Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large

Gareth Ward

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 11:55:10 +1300

I spent a fair while researching Wireless/DAC/Speaker combos when I wanted to set up something simpler for home than the old behemoths (legacy of a university-era hifi job). Interestingly found that Airplay effectively resamples everything to (IIRC) 48khz – I assume above that generates bandwidth requirements beyond what a standard…

Rich Lock

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 03:59:57 +1300

“it’s k-pop, nothing will make it sound decent”

Yes, but she needs the more expensive headphone because it's all about the Gangnam style, innit? Keeping up with the Parks, and all that.

Pete McDowell

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 12:23:08 +1300

Those "More Barn" Northwest TAD speakers still go on tour as Neil's own onstage monitor system.

Russell Brown

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:49:00 +1300

I have a Paul Money ‘top of Dominion Rd’ not halfway down, Yamaha and solid speakers. All you do is link an Apple TV to a DAC to the amp and everything works.

As per discussion above, I'm happy enough to trust the DAC in my Onkyo amp.

$100 usb…

TracyMac

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:08:14 +1300

If you're using Mediamonkey Gold, it'll be using the latest LAME codec, which is a good thing.

Yes, I am using MM Gold, but I thought LAME was MP3s only? Damn it, I am tempted to switch to MP3 with VBR 320 kbps. I was already getting the hump with…

Moz

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:28:44 +1300

The backstory for us is slightly amusing. I bought $500 headphones ($500 in a sale!) and my partner made the usual scoffing noises that people do when they see audiophile prices. Being a bit of a bastard, I let her use them for a couple of weeks, hooked up to…

Alec Morgan

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 14:05:35 +1300

I have a Paul Money ‘top of Dominion Rd’ not halfway down, Yamaha and solid speakers. All you do is link an Apple TV to a DAC to the amp and everything works.
Bypass the HD TV too for audio only.

$100 usb turntable helps too. Vinyl rules!

Peter Johnston

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 12:36:25 +1300

Why complain that people are discussing the major selling point of something?
Fair point, sorry more of an observation than a complaint really, it certainly seems to be a topic that resonates (no pun intended).
Agree with Moz that anything that leads to less shitty plastic (i.e. CDs) is worthy…

Chris Lipscombe

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 12:15:05 +1300

Ah, vinyl. It's why I still have a good quality functioning turntable. My complete stereo setup (Linn, Naim, Yamaha, Wharfedale) is pretty much a 1988 reference system.

Moz

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 20:30:42 +1300

Man, so many responses about the format and so few on the music! At a certain age, does one start meaning more than the other?

Why complain that people are discussing the major selling point of something?

Sure, you may buy a Lambourghini for the great resale value and Penthouse…

Barry

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:47:34 +1300

Really enjoyed the tech talk and have set aside some of those articles for later reading but, more importantly, the Windsor Castle! It started in 1846 but even if we count its second start in 1850 after the fire, why is it not a contender for the oldest pub in…

Hebe

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 12:32:44 +1300

Weather and John Cale. Has to be done.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUdd3Z-BARQ

Jonathan Ganley

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 08:35:18 +1300

And re the whole Neil Young thing – amazed he can hear anything after four decades of Crazy Horse…

Probably thinks the high-pitched nasal whining noise in his ears is just his own voice.

Which brings us back to Pono, and Young's quest for better quality sound. In his book…

Samuel Scott

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 23:06:19 +1300

I'll check out Pono. I reckon I'd be keen on 88/24 files. Why not? Also I don't think there should be any issue with a mini headphone jack, as long as you have good connectors. Maybe it's all nonsense, but I'm quite happy to pursue the nonsense.

And good stuff…

Rich Lock

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 23:03:09 +1300

We don’t have enough Skrillex on the PAS music pages.

Not bad. For Skrillex.

Knife Party and Excision FTW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-IWRmpefzE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cavdv6D43sE

John Morton

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 22:58:20 +1300

When I was re-encoding my CDs to FLAC and trying to figure out what quality level to use for the vorbis encode to go on my phone, I tested out FLAC->vorbis versus FLAC->LAME mp3 320kbps->vorbis using ABX testing software.

Couldn't tell the difference.

