New room set up - ProAc D18 saga continues

jokiarch wrote:

drife wrote:hmm.... elhefe's quiet. maybe he's hired Cikgu Joki to land the mystic touch?

Oye.. Drife, I not Cik-gu, I batang lah. So my mystic touch won't help
JoKi

You're still a cikgu with batanglah. when landed the mystic touch the batang emits jitters and high resonance. when this energy is transfered to the table, it goes "tak, tak, tak". now that's good tonal quality. female audiophiles love it

you're right Wong. its all about convenience with music/mtv "on demand". Ipads or HTPCs, you'd probably sacrifice a bit of sound quality but in return you get video (when you're bored staring at the audiophile's padded/blank wall).

after a hard day's work these things put a smile on my face.
1) YoutubeHD
2) Legends of Jazz DVD etc etc etc
3) Tons of lossless audio files
4) talking smack here in HF4S

all done through a cheap old PC.

Yah, I think many will tend to agree convenience can be a very strong point. Myself I have always been planning to maintain more than 1 system, the other a much more modestly priced one purely based on convenience. Thus the two kind of exhibits I tend to spend lots of time with at the KLAVS - the high-ends and the "affordable-ends" !

YouTube is a god-send in many ways because search them for almost any music and we tend to find someone has uploaded one. Sometimes we may want to do some exercise like threadmill or maybe do some writing or even some work at home and some music helps things a lot. At one time I was thinking to use tube amplification to soothe the supposed harshness of MP3 but then I realized I am going around in circles chasing my tail because with a tube amp I will start to agonize over tube selection, warm-up times, and so forth. It doesn't make sense anymore than isn't it ?

2nd and 3rd system very important. But I seldom will purchase a brand new item to build up the 2nd system. Its basically will come from my previous main system. Currently, I have my EPOS M12.2, Marantz CD6000+Airport Express + ArCAM rDAC from previous set up (except the rDAC, I cheated there hehehe). Now just waiting for the X-A1 and X-A50 to be passed onto this set up once I get (or if I get) a new amp for the ProAc set up.

WongKN wrote:Yah, I think many will tend to agree convenience can be a very strong point. Myself I have always been planning to maintain more than 1 system, the other a much more modestly priced one purely based on convenience. Thus the two kind of exhibits I tend to spend lots of time with at the KLAVS - the high-ends and the "affordable-ends" !

YouTube is a god-send in many ways because search them for almost any music and we tend to find someone has uploaded one. Sometimes we may want to do some exercise like threadmill or maybe do some writing or even some work at home and some music helps things a lot. At one time I was thinking to use tube amplification to soothe the supposed harshness of MP3 but then I realized I am going around in circles chasing my tail because with a tube amp I will start to agonize over tube selection, warm-up times, and so forth. It doesn't make sense anymore than isn't it ?

Yes, thats the trap if you try to stll get the best SQ on the 2nd and 3rd system. Better stick to mini compo or walkman

Ah, the ever dependable mini-compo. Don't write them off totally, some of the mini-mini compos can entertain surprisingly well. For me, I find the key is expectations, because they are so cheap and I totally don't expect anything from them, they can be surprisingly entertaining. Just like how we can enjoy radio when driving...

Actually I have an Arcam pre-power lying around so I am already set on the amp front. It is a pity I bought my Blu-Ray player too early, before the SONY S370 came out. For speakers, there is always H4S 'for-sale' forum !!

Believe it or not, mini compo can sometimes be a pleaure to use especially listening to radio. I find that the analogue tuner found on mini compos gives better reception than the digital ones.

If I cant find a better pre power amp for the ProAcs, then maybe I will get a new amp for the EPOS. Looking at Creek Evo 2. Few more days to 2011.

with digital harshness i tend to lean towards tubes or a reserved sounding system (yes there is a purpose for reserved sounding speakers here). they open up when you crank up the volume. just nice and not too "in your face" digital glare...

a budget hybrid amp is good. that way there's no expensive power tubes to tie your a$$ down. budget preamp tubes are so cheap and long lasting you could leave them on for hours w/out getting the "$$$ burning" feeling.

Ah, yet another analog vs digital war-cloud is looming in the horizon !!

I tend to think is has more to do with the antenna. I actually use one of those signal boosters for TV reception, then use a T-joint to hook up both my plasma and tuner and the tuner gets 80% signal strength ! It's a digital Rotel tuner.

