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Good “Schiit” at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest

Audio, Entertainment / By / / , , , , / 4 minutes of reading

Last weekend I was able to attend one day of the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, which is held here in the Denver Tech Center, not far from me, along with fellow MacinTech members Rick Hyman and Jon Flowers. I went through many of the vendor displays in the “CanJam” exhibit focused on Headphones and mobile/personal audio devices, and one of the most interesting things for me was from the Sennheiser booth. I have a set of Sennheiser HD600, which they had on display along with an HDVD 800, their $2,200 headphone amp, as well as an HD650, an HD800 and HD800S. What I noticed is that they were using balanced cables for all of them, where there are separate ground wires for each side, along with isolated, balanced amplifier modules. Even in the noisy exhibit tent, all three of us could hear a marked difference between their demo units and my headphones, which I had brought with me. Even with the same model headphones plugged into the same amp, but with the standard cable using a shared ground, there was a noticeable improvement in the clarity in the high-end, better control in the bass, and a more open “sound stage” with the balanced cable. Because the HD600 has a replaceable cable, it’s easy to upgrade to a four-wire balanced cable, and I found an “inexpensive” one from ZY for about $75 through Amazon.com. Sennheiser’s balanced cable is about $240, and “premium” cables go for about $330, which is more than I paid for the headphones! To use balanced headphones, though, […]

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Audiophile Headphones and High-Resolution Audio

Audio, Entertainment, Music / By / / , , , , / 8 minutes of reading

After we got the Bose Quiet Comfort 20i noise-canceling earbuds for Jeannette, I decided to sit down and compare them with my Bose Quiet Comfort 15 noise-canceling headphones, my Shure E3 in-ear monitors, and my Yamaha YHD-1 orthodymanic headphones. I was actually somewhat surprised by the differences between them, and I thought that they all sounded fairly good by themselves. I think that the Bose earbuds and headphones were very similar. I thought they my Shure E3 had better clarity, though the Yamaha sound was more open and natural, but lacked a little low-end. While researching the earbuds, I ran across numerous articles on high-resolution audio as well, which is loosely anything that is more than the 44.1KHz sample rate with 16-bit depth (16/44) used by CD recordings. While many of the articles proclaimed how 24/96 or 24/192 sounded so much better than the overly compressed 16/44 recordings. I also found a number of articles like this one proclaiming that HD audio is like the modern-day equivalent “snake oil” marketing hype like tubes vs. transistors or oxygen-free speaker cables… Kirk McElhearn points out that at 16-bit, you can record up to 65K volume levels, and that 44KHz is the minimum sample rate to capture frequencies up to 20KHz, the standard for high-fidelity audio. If you think back to the time when we went from 256 colors, to 65K colors to 16.7M colors, the difference was dramatic, with 16.7M colors more life-like and photo-realistic. While we were mostly content with 65K colors, and probably can’t detect all 16.7M colors, the optimal color bit-depth probably lies somewhere in between

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Noise-Cancelling Headphones

Audio, Entertainment, Music / By / / / 3 minutes of reading

Jeannette’s office is being remodeled, and will be moving to more “modern” open, low-walled cubicles. She’s already worried about the noise distraction, so I’ve been looking into noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds for her. Since the dawn of time (or as long as they have been in business) I would say that I’ve not been a fan of Bose. Having worked in an audio shop while in college, we did some repairs to some of the original Bose 901 “direct/reflecting” speakers, which appears to be an array of 4″ paper cone drivers like you would find in a clock radio… While the reflecting concept was interesting, they didn’t seem to have a very full range. I preferred more open systems like the Magnaplanar or a time-phased array speaker like the Dahlquist DQ-10, upon which my home-built speakers are based. I have an older pair of Yamaha YHD-1 orthodymanic headphones, which are open back, and have a nice airy sound. However, since they are open back, they aren’t good at blocking ambient noises! When I decided that I needed noise-canceling headphones years ago, I bought a set of the original Bose Quiet Comforts, which I really liked. The sound wasn’t perfect from an audiophile perspective, but the noise-cancelling worked noticeably better than any others that I tried. After using those for several years, the sound on one side became intermittent, but I couldn’t tell if it was the cable or the electronics… When I was moving into our new open office building a couple of years ago, with low walled cubicles,

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What Cables Should Cost

Audio, Computers, Mobile / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

Since my son Eric has gone to college, and taken his Sony PS3 with him, I didn’t have any way to watch Blu-Ray movies any more. While Christmas shopping, I realized that Walmart had quite a few Blu-Ray movies priced as low as $8 each, nearly the same price for the same movie on DVD. I decided that it was time to buy a Blu-Ray player. After reading a few reviews, and shopping around a bit, I found a decent deal on a Sony BDP-S370 on sale at Sears. When I hooked it up, I realized that I was going to need another HDMI cable to get the full resolution. I had my previous DVD player hooked up using a Component Video cable, but that seems to only support up to 1080i, not 1080p that I can get using HDMI. I checked the prices on the HDMI cables at Walmart when I picked up a few Blu-Ray movies, and found their best deal was a 6-foot HDMI cable from Vizio for $28. Instead, I’ve ordered online from Monoprice. They have 6-foot HDMI cables for about $3 each. So I ordered 4 of them, in different colors, so that I can tell them apart when I hook things up. I also found they had a Component Video cable for Melissa’s WII for about $3.30, and one with Composite and S-Video for $2.72. Even with the $7.75 or so for shipping, the total for the order came to only $26. So I saved a couple of bucks over Walmart’s cheapest price, but I’m getting 6 cables

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