sr1329

As much as we like to think we are an important market we are not. Our volumes are too low to really make a dent in anything. However $1950 keeps it in the range of top line Denon, Pioneer Elite, Marantz, Yamaha stuff. Imagine a company with no presence in that market like a Samsung coming out with a “home theater pre amp” priced at $1950 with great marketing and it’s instant credibility for them. Then they can slowly trickle the technology down to lower price points. If not they could go with Yamaha which has been doing its half baked surround modes for decades. They have a captive audience on that stuff already. Except this time it would actually sound good. The headphone market has grown like crazy but it’s still mostly a portable market. Only audiophile types listen to headphones at home. Only audiophile types would visit a measurement center to get tested for their transfer function. This is where the Creative approach is better for the mass market. I am sure it won’t be as good but taking a picture of you ear is something anyone could do. Consumers won’t pay more than $50 for an app to do the processing. But they might pay $300-500 for a headphone that has it all built in. VR is a technical success imho but still a commercial failure. How many people will buy a $2000 PC and then a $800 headset? Possibly when the tech gets to the point that $800 buys the computer and the headset it might work. With the computer being a small wireless box somewhere. None of this ready for mass market sadly. At the end most people don’t care how many DACs are in it. They have two ears only. Maybe the best we could hope for with Ambisonic multichannel audio might be a single person “cage” system sort of like they used to demo 5 channel SACD at Best Buy. It needs to be packaged up in one box. The other way to do this is target the architectural market by getting this in front of architects and contractors. And then obviously providing commissions to get these installed. Maybe 3 “off the shelf” setups and then fully custom above those. To me it seems there are a few years to get all this sorted out. I don’t know if historically there ever has been a precedent of a boutique audiophile company successfully releasing a consumer standard. Sony couldn’t even get SACD to stick. The best I’ve seen is Dirac getting into a few cars. But they still have been dwarfed by Harmon and Bose in the automotive market. Maybe Smyth could license the tech to Dirac for auto applications only. And maybe that make people want it for home. But really I know of only one car that had Dirac. It was the E92 BMW M3 only if you ordered the “competition audio” package as a $1950 option. BMW just shoves Harmon into everything else and doesn’t use Dirac anymore. If if history is any indication unless these guys get business savvy very quickly they will be a niche company at best. For that matter HTC will likely be bankrupt or acquired before VR takes off. Great hardware but horrible marketing.

Sure they might be but so far the others are releasing IMHO half baked products that might sour the market to 3D audio. I don’t think they are late yet. They are certainly at risk of being late if they don’t act within the next year though. All signs point to this being the real deal for the first time in history. However for it catch on it’s got the same problem as VR. The tech is very convincing but just too cumbersome to really catch on. In that case the headsets need to get lighter, be free of wires and just generally be comfortable enough to use for more than an hour. Of course the price needs to be around $500. For 3D audio it’s the same thing. It needs to be wireless, light and comfortable and priced at or below $300. I agree that Smyth would do well to partner with a company that needs credibility in the audio market like a Samsung. The company has deep pockets. It has credibility in phones and TVs but nothing in audio. They can accelerate R&D and manufacturing and sell millions. The Smyth brothers can become rich in the next two years, become a household name and the technology could trickle down to most of us quickly. Creative has its X-Fi product and they could get it out to mass market pretty quickly. It won’t be anywhere as good but they have brand recognition in the mass market.

I have a similar goal in mind. My constraints are a little different. I will also be going with 2.0 or 2.1. 1. I need an HDMI input - I would use an HDMI to Optical/Coaxial converter if needed 2. I want to keep everything in the digital domain from start to finish 3. I want to try to keep it simple using the boxes at minidsp, but would use a Mac Mini if that's the only way 4. If I use a Mac Mini, I would still use a box to do the digital crossover function. I just started researching my options today so I'm just starting out. I'd also like to hear from others who have done this.

I had one and returned it. It sounded pretty darn good. But the killer feature is supposed to be that bridge that allows ethernet->I2S->DAC. But I saw the writing on the wall with their obviously hopeless attempts to make a user friendly product. First of all as much as it sounds good that touch screen screams "gimmick". The remote does not work at an angle. Then I tried that iPhone app and realized that this is hopeless. These guys don't have the first clue on designing a user interface or any software. Given that the bridge will work only with their clunky software it was a lost cause in my eyes. IMHO nobody can touch iTunes remote or Squeezebox as an interface and of the two Squeezebox still has issues but it gives you control that iTunes never in a million years could. Those two systems are the only ones I know that will let you manage and control a library of tens of thousands of songs without making you wish you could go back to the days of changing silver discs. IMHO the whole point of computer audio is convenience beyond the fact that greater sound quality can be achieved at lower cost. If the interface sucks you might as well deal with vinyl and all its headaches. Coming back to the PWD, if you run Squeezebox to PWD via S/PDIF then it negates all the sonic advantages of the bridge and the product will never meet its advertised potential or its design goals. It sounded good via S/PDIF but surely there are better sounding DACs at its price point given how much R&D and construction costs went into that gimmicky screen and all this bridge hoopla.

Sorry, I guess I didn't scroll down.

Any comments on how they sound? Any comments on the Weiss Saracon method for extracting from DSD? Any spectrum analysis done on these to make sure they really are what they say they are? I'm ready to buy, but only after some proper research.

Thanks I'll check it out!

Can you use iPhone remote with Decibel?

Jitter inaudible? So that's why semiconductor firms have spent millions trying to reduce its value over the years.

It's about time. I have bought wierdo albums from those "audiophile" labels, but 99% of it is pure crap. Some of it is okay, but why listen to it when you can listen to actual music.

You would have to buy one with a return policy and see if it fits your needs. If you have hundreds of cassettes you may need the speed to make it palatable. But I'd bet that it isn't a high fidelity solution. If you consider a best case frequency response of 20Hz-20KHz, then at 8x you would need the circuitry to handle 160KHz at the head and then pitch correct it with analog circuitry since no digital format really can handle that sort of range. If I had a few dozen cassettes I would find a nice 70s or 80s Nakamichi Dragon or similar and use its output to feed a digital recorder. Getting good sound from a cassette is a difficult thing and those Nakamichis were one of the few that could do it. With analog playback the engineering of the mechanism and circuitry is very important.

Those 5-bay USB things are hopeless. At least that's been my experience. But if you can stream those big MKV files then I find it hard to blame the NAS. Anyway could you please list what exactly you are using? I don't get this at all: "I'm a proponent of the J. River Library Server as I listen at work, but it also gets my noisy storage out of the listening room. I have an Addonics box with some pretty noisy fans and 5 bays. I used to connect each drive to unique SATA connections but now I am limited to using an E-sata to USB adapter to connect to my office computer."

Just Google K64enabler.

USB or FW DAC is first and Interconnect is dead last. As for software there are free ones out there.

There's a loss of sound quality with screen sharing?