Now, you have probably already blew tons of money on the house rennovations and now you are talking about buying a new amp. Life must be treating you well, good for you man.

drife wrote:with digital harshness i tend to lean towards tubes or a reserved sounding system (yes there is a purpose for reserved sounding speakers here). they open up when you crank up the volume. just nice and not too "in your face" digital glare...

a budget hybrid amp is good. that way there's no expensive power tubes to tie your a$$ down. budget preamp tubes are so cheap and long lasting you could leave them on for hours w/out getting the "$$$ burning" feeling.

I actually went a slightly different approach. I once used a California Audio Labs DAC which has a tubed output stage. It was quite nice sounding but unfortunately as it was used in my main system, I tend to spend more time with the LPs.

analog vs digital? no man. its a marriage. a match made in heaven. tubes do compliment rough sounding computer music.

plus, it helps to hide its flaws too

WongKN wrote:Ah, yet another analog vs digital war-cloud is looming in the horizon !!

I tend to think is has more to do with the antenna. I actually use one of those signal boosters for TV reception, then use a T-joint to hook up both my plasma and tuner and the tuner gets 80% signal strength ! It's a digital Rotel tuner.

Now, you have probably already blew tons of money on the house rennovations and now you are talking about buying a new amp. Life must be treating you well, good for you man.

Waaahh WongKN, as if you read my mind.

On my pursue to become an engineer, I always experiment stuff on radios, amps etc. with no knowledge and money hahaha. And one of the things I did was to attach the antenna of the mini compo a wire string. And this wire string I attach to another string that I erected across my window ceiling from one corner to the other corner. Sometimes can get Thai station some more hahahah.

Cant complaint too much on life. I did my time in the first part of my career (most of the time either I am in the middle of the sea, or jungle, or desert or swamp with no social life and just a transistor radio). Get as much dough as possible. Only now after more than 10 years in the oilfield, I start to enjoy the dough. Hehehehe.

there're budget tubed DACs. just have to hunt around.

for those who're not willing to spend on a tubed DAC. i believe it cannot get any cheaper than this. don't know how it sounds or if it really works. but anyway...

drife wrote:there're budget tubed DACs. just have to hunt around.

for those who're not willing to spend on a tubed DAC. i believe it cannot get any cheaper than this. don't know how it sounds or if it really works. but anyway...

Aaaaahhh I remember the days where I hang out a lot at the electronics shops along Jalan Pudu. Buying LEDs, transistors, resistance, cheap red and black wire etc.

Recently I heard this hilarious rap song from a Hong Kong band, about the life of the common working people. The song was a constant 'tar kard, tar kard' (cantonese for punch card, i.e. get your attendance card punched) with a commentary on the kind of stunts normally pulled by us common working folks on a slow day (ular at the pantry to waste some time away for e.g. ).

To be honest, I can't really see myself putting this kind of music on the serious main system, somehow the mood seems to be in conflict. But put that into the background when reading a book or newspaper or simply spending some time relaxing with the family and I can see the entertainment value shooting up by orders of magnitude. I can still hear the song now "tar kard, tar kard....."

BTW, anyone knows the name of the band and the song ?

elhefe wrote:

drife wrote:there're budget tubed DACs. just have to hunt around.

for those who're not willing to spend on a tubed DAC. i believe it cannot get any cheaper than this. don't know how it sounds or if it really works. but anyway...

Aaaaahhh I remember the days where I hang out a lot at the electronics shops along Jalan Pudu. Buying LEDs, transistors, resistance, cheap red and black wire etc.

yeah. the things that diy freaks do. let's just hope that the fella's soundcard works and his pc doesn't cook . then we can ask him for schematics and get our local tv repair guy to solder. haaaaaa

WongKN wrote:Hmmm.... for some time already I was told that MP3 at data rate of 352kbps is very near to CD so I am curious. The convenience of this method of playing music makes a lot of sense for the secondary systems, you know as background music or even a 2nd or 3rd system for a quick relaxation when it doesn't make sense to power up the main systems and so forth, exactly as your example. Apparently the higher data-rate allows the MP3 to get to near lossless decompression. So in a simpler system, we actually might not be able to tell, or don't really bother about the loss of sound quality. If you ever have a chance to try a low-compression (high data rate) MP3, please let me know.

320Kbps, (not 352) is the common high-Q MP3 bitrate.