Which isn't to say that transcoding artifacts…

Rich Lock

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 22:55:37 +1300

And re the whole Neil Young thing – amazed he can hear anything after four decades of Crazy Horse…

Probably thinks the high-pitched nasal whining noise in his ears is just his own voice.

Rich Lock

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 22:52:09 +1300

all this talk of sound stuff is why the public tune out of giving a crap about audio quality…. they just wanna hear the music, cue off the shelf consumer friendly (i anyone) devices that have taken off and them that haven’t

There's a scene in the film '24 hour…

Mark Thomas

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 20:28:06 +1300

I’ve been using whatever’s bundled into Media Monkey, which I suspect is FFmpeg

If you're using Mediamonkey Gold, it'll be using the latest LAME codec, which is a good thing.

Peter Johnston

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 20:18:14 +1300

Man, so many responses about the format and so few on the music! At a certain age, does one start meaning more than the other?

Anyway, back to the music.

I have high hopes for the Grayson Gilmour album – love the tracks I've heard so far. Will also check…

Hebe

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 20:00:01 +1300

I can't really see there being anything beyond a niche market at best for the Pono Player.

My 16yrold sons can't wait. They complain deeply about the tinny iPod touch sound, prefer records and hunt them out, and are hanging out for a decent digital sound player. There must be…

Rik

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:56:54 +1300

Stephen – my 6yo son likes Puddles, he's a bit Tom Waits for me, but the band Puddles is playing with (Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox) are awesome, so thanks for posting that link!

Stephen D. O'Hoy

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:19:41 +1300

Russell did a Media7 about comparing MP3s to higher quality audio to see if anyone could tell the difference. It's on YouTube somewhere. Sam Flynn-Scott, Peter Baker and I were on the panel.

I think Pono will struggle. The margins on digital music retail are very small. To release the…

TracyMac

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:02:31 +1300

And that’s interesting stuff about the encoder quality. I used to download the reference OGG (vorbis) encoder and use that when I was using CDex to rip my audio, but of late I’ve been using whatever’s bundled into Media Monkey, which I suspect is FFmpeg. Might explain why I’ve felt…

TracyMac

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:58:15 +1300

There’s a theory that brostep was invented because weeny laptop speakers couldn’t play the bass in proper dubstep.

I love it.

...And I went and stocked up with proper-like UK dubstep CDs when I was last in Auckland. I rip those into OGG for carting around, but I should really…

Paul Rowe

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:39:51 +1300

Where was Neil Young when cassettes were the Trojan horse for CDs destroying vinyl? Tapes had an absolutely shit sound compared to... just about everything.

me I love music.... and I've yet to find a audiophile who can honestly say the same, they are too obsessed with sound quality over…

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:36:50 +1300

Someone pointed me to this excellent, informed blog post, which basically says:

Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.

And nails it on the actual value of lossless.…

Simon Bennett

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:12:01 +1300

I love music too. For me the difference in appreciation between high resolution recordings and lossy files is akin to the difference between looking at a reproduction of a painting in a book, and taking in the real thing in a gallery.

bob daktari

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:05:51 +1300

all this talk of sound stuff is why the public tune out of giving a crap about audio quality.... they just wanna hear the music, cue off the shelf consumer friendly (i anyone) devices that have taken off and them that haven't

me I love music.... and I've yet to…

Moz

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:01:18 +1300

The difference between lossless and lossy? I've never done a side-by-side comparison so I could be just imagining it ..

I've done a bit, and specifically the bit where I encoded at 3 different settings and ABX'd them before settling on a value that was "sometimes I can tell", on…

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:47:53 +1300

My experience is that my external, USB DAC ($99-ish) with decent headphones is much better at home in the quiet than anything else I’m willing to shell out for, but around town or at work the cheap version of my headphones powered by my phone or desktop PC is good…

Jim Cathcart

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:22:41 +1300

That’s interesting. I bought one Onkyo receiver because it it was incredibly cheap for what it offered (like, $400 cheap) and then another one when I wanted a stereo for my office, and that was only $300 – cheaper than any purist stereo amplifier. They’re both powerful and well-featured amplifiers.…

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:21:40 +1300

Background.

That's a great piece of writing.

