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No More Audiophile Hassles


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5 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

on my new iMac, Audio MIDI cannot be set to 24/96 output - only the mic input can be set to that

 

???

 

Is your DAC connected?

 

If so, you should see something that looks like this:

 

 

Screen Shot 2017-10-17 at 5.23.14 PM.png

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby
Edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley
Through the middle of my skull

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4 hours ago, davide256 said:

Enjoy your "hotdog" . I'll keep struggling to master cooking "steak". After 30 years of cooking "steak", I both enjoy the "taste" and the knowledge that it can be made even better.

One mans steak is another mans hot dog. This is all subjective stuff. IMO any thing that is two channel based is a hot dog, you CAN'T replicate a live event with two speakers, not even a harmonica.
Immersive audio is steak in my book. However this thread is about less of a hassle audiophilia so I stick with my active speaker 2 channel recommendation. 
 

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1 minute ago, witchdoctor said:

One mans steak is another mans hot dog. This is all subjective stuff. IMO any thing that is two channel based is a hot dog, you CAN'T replicate a live event with two speakers, not even a harmonica.
Immersive audio is steak in my book. However this thread is about less of a hassle audiophilia so I stick with my active speaker 2 channel recommendation. 
 

Oh, that's right. You are the immersive audio one. I remember now. Its not steak, it's Soylent Green!

Forrest:

Win10 i9 9900KS/GTX1060 HQPlayer4>Win10 NAA

DSD>Pavel's DSC2.6>Bent Audio TAP>

Parasound JC1>"Naked" Quad ESL63/Tannoy PS350B subs<100Hz

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4 minutes ago, 4est said:

Oh, that's right. You are the immersive audio one. I remember now. Its not steak, it's Soylent Green!

Look at this video of pink floyd mixing in immersive at abbey road. Notice how abbey road studios looks just like witchdoctor studios (although I use 1 sub, not 8!). You can't do steak without the "voice of god" channel right? 
 

 

WP_20160819_001.jpg

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BTW both abbey road and witchdoctor studios use active speakers, that is filet mignon in audio terms.

Check out the result of the Pink Floyd Immersive Audio project, this is steak at a 5 star restaurant, on New Years Eve, while dressed to the nines and Miss USA as your date. If they would have just setup two tower speakers and played stereo they would have been laughed out of London, sorry:

 

 

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47 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

One mans steak is another mans hot dog. This is all subjective stuff. IMO any thing that is two channel based is a hot dog, you CAN'T replicate a live event with two speakers, not even a harmonica.
Immersive audio is steak in my book. However this thread is about less of a hassle audiophilia so I stick with my active speaker 2 channel recommendation. 
 

 

Even a very low cost, bare bones 2 channel effort can do "immersive audio". All the fudges which add lots of extra sound, coming from other directions, etc, etc, etc, are just means to an end which can also be thrown up by good ol' stereo. Why the stereo method normally doesn't work is because the playback system isn't good enough, and needs lots of assistance from extra gear - "crutches" ...

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If you’re not averse to headphones I’d suggest you get a Chord Mojo, a pair of Sennheiser HD600 headphones and a copy of jriver media center. Connect it all to your laptop running jriver fed by your NAS drive and proceed to enjoy an audiophile experience for less than $2k all in. No room correction, no DSP, no class D. You could do better for a lot more money but I bet you’d already  find that you’re more than satisfied.

 

If immersive Audio is what you want then get a Smyth Realiser and invest in having your own personalized 7.1 PRIR made of the room of your choice.

 

For a 2 channel speaker system you could start and end with Schiit Audio and ELAC, plus a copy of “Getting Better Sound.”

 

None of these solutions would break the bank and then, going forward, you could spend your money on music.

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1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

Even a very low cost, bare bones 2 channel effort can do "immersive audio". All the fudges which add lots of extra sound, coming from other directions, etc, etc, etc, are just means to an end which can also be thrown up by good ol' stereo. Why the stereo method normally doesn't work is because the playback system isn't good enough, and needs lots of assistance from extra gear - "crutches" ...

Actually both auro 3D and DTS-X say they have a way to do immersive via headphones. I know SRS Circle Surround and Yamaha with DSP attempted to do it too with fewer speakers. My preference is the way Pink Floyd did it at Abbey Road, YMMV.

