following thread may be helpful: http://www.computeraudiophile.com/node/955 HTH!

What do I want from Computer Audio? Firstly convenience, with reasonable audio quality a close second. The greatest advantage of Computer Audio is the near-instantaneous access to all music in your collection, and even music not in your collection e.g. via internet radio streams. Its second advantage is that acceptable or even very good quality audio is available at a reasonable price compared to legacy systems, although this is also a function of increased quality vs price in consumer electronics for the rest of the reproduction chain (amps etc.) in general. A third advantage would be the increased portability of quality music (high capacity personal music players that handle lossless formats), although this ties in with the convenience aspect first mentioned.

Phil, I got a TS-RCA cable when I bought the Duet. I hook that up to the tape outs on my integrated amp and hook it up to the Instrument inputs on the Duet breakout cable. The turntable is hooked up to the phono inputs of the integrated amp. 1. Check Core Audio is set for the Duet I/O and also set at 24/96 (Audio Midi Setup) 2. Run Audacity (I am running 1.3.5b) on the MacBook, set Default sample rate to 96000 Hz, leave Default sample format (what Audacity uses internally) as 32 bit float and check Duet is selected for I/O (under Audacity prefs) 3. Do a trial run and set levels in Audacity for the loudest passage on the LP (you can be a bit conservative when you are going to export in 24 bit i.e. if the levels are a bit low you will still have more than say 16 bits) 4. I record the entire side as one file, export as 24 bit WAV then manually split into tracks later, convert to FLAC and add metadata. While Audacity can export straight to FLAC, and re-import that FLAC, it is much faster exporting/importing WAVs. I find the best workflow is to do all the recording in one session then spend time later on splitting tracks etc. and this is where the faster import of WAVs comes into play. I don't bother removing clicks and pops (just clean the vinyl well first), but Audacity comes with a plugin that can do this if you wish. You could also dither the files down to 16/48 (using Audacity - again the quality of the dither is set in prefs), if you wanted to save some space.

Brian, just select 'Flat List - Expanded' at the bottom of the page, and you will see all the posts in chronological order (or reverse if you prefer), disregarding threads. I think this is what you want? Also, to quote previous posts, use the cite tags and copy & paste.

I have been reading some back issues of 'The Audio Critic' (from a link in one of mpmct's posts I think), and his reviews cut out much of the esoteric flowery language prevalent in many magazines, and his impressions are backed up by technical measurements. His creed appears to be that science is the be-all and end-all of music reproduction, i.e. if it can't be measured it can't be heard and that the electronics along the chain sound very similar unless seriously poorly designed, and the main contributor to higher/lower quality sound is the speakers, and the source material. Whether folks here agree with that attitude or not, his reviews do mention build quality issues, circuit design issues and internal component quality with reasonable objectivity, and as such are quite useful reading for product quality comparisons. Mind you, I am not suggesting that CA start reviewing in this manner, I find your reviews very informative and useful too Chris, and I keep an open mind regarding whether or not certain things influence sound quality!

Hello Phil, I am using the Apogee Duet with my MacBook, both for listening (FLAC via Play.app) and for digitising my vinyl (using Audacity). I find the quality and clarity of the sound to be very good. I have done very little headphone listening through it though, so I can't really give an opinion on this aspect, although most reviews on the web are positive about this. I also like the convenience of the large volume control knob. Overall, a great piece of gear for the price, it is a bit larger than it appears but still easily portable. One caveat on it would be Apple's incredibly stupid (IMO) decision to remove FW from the latest MacBooks, meaning that if your current laptop died, you would be forced to spend a lot extra on a MacBook Pro and a FW800-FW400 cable to continue using the Duet. Apparently it works with that setup. Maybe Apogee will decide to write Windows drivers for the Duet, who knows? HTH.

So the manufacturers will allow people (only certain people presumably?) to plug a flash drive into their systems? A potential security risk for those exhibitors running systems based on Windows, not too bad for Macs though!<br /> <br /> Someone could write a 'virus' that sends all audio on Windows systems through the kmixer and resamples it to 11025kHz mono, then plug it into a competitor's setup LOL <br /> <br /> Back to a serious note, what sort of volume levels occur at these events? I assume there needs to be sufficient volume to drown out as much of the hallway traffic noise as possible without impacting to severely on the neighbours?