Harry Pearson of Absolute Sound fame passed away.
RIP
I miss him. He was special.
Reading the Absolute Sound gave High End the language.
RIP
I miss him. He was special.
Reading the Absolute Sound gave High End the language.
I just heard this also. I knew him well back in the 80's-90's when I used to visit his editor (Sallie Reynolds) in Sea Cliff. He was just a short walk up the street to his house. I was at a party for Billy Preston there and met a lot of musicians and producers over the years. And, got my first experience at Carnegy Hall when there visiting him and Sallie. Harry bought me my first A-P System One to see what I could correlate with tests and listening. He was the person who came up with the term Hi-End Audio. Always a gentleman. Last time I saw him he visited me and Sallie in our hot tub in California (I stole her away from Harry). His ability to write a description of sound so well you actually knew how a product sounded was amazing. The old African proverb applies now --- "When a man dies, a library burns to the ground."
R.I.P. Harry.
-Richard Marsh
Omicron is having a webinar on the aforementioned topic November 19 and 20 -- other items are measuring loop stability, impedance and automating the Bode-100.
OMICRON Lab "Smart Measurement Solutions": OMICRON Lab Webinars
OMICRON Lab "Smart Measurement Solutions": OMICRON Lab Webinars
Oh dear - another round of "digital is the death of music!" bashing ... an easy target, which does so much to sustain the myth via the lacklustre quality, and flaws, of implementations, so much of the time ...
I just had a notable experience of this happening - the relevance, here, is that the source initially was analogue, an LP12 no less: a friend's place with an ambitious fully active setup, dipoles, top notch drivers, etc. Started with some classic, vinyl Dire Straits - dreary, flat, uninteresting sound, a "I want to talk over this music to make life more interesting" quality to it ...
Hmmm, maybe plenty of warmup needed ... 2 sides, another album ... still going nowhere - OK, drop the analogue, go for CD source ... better bass, somewhat fuller - but still a quality of "I can't be bothered listening to it" ...
During this time, it turns out that the DEQX unit that's doing the fancy splitting for the drivers was only switched on a short time earlier - was powered down the previous day because of lightning storm concerns ... it normally is left on 24/7 ...
Ah-hah!! The converters in the DEQX, and other circuitry within are probably in sub-par state ... gee, if we hang in there long enough it might come good ... and lo and behold, in the middle of a track, a CD of jazz with very heavy percussion, lots of cymbal work - it happened! The sound suddenly snapped into shape - it went from mediocre and boring, to lively and "musical", in the space of seconds ...
I have never heard that transition occur so dramatically and obviously before - my best guess is that the DEQX had some key area of its digital - analogue circuitry "come good", from the continuous conditioning it was getting from the playing, a numbers of hours needed to make the circuit "snap" into place ...
The point being, this SQ problem appears to be so rampant in the digital source/DSP translation world - and little is done to get it under control ... and maybe that's part of the reason the word "vacuous" is applied to much digital sourced sound ...
I just had a notable experience of this happening - the relevance, here, is that the source initially was analogue, an LP12 no less: a friend's place with an ambitious fully active setup, dipoles, top notch drivers, etc. Started with some classic, vinyl Dire Straits - dreary, flat, uninteresting sound, a "I want to talk over this music to make life more interesting" quality to it ...
Hmmm, maybe plenty of warmup needed ... 2 sides, another album ... still going nowhere - OK, drop the analogue, go for CD source ... better bass, somewhat fuller - but still a quality of "I can't be bothered listening to it" ...
During this time, it turns out that the DEQX unit that's doing the fancy splitting for the drivers was only switched on a short time earlier - was powered down the previous day because of lightning storm concerns ... it normally is left on 24/7 ...
Ah-hah!! The converters in the DEQX, and other circuitry within are probably in sub-par state ... gee, if we hang in there long enough it might come good ... and lo and behold, in the middle of a track, a CD of jazz with very heavy percussion, lots of cymbal work - it happened! The sound suddenly snapped into shape - it went from mediocre and boring, to lively and "musical", in the space of seconds ...