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13 minutes ago, esimms86 said:

If you’re not averse to headphones I’d suggest you get a Chord Mojo, a pair of Sennheiser HD600 headphones and a copy of jriver media center. Connect it all to your laptop running jriver fed by your NAS drive and proceed to enjoy an audiophile experience for less than $2k all in. No room correction, no DSP, no class D. You could do better for a lot more money but I bet you’d already  find that you’re more than satisfied.

 

If immersive Audio is what you want then get a Smyth Realiser and invest in having your own personalized 7.1 PRIR made of the room of your choice.

 

For a 2 channel speaker system you could start and end with Schiit Audio and ELAC, plus a copy of “Getting Better Sound.”

 

None of these solutions would break the bank and then, going forward, you could spend your money on music.

Good call, I own the HD600 and am getting the new iFi MQA BL DAC, around the same price as the Mojo.

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10 hours ago, wgscott said:

...Let's say for example 99% of my music files are either redbook, AAC/mp3, or 24/48 or 24/96 PCM.  How much of a performance hit would I take if I just used iTunes and set Audio MIDI setup to 24/96 output, so that coreaudio would just upsample everything to that and send it to my DAC?

 

How much of a performance hit would be entailed in using, for example, a $1K consumer-grade TEAC DAC (which is the best I have, fwiw)?

 

Why not use the TEAC HR Audio Player? it's free! You have a Teac DAC and it plays all your music files, except AAC. You could convert your AAC files to MP3. Also unlike iTunes it offers automatic sample frequency switching. It works with both PC and Mac. I've used it for years and it works great.

I have dementia. I save all my posts in a text file I call Forums.  I do a search in that file to find out what I said or did in the past.

 

I still love music.

 

Teresa

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While I have't heard every single moderate speaker system recently, I have heard a few.  I have heard some very expensive high quality rigs as well.  The JBL LSR 305 active speakers are something of an inflection point of stellar value. The quality in absolute terms is good.  Not just okay for the money, not good for the money, in absolute terms good. The quality is stupid good for $300/pr.  Especially if used near field as monitors as intended.  

 

I have set them on chairs in front of Soundlabs.  And in other people's opinion, there was nothing embarrassing about it. They were good.  Not equal to Soundlabs, but quite good.  When I moved for a short time they were my speakers in a large listening room.  They were musical and enjoyable, but not up to larger systems.  I added a sub, and they were far better in a large room than I expected.  I have heard multiple systems with stellar upstream gear powering speakers costing 10 times as much that were no better or not even equal.  I was feeding a USB/SPDIF converter from PC to a 15 year old good DAC/pre which fed the JBLs.  I think you can surpass that DAC/pre with a $500 one today.  

 

What did they lack with a sub as a main system?  The last degree of super clean, super low distortion sound.  The last step of full dynamics (they could sound like they compressed dynamic some small amount), the last final step or so of full detail.  They don't lack this when used near field as intended.  They never did anything nasty, nothing hugely obvious to color up the sound.  Just a little bit of final cleanliness compared to excellent systems.  

 

So regarding Bill's question, $500 DAC/pre or his Teac (which has balanced outputs perfect for the 305s), and even one of the Dayton Audio $200 subs.  You have a $1000 in a very good system.  

 

I once determined to my own satisfaction total system cost was a 4th power function.  To double subjective sound quality required 16 times the money.  With that $1k system above, I am not sure $16k will double that.  I would guess maybe a 20% improvement.  

 

I'll continue in another post. 

And always keep in mind: Cognitive biases, like seeing optical illusions are a sign of a normally functioning brain. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but it is something that affects our objective evaluation of reality. 

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2 minutes ago, esldude said:

While I have't heard every single moderate speaker system recently, I have heard a few.  I have heard some very expensive high quality rigs as well.  The JBL LSR 305 active speakers are something of an inflection point of stellar value. The quality in absolute terms is good.  Not just okay for the money, not good for the money, in absolute terms good. The quality is stupid good for $300/pr.  Especially if used near field as monitors as intended.  

 

I have set them on chairs in front of Soundlabs.  And in other people's opinion, there was nothing embarrassing about it. They were good.  Not equal to Soundlabs, but quite good.  When I moved for a short time they were my speakers in a large listening room.  They were musical and enjoyable, but not up to larger systems.  I added a sub, and they were far better in a large room than I expected.  I have heard multiple systems with stellar upstream gear powering speakers costing 10 times as much that were no better or not even equal.  I was feeding a USB/SPDIF converter from PC to a 15 year old good DAC/pre which fed the JBLs.  I think you can surpass that DAC/pre with a $500 one today.  