John Morton

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:21:15 +1300

While it might be true that MP3's psychoacoustic model was designed for inattentive, casual listeners in noisy environments, the last twenty or so years of development and tuning on, eg the LAME encoder as well as subsequent generations of codecs has been performed by highly attentive, trained audio engineers in…

Moz

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:17:00 +1300

Sidenote: Does it annoy anyone else when kickstarter is co-opted as an advertising medium where the people behind the products already have plenty of funds to make it happen?

Yes. Especially when, as here, the "kickstarter" is selling the product for more than RRP. The signature of some random numpty…

Moz

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:13:34 +1300

My hope is that this pushes a lot more music into lossless formats, so we're not stuck looking at HDAudio.com and pining. http://www.flyingnun.co.nz/‎ started selling FLAC a while ago much to my joy.

I've read a lot about his views on high fidelity audio – I still feel it's largely…

RaggedJoe

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:08:24 +1300

I recently added a DAC to one of my amps. Good, improvement if you listen properly.

Newbie question. How does streamed music (Pandora/Spotify) compare with Mp3/AAC etc? Sounds better to me, but I am no audiophile..

Konrad Kurta

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:04:38 +1300

Distributing audio for final listening purposes in 192/24 is ridiculous. Distributing for remixing/remastering/further processing, that may well make sense, particularly if the individual tracks (i.e. pre-mix) are distributed.

Why? Science. http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

If anything, 48kHz/24bit would be the sweet-spot at providing just a little more dynamic range (not that we don't…

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:02:11 +1300

Great post. After years working with Onkyo in Osaka, it’s encouraging to see that people still care and can express audio output with clarity. Onkyo external DACs and audio boards have gained cult-like status in Hong Kong and mainland China. Strangely, these devices have never been available outside Japan, except…

Stephen Judd

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:48:54 +1300

Background.

Stephen Judd

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:48:18 +1300

I'm just going to leave this here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmCJEehYtU

Jim Cathcart

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:16:40 +1300

Great post. After years working with Onkyo in Osaka, it's encouraging to see that people still care and can express audio output with clarity. Onkyo external DACs and audio boards have gained cult-like status in Hong Kong and mainland China. Strangely, these devices have never been available outside Japan, except…

JonathanM

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:02:26 +1300

Why? Science. http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

If anything, 48kHz/24bit would be the sweet-spot at providing just a little more dynamic range (not that we don't…

Mark Thomas

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:57:05 +1300

The “More barn!” story.

Hah

Mark Thomas

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:53:54 +1300

Anyway, apparently the advent of iTunes will kill this whole phenomenon.

(Or the increasing popularity of minimalist music like The XX, Lorde and James Blake)

Alan Perrott

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:53:21 +1300

speaking, well someone was, of Skrillex reminded me of this lot. anyway the Guardian locates them somewhere btwn him and Aqua...like totally, and it's got something to with chocolate. cute as a button on a corpse, a happy corpse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKqgE4BwAY

Mark Thomas

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:51:59 +1300

[At the risk of sounding even older and whiter than Neil Young...]

My biggest beef with music from the past ten years hasn't been mp3 compression, but dynamic range compression or "loudness" of music mastering. It's what makes a lot of modern pop music sound thrashy and tiring to listen…

Rich of Observationz

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:40:04 +1300

I'd love to see a comparison of how many people can tell an HD audio file from at 320kbps Mp3

That isn't really the issue (for me anyway). It's transcoding – if you ever want to go from MP3 to another lossy format (like Ogg Vorbis), then the quality will…

Konrad Kurta

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:39:33 +1300

Even after a good D/A converter, I reckon the difference is negligible.

To be fair, he has a long history of obsessing about audio fidelity.

The "More barn!" story.

Yeah, I've read a lot about his views on high fidelity audio – I still feel it's largely a pointless exercise.…

Peter Darlington

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:17:31 +1300

Thank you for filling the 2011-2015 PAS Skrillrex quota.

:-)
I'd have to be honest and say that it's mainly the Ragga Twins that does that tune for me. Although the video is fun too.

Peter Darlington

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:15:39 +1300

But I do quite like this one ...

Me too. Just proves that there's probably nothing that can't be improved by a little Jamaican ruffness.

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:07:47 +1300

He should stick to the ‘loudness wars’ if he’s concerned about the integrity of the original artisitic product.

To be fair, he has a long history of obsessing about audio fidelity.

The "More barn!" story.