But bitrate is not the only thing that determines the MP3 quality. More critical is the transcoding & compression algorithm that decides how best to compress from the original WAV or RAW CD source into an MP3. There is this encoder called LAME thats supposedly the best so far for quality, when compared to other encoders outputting the same bitrate MP3 file.

Once the bitrate for the MP3 file has been decided, then its only a matter of streaming this file across from one device to another device. Then the end-device will decode the MP3 file and then subsequently output back either SPDIF, or line-level analogue, or in the case of Meridian active speakers, the DAC & amp is fused into the speaker system.


Most Internet Radio stations' streams are using 128Kbps MP3 and when played back via simple decent hifi system (like Audiolab, Cyrus, Marantz class), the poor sound quality of MP3 is quite obvious already.

Good info mugen.

Whatever it is, for some music-lovers like me for e.g., I cannot get away from not only CD but also MP3. For e.g., the last song by Dan Fogelberg that was released was only available as MP3 download. Basically after Dan died from cancer, his widow released this song specially written by Dan for her on one of the birthdays when Dan needed to be away on a concert tour. She wrote that she received a bunch of beautiful flowers and a recording of this song "Sometimes a song" specially written just for her. Ths song is one of the slow mushy love-song but with a very very nice tune. It was her private collection but eventually in support of the cause for cancer, she released it on chargeable MP3 download and appealed to Dan Fogelberg fans to donate to download the song, with all proceeds going over to charity.

This song received lots of airplay over the radio and till today it is still only available as MP3 download, though I think some people has already uploaded it onto youtube. No CD or any other alternative medium is available the last time I checked.

Of course the wisdom of adopting a medium just for one song can be questionable. On the other hand, the wisdom of adopting a variety of medium, all playing at their own level and allowed to deliver their best situation can make good sense. Again, I think the important thing is to understand the limitation of each medium, accept their strengths and weaknesses compared to others, as long as in the end, most importantly, we get to play the music that we want. I know this message is probably not clear before but this is basically my approach. Takes time to get there of course.

Sorry, just found out that it was eventually released in the CD "Love in Time".

Just wanted to correct the error....

Mugen,

On your explanation of mp3, does it apply to m4a lossless as well?

.m4a could be both lossy or lossless.
If lossy, it adopts the "AAC" advanced audio coding" that is suppose to give better quality vs. MP3 at the same bitrates. I haven't done any critical tests between mp3 vs. m4a and really determined if either is superior over or not. Coz frankly, most of the "lossy" music i have personally are already of some degraded quality so i just enjoy them per se and not for any critical listening.


In the case of Apple's implementation, if the original digital source is encoded in "Apple Lossless" format, it still uses the .m4a file extension but it can then be assumed that transcoding from WAV to Apple-Lossless and back and forth 100x should yield no loss in quality whatsoever. The whole idea of a loss-less format is such that it will preserve everything bit-for-bit. And they apply only "packaging compression" (like similar RAR, LZH, ZIP, tar, formats). The original information payload is always faithfully maintained.




But of course, if you transcode between any format involving a lossy medium, there will always be quality degradation in each conversion step. This is because the payload itself has been stripped down and some "approximations" are used to represent the original information with much less bit resolutions.

A good example is JPEG photo file compression. There will always be some quality loss in a .JPG file each time its transcoded from an original RAW , TIFF, or BMP (bitmap) picture file.

Mugen,

I used to rip all my CDs to MP3 at 192Kbps and then got to know that Apple Lossless m4a was a better option for SQ. What is m4a lossles bitrate then?

If its not much better than 192Kbps MP3s, better stick to MP3 then, smaller file size. For m4a lossless, one song its about 30 MB !!!!

Anytime you compare something with a file extension ending with 'peg' or 'pg'-something (NOT those PG-13 tags you see in movies OK ??!!), like jpeg, mpeg, mp3, etc you are looking at lower fidelity/quality almost all of the time compared to lossless implementations like m4a. These 'peg' implementations are meant for small file sizes, constrained transfer rates and other considerations.

There are a number of lossless standards in the market now and supporters of each camp are already starting to fight. There have been disparaging remarks made about FLAC files for e.g., yet another lossless file format. Then SONY invented SACD and DSD but people now say DSD not so good. But it is a lossless format capable of 24/192kHz.

This is what I meant when I said I wish everyone will just skip all the hype and technobabble and get on with the business. Like the chinese saying, all these high-res and especially audiophile new implementations are like a loose pile of sand, often each going their own way and with their own personal agenda. The end result is the manufacturers do not see any potential and do not see us seriously. Without their involvement, we, the audiophile consumers really cannot get much headway.