 

What did they lack with a sub as a main system?  The last degree of super clean, super low distortion sound.  The last step of full dynamics (they could sound like they compressed dynamic some small amount), the last final step or so of full detail.  They don't lack this when used near field as intended.  They never did anything nasty, nothing hugely obvious to color up the sound.  Just a little bit of final cleanliness compared to excellent systems.  

 

So regarding Bill's question, $500 DAC/pre or his Teac (which has balanced outputs perfect for the 305s), and even one of the Dayton Audio $200 subs.  You have a $1000 in a very good system.  

 

I once determined to my own satisfaction total system cost was a 4th power function.  To double subjective sound quality required 16 times the money.  With that $1k system above, I am not sure $16k will double that.  I would guess maybe a 20% improvement.  

 

I'll continue in another post. 

Based on that math you must be in charge of balancing the national debt :)
You can't double subjective sound quality because it is subjective, but I'll bet you could double OBJECTIVE sound quality for a helluva lot less. Sometime just by moving your speakers and then using something like Audyssey providing you have the tools to do measurements.

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So given a Teac or Emotiva Stealth, what do we loose with Bill's other compromises?

 

With redbook, I am not convinced you loose a thing. 

 

With 320 kbps mp3 or similar(better) lossy encoding.  You loose something I think.  With some tough to compress sounds I can abx 256 kbps.  With most music not.  So that is somewhere near an edge case.  I haven't spent any serious time plumbing the depths of lossy encoders better than mp3.  Hydrogen audio can probably guide you on those.  If you use upsampling in iTunes I don't know.  I hate iTunes and don't use it.

 

In any case following the gist of Bill's inquiry, I think I would say 20% maximum loss for most any reasonable purpose.  I really think speakers and amps are the only critical choices in todays hifi rigs.  I do mean high fidelity rigs, not designer colored, beautiful statements of the audiophiles cachet and taste system that also isn't high fidelity.  You know systems that may sing musically for some particular tastes, but have character of their own rather than fidelity.  Considering the spread of price from $1k to say $100k systems (I don't think I have heard any costing more than this though some exist in surprising numbers) that isn't much improvement for your money.  My old 4th power function would say 20% would cost $2k, not $100k.  So with everything being so good for so cheap the only money spent worthwhile is speakers, maybe amps, and DSP.   So maybe the audiophile world isn't flat in a Krugman sense, but the tilt isn't much anymore. 

 

 

And always keep in mind: Cognitive biases, like seeing optical illusions are a sign of a normally functioning brain. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but it is something that affects our objective evaluation of reality. 

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13 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

Based on that math you must be in charge of balancing the national debt :)
You can't double subjective sound quality because it is subjective, but I'll bet you could double OBJECTIVE sound quality for a helluva lot less. Sometime just by moving your speakers and then using something like Audyssey providing you have the tools to do measurements.

I don't agree with you. 

 

Subjective quality is subjective yes.  Subjective loudness as an example is such that 10 db sounds twice as loud while requiring 10 times the power.  An objective scale matched to subjective matching.  So it was my carefully considered opinion based upon some reasonable experience of many systems available then that what seems overall twice as good subjectively cost 16 times the money just before the turn of the century.  

 

Since that time a fair number of components seem to have reached levels of performance beyond subjective reproach, and then gotten cheaper while advancing performance further still.  In such devices no amount of money will increase subjective quality.  The curve reaches an asymptote.  

 

As for using software like Audyssey (in my opinion the worst of all such software I have used by a wide margin), yes that can result in further improvements which cost nearly nothing.  But we are into how to use the gear more than the gear itself.  How to prepare the recordings rather than quality of those recordings themselves.  

And always keep in mind: Cognitive biases, like seeing optical illusions are a sign of a normally functioning brain. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but it is something that affects our objective evaluation of reality. 

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I would also remind everyone of the now more than a decade old event.  Where Wilson hid a $1k Parasound amp, and the  iPod source they used at a major audio show.  No one seemed to find anything remiss.  There are several ways to approach this.  One is that other than speakers, we might get very far down the curve before audibly losing anything. 

 

 

And always keep in mind: Cognitive biases, like seeing optical illusions are a sign of a normally functioning brain. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but it is something that affects our objective evaluation of reality. 

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3 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

what was on the ipod - mp3, redbook...?

Look at the thread.   Apple lossless 16 bit. 

And always keep in mind: Cognitive biases, like seeing optical illusions are a sign of a normally functioning brain. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but it is something that affects our objective evaluation of reality. 

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