I have never heard that transition occur so dramatically and obviously before - my best guess is that the DEQX had some key area of its digital - analogue circuitry "come good", from the continuous conditioning it was getting from the playing, a numbers of hours needed to make the circuit "snap" into place ...
The point being, this SQ problem appears to be so rampant in the digital source/DSP translation world - and little is done to get it under control ... and maybe that's part of the reason the word "vacuous" is applied to much digital sourced sound ...
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I have no problem with digital sound as such.
This is kind of interesting :New Methods for Quantifying Sonic Performance | The Absolute Sound
This is kind of interesting :New Methods for Quantifying Sonic Performance | The Absolute Sound
Indeed it is. The correlation between upsampling and perceived quality is something that I explored quite a bit on my PC, and even with, or perhaps because of, the very basic on-board DAC and low cost speakers it was pretty obvious. If one wants to go "silly", take a low bit rate MP3 file, convert that to WAV and then upsample to an extremely high rate - made a very large difference to the listenability of the original file for me.
Obvious downsides, 😀 - huge increase in storage space required ... but a worthwhile exercise to "prove" a point ...
Obvious downsides, 😀 - huge increase in storage space required ... but a worthwhile exercise to "prove" a point ...
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HTC One (M8) Harman Kardon Edition Specs and Reviews | HTC United States
They claime that they can descramble MP3.
Maybe the Fraunhofer guys where more clever then we thought.
Fraunhofer ( the man ) found the solar spectrum.........
They claime that they can descramble MP3.
Maybe the Fraunhofer guys where more clever then we thought.
Fraunhofer ( the man ) found the solar spectrum.........
The technology is called "Clari-Fi" - not unscrambling; reading between the lines of some reports on the net, it analyses the decoded, playable waveform, and intelligently guesses what was stripped out, from knowing how the MP3 encoding would have done its work in the first place, and examining what clues exist in various areas of the musical track. How effective it is depends how "intelligent" it is, and whether it tries to overcook the "enhancement" or not ...
Really, the best answer is not to do lossy compression in the first place, 😉.
And of course, all the work to "fix" the track may still result in degraded quality, from processing circuit interference artifacts.
Really, the best answer is not to do lossy compression in the first place, 😉.
And of course, all the work to "fix" the track may still result in degraded quality, from processing circuit interference artifacts.
Sure, i am just mesmerized what happens to " rescue " the sound.
Quality in the first place.
Maybe some bosses got nervous that the customers demand more then a mockup.
Anyway.
Quality in the first place.
Maybe some bosses got nervous that the customers demand more then a mockup.
Anyway.
comparing the same disc (recorded at the same time and place) between vinyl, SACD and CD, I find that the SACD is pretty close. The CD is clearly several notches below.
On bad recordings, the differences vanish completely. On good recordings, Vinyl is the winner, IMHO..... Repeatably so......
On bad recordings, the differences vanish completely. On good recordings, Vinyl is the winner, IMHO..... Repeatably so......
To better good digital requires quite an amazing turntable and phono stage but it is doable.
A general rule for audio that I've developed over the years is, no matter how good you think you've heard a particular recording being played back - from whatever medium it's stored on - that it will always be possible to hear a superior rendition of that particular physical version of the stored music occurring ...
This has happened to me over and over again, to the point that I just take it for granted these days - I take absolutely no notice of unpleasantness in the playback of a completely unknown recording, because I know that if I go to enough effort that all those negatives will fade to insignificance - the music can always be "rescued" ...
This has happened to me over and over again, to the point that I just take it for granted these days - I take absolutely no notice of unpleasantness in the playback of a completely unknown recording, because I know that if I go to enough effort that all those negatives will fade to insignificance - the music can always be "rescued" ...