Posts by Russell Brown
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Capture: One picture of you, and no more, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Also, my hair is super.
+1
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Moz,
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 enough.
Where I first noticed the difference was trying to DJ off my iPad, alongside vinyl. The gulf between digital files and records through a PA was just embarrassing. And it really did seem to go away when I added the DAC. WAV files do seem to sound better in that setting too.
I'm also pretty clear on the fact that AirPlaying to my Onkyo receiver sounds a lot better than running a lead out of the headphone port.
The difference between lossless and lossy? I've never done a side-by-side comparison so I could be just imagining it ...
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Background.
That's a great piece of writing.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
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 in the grey market.
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.
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to Steve Withers,
Ask Jeeves was pretty good until they started ranking paid-links ahead of the links one might be looking for. Several search engines went that way.
My memory is that most search engines had caved in to this practice and thus were becoming less and less useful.
Google resisted and was then able to persist. Certainly this is why I kept using Google. They provided results we wanted.
Didn't they just! I recall it seeming a little like magic.
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My grandfather holding me at the first place I lived, in Point Howard.
He's gone but he remains very important to my sense of identity. I wrote about him here.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Konrad Kurta,
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.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Konrad Kurta,
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 the DAC. Hooking things up so your conversion is done on a better device definitely makes a difference.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to George Darroch,
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 ...
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to George Darroch,
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.