Back to MP3. When you rip your CDs to MP3, have you tried the higher rates ?

That will be my next attempt WongKN. I will rip the same CD, one in m4a and one in MP3 at 320Kbps. Will see whether I can hear any difference.

For 192 MP3 and m4a, on the system, there is a difference in output volume. MP3 volume seems to 'quiter' than m4a at the same level on the volume knob.

elhefe wrote:Mugen,

I used to rip all my CDs to MP3 at 192Kbps and then got to know that Apple Lossless m4a was a better option for SQ. What is m4a lossles bitrate then?

If its not much better than 192Kbps MP3s, better stick to MP3 then, smaller file size. For m4a lossless, one song its about 30 MB !!!!

m4a lossless would be the same bitrate as a WAV or CDDA audio file. Means you're doing 16bits, at 44.1Khz , so its 16 X 44100 = 705Kbps per channel.
So a typical stereo stream would be approx 1.4Mbps, not taking into account some signaling & protocol overheads.

So technically speaking, m4a lossles is superior then MP3, correct? Whether its sounds better or not, that is subjective I suppose.

If the criteria is sound quality, then lossless is obviously superior to any lossy format.

if the criteria is storage efficiency & compactness, lossless is definitely inferior to lossy (ie MP3).

So it really depends on what you're looking for. If u wanna take your music with you on the go and enjoy it on the airplane or for long roadtrips, you wont be able to pack as much lossless songs compared to mp3 songs.

If you wanna do serious listening at home, you don't need to rip music into lossless either, just play the original CD and you're good to go already.

Personally, I still haven't figured out where does lossless really fit it, unless you're doing pro studio work or some shit with sound editing and stuff.


I know this one guy who's a complete lazy ass, (yes, total lazy ass) who just wants to rip his entire collection of CDs into a HDD media player and then play everything from this one massive digital library. This is really pushing the term "lazy ass" into new frontiers already.
IMO of course.

Dear Sifu,

anyone has Pro Ac Responce 1.5 or 1.8 for sale..

Pls pm me..

Rgds,

Terence

Yesterday I bought a few new CDs and did this experiment.

For the CD Bistro Affair by Beverlyn Khoo, I ripped to copies:

1. Apple Lossless (m4a)
2. MP3 (320kbps stereo bit rate at 48kHz sampling rate)

Transferred it to my iPhone4 and connected it to my hifi set up.

Non technical explanation - there is a different in sound to my ears. First of all, the volume. At the same 10 o'clock volume know on my amp, the MP3 sounds louder. Whether the SQ is better or not, cant really tell the different.

File size, the MP3 still still smaller than m4a. The MP3 takes up about 8 to 12 MB but the m4a takes up about 15 to 25 MB.

aaaannnd the 2011 upgraditis sickness kicked in. Currently on home demo, MF M3i and M6i amplifier. Just brought back last night. M3i on 70 wpc and the latter on 200 wpc. For this week, will be listening to M3i first.
Hook it up last night. Now have to forego bi amping for a while as there is no matching power amp available.

The m3i came in a very lavish presentation. Wrapped in a black velvet bag and a pair of white gloves was provided together with a static cleaning cloth.

Pictures of unpacking below. Comment on SQ, maybe tonight heheheh.

elhefe wrote:So technically speaking, m4a lossles is superior then MP3, correct? Whether its sounds better or not, that is subjective I suppose.

Do u rip ur music in the uncompressed format like AIFF? Currently i rip all of my CDs into AIFF format.

dynon wrote:

elhefe wrote:So technically speaking, m4a lossles is superior then MP3, correct? Whether its sounds better or not, that is subjective I suppose.

Do u rip ur music in the uncompressed format like AIFF? Currently i rip all of my CDs into AIFF format.

Never tried AIFF. In your experience, does it sound different compared to m4a or 320 kbps MP3?

elhefe wrote:

dynon wrote:

elhefe wrote:So technically speaking, m4a lossles is superior then MP3, correct? Whether its sounds better or not, that is subjective I suppose.

Do u rip ur music in the uncompressed format like AIFF? Currently i rip all of my CDs into AIFF format.

Never tried AIFF. In your experience, does it sound different compared to m4a or 320 kbps MP3?

Yeah i played through my iPod classic. The AIFF is definitely better than 320kbps mp3.