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:05:50 +1300

Mp3 is highly dependent on the compression ratio – I’d love to see a comparison of how many people can tell an HD audio file from at 320kbps Mp3. I’d guess even dedicated audiophiles would struggle even with a great sound system.

Probably true – except for the part about…

Shaun Lott

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:05:43 +1300

Call me an old fart, but this is part of the reason I still like to buy CDs. You get the WAV file, in a permanent storage format. I can rip an MP3 or whatever lossless format I choose. And the files are demonstrably mine, not in limbo on someone…

Konrad Kurta

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:52:56 +1300

Mp3 is highly dependent on the compression ratio – I'd love to see a comparison of how many people can tell an HD audio file from at 320kbps Mp3. I'd guess even dedicated audiophiles would struggle even with a great sound system. As for Neil Young, I don't know why…

Simon Bennett

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:35:57 +1300

Yes, but I have quite a good destination device! ;-)

It's nice to see that at least a small subset of people care about music quality. Most people I know claim to hear no difference between a compressed file and lossless sound. To me it's like the difference between watching…

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:30:16 +1300

ETA: perhaps Skrillrex sounds better in lossless formats.

There’s a theory that brostep was invented because weeny laptop speakers couldn’t play the bass in proper dubstep.

But I do quite like this one ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGpzGu9Yp6Y

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:29:18 +1300

It’s a testament to his lifelong openness and ability to commit to other languages and cultures that he’s heading to Japan in this capacity.

Really nicely put.

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:26:14 +1300

We don’t have enough Skrillex on the PAS music pages.

We have rules about trolling on this site.

;-)

That's a lot of fun.

George Darroch

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:25:45 +1300

We don’t have enough Skrillex on the PAS music pages.

Thank you for filling the 2011-2015 PAS Skrillrex quota.

ETA: perhaps Skrillrex sounds better in lossless formats.

George Darroch

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:23:55 +1300

I do like the idea of that machine, and the design doesn't both me – presumably it's handbag portable, rather than pocket portable. However the limited memory will be a problem. We're used to large libraries. We're used to low quality, and we're no longer used to the tradeoff.

Sayonara…

Martin Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:22:28 +1300

Most devices are clunky and not fully realised in their first iteration. Give it a couple of gens and some better ID. The first iPod was pretty shit.

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:21:50 +1300

At the very least I’d want Airplay capability to stream the music around the house and into my main system via Apple TV.

The problem with that is that the digital to analog conversion then gets done at the destination device, not in the super-hi-fi player you've paid hundreds of…

Peter Darlington

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:21:19 +1300

We don't have enough Skrillex on the PAS music pages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LyOmZXJxas&feature=youtu.be

Peter Darlington

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:17:56 +1300

I don't think ya average music consumer/listener cares about the things Neil does... and the vast majority don't know who he is either... now if Dr Dre was behind it maybe people would be happy to shell out a big bunch of money on a music only player.

Yeh my…

Simon Bennett

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:08:19 +1300

I like the idea of a high-resolution version of iTunes (why can’t iTunes do it? I’d pay a premium), but the Pono device has no appeal for me. At the very least I’d want Airplay capability to stream the music around the house and into my main system via Apple…

bob daktari

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:06:59 +1300

everyones doing it....

Nirvana's Krist Novoselic Playing Lorde's "Royals" on Accordion

http://pitchfork.com/news/54325-heres-nirvanas-krist-novoselic-playing-lordes-royals-on-accordian/

Black Simon and Garfunkel, aka The Roots' Captain Kirk Douglas and Questlove, cover Lorde's "Royals."

http://boingboing.net/2014/03/13/black-simon-and-garfunkel-play.html

bob daktari

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:02:51 +1300

I'm with the rabid pack on the Pono – meh. If it wasn't for Young fronting this I doubt it would have gained any column inches nor kickstarter donations – and should I mention the name... double meh

Yes some people want higher quality music files and some of those…

Russell Brown

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:40:02 +1300

Ooops – nearly forgot. ‘Royals’ gets the kapa haka treatment from students at Lorde’s old school, performing at Polyfest. I'd like to hear the whole thing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNi77S8gcWY&list=PLMsHe5vD8mXN76Uqod2OqyLo30Fzl6Bdu

Public Address

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:40:02 +1300

Discussion from blog post.