Jump to content

CarlSeibert

High Rollers
  • Posts

    2,511
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    10

Posts posted by CarlSeibert

  1. Best I can tell from the Roon forum, some streamer apps (including Roon) can pass the MQA stream though to an MQA DAC. Some apps (Tidal, and soon several others, including Roon) can our will eventually be able to transcode the stream to whatever resolution it represents. But i can't see how the matching filter thing could be implemented for an arbitrary DAC. If so, software decoding won't be able to provide the "complete" MQA expense.

    So, for me, it's "95% of 95%", whenever I can figure out the logistics of getting the signal to the DAC in the system I actually want to use it in.

  2. This thing feels to me like it could be pretty significant.

    Put aside all the conspiracy theory nonsense and what you've got is a distribution format that allows streaming good quality at a reasonable bandwidth cost. Considering that all music nowadays (more or less) is all distributed via streaming. That's huge. Yeah, MQA fake 24/whatever might not be quite as good as real 24/whatever, but that's not the point. With truly lossless encoding, for each itty bitty little increase in quality you have to pay double in bandwidth.  Streaming services at real lossless 24/92 (or whatever)? Faggidaboutit. 

    It's a 95% of something vs 100% of nothing kind of thing. DSDs and hires downloads might be wonderful but they only exist in the audiophile fringe niche. The music you really want to hear is rarely available that way. If streaming services can stream something for us that sounds more or less like, say, 24/96 from the same distribution file they use for deaf millennials, that's something that might actually happen and I'm down with it.

    Archiving is the same story. Harsh reality is that digital assets, whether pictures, video, or audio are stored in their distribution formats in any kind of archive that you snd I are likely to have access to. The original photographer may have the RAWs and the engineer may have lossless masters, but fat lot of good that does us. What matters to us is archives we can actually get to. (Like when each streaming service dies and orphans a lot of music.) I'd rather have almost hires than exactly Red Book.

    Now, we won't know if any of this magic is for real until we've had a chance to live with the format for a while to know if it's not flawed. All we have now is first impressions and hokey A/B tests that aren't worth spit. We can't pass judgement until we've heard music we care about, long term. And for that to happen, the product has to gain traction in the marketplace. And for that to happen, some hypesters have hype their asses off and actually sell the shit. So we shouldn't fear the hype. Be one with the hype.

     

     

    Grahame - I only made it through the first link in your posts. I couldn't go on. That guy had me screaming at the walls halfway through. Good lord!  I propose we start a charity that provides free line and copy editing to financially or intellectually impoverished bloviators. Some of these people need some discipline, dammit. Maybe instead of green eyeshades our charity editors come come in leather and studs. They could carry whips.

    • Like 5
  3. The Utopias visited at my house last week, in the company of my friend Jim. Pretty darned impressive. The speed and finesse of an electrostatic with the guts of a dynamic and all that cliche stuff. Wonderful top end. As in actually for real, not just prominent.  Very fine resolution across the band. And super tight, tuneful bass. Somebody here (JP?) described them as "clean". That's pretty apt. They're fast,fast, fast. It's all the music and none of the noise. Sense of space was palpable in a way that I've not heard before, certainly on dynamics. In comparison to other headphones we had on hand, (HE-500s, HD-800Ses, LCD-3s) they were just "better". Of course, they cost twice as much as the next priciest unit. All were driven by my relatively modest Woo from either a Neko D-100MKII or vinyl. We didn't have a solid state amp on hand to try.

    All that said, there were a couple pieces of music that sounded more "whole" for me on the LCD-3s. Mind you, I doubt anybody would listen to those two phones for two minutes and fail to judge the Utopias better overall. Ditto for the other sets we had at hand. (But it does beg the question: what do the LCD-4s sound like?) So maybe we're not yet talking about the absolute bestest thing ever for all time past and future..  There's always a new world to conquer.  

    If I was really in danger of writing that check, I'd want to listen to the Utopias for a pretty good long time to be sure they were the right musical fit for me, before putting pen to financial instrument. I listened to them for about five hours on one day. Which, now that I think about it, is something of an endorsement for non-fatiguing listenability. They were comfy, too. Maybe the comfiest I've felt. But I'm not really the princess with the pea as far as headphone comfort goes. Most of 'em seem to feel fine on my head. 

     The Elears are very nice, but not in the same league, really. It's not that they're 80% of the Utopias. They're a different sort of thing altogether.

    A sample of the Woo WA 8 sort-of-portable DAC/amp was traveling with the headphones. It didn't suck, either. I thought it was curious that they would put it in the box. I mean who is going to drive $4K headphones with a portable? But it drove both the Focals really nicely. 

    • Like 6
  4. I haven't been in this thread for a few days either. Wow, Steve, kickbacks are scary. I'm glad to hear you're on the road to recovery.

    My father-in-law used to work in a shop at a school. Somebody had a kickback that went halfway through a concrete block wall. (Fortunately without going through the guy first) They left the piece of wood sticking out of the wall as a motivational showpiece. Made an impression on me.

    Really should get a riving knife for my old Unisaw.

  5. 14 hours ago, RudeWolf said:

    USB audio can't do checksums and repeat sends, it'll just cut out, if the stream gets interrupted. 

    I read somewhere that wasn't the case. You'd get a bad value. Then that was supposedly poo-poo-ed because if you got an error on the most significant bit, the sonic world would end and everybody would hear it.

    The poo-poo-ing made me very suspicious, because an error on the MSB would be a lot like a zero-crossing error. I've made, well, a few zero-cross errors in editing and nobody ever noticed. But I suspect that one every hundred thousand samples or million samples or so would probably sound like bad sounding digital. 

    All of which suggests to me exactly what you said: Buffer enough to be able to resend resend packets. Why not?

    • Like 1
  6. 1 hour ago, Hopstretch said:

    Speaking of shitholes, I got dragged to the worst strip club in the world today during a corporate farewell. Sad, fat Bulgarian girls with mustaches and maybe three teeth between the entire English van driver clientele. I am permanently less horny for having ever darkened their door.

    The mind reels.

    • Like 1
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.