BillD

Well, most of the issue with SACD is ultrasonic. I tend to agree that DVD-A sounds better to me. But I can't hear much over 15 kHz anymore. What could be an issue with ultrasonic noise is heating up your tweeters, causing them to be inaccurate in the audible band. Makes me think that having an ultrasonic filter might not be a bad idea (remember the made-up Rane spec sheet for some device that had an ultraviolet filter?)

Well, ours was a little different, but I got the free money too. You could "volunteer" to be downsized when there was a Lack of Work action about to be taken and then. That's what I did. You avoided the embarassment of getting called in and told, and the orientation meetings, etc. They threw you a retirement party instead of having to leave persona non grata. What you got was a week of pay for every year worked as a lump sum, plus you could collect unemployment and then retire and start collecting your pension (yes, we had one that was frozen some years back, but I did qualify. Not much, but between a grand and two a month). Because of health issues (ESRD) I was able to qualify for disability almost immediately after I retired. So, with my wife working at Mayo Clinic (I opted out of my work insurance to be covered by hers), I was all set. She's now retired from Mayo, and we have her retiree benefits as well as my being on Medicare because of disability.

Ed, that was how it was at my work before I retired. I had an office, but the cube farm was so quiet, I thought I was alone in the building most of the time. Spooky. I think it was one of the factors that made me throw in the towel early. At least I could retire with some dignity rather than being "downsized".

I've never liked closed backs since the Koss Pro 4AAs I had for years. My ears would sweat, but to drown out noisy co-workers, it is the way to go. I now have AKG 701s which let my ears breathe a little.

You did good, Balok =d>

You guys are cheating. You aren't supposed to inspect the element, you're just supposed to know.

Well, back in the day, I could hear the 19kHz pilot tone on FM if it wasn't notched out. No more. Kids are using ringtones up there so teachers can't hear when their phones go off to tell them they have a message.

I found this online, which would indicate that instruments do indeed make those low notes.

Voice of the Theater?

It's really odd about time management in HT setups. The Oppo lets you set distances (for 8 channel output), but it demands that all speaker pairs are equidistant from the listener, and that each pair is < the distance to your mains. You know how the Sunfire works, which is a little more flexible.

How are you going to have those subs "catch up" with the rest of your system — put in a variable delay box between your preamp outs and power amp ins?

What does it say on the back of the tweeter. Is it SD-13?

I'm about the same as Balok

I think vinyl went to shit when Columbia started producing the records for others . I belonged to Columbia Record Club, and the stuff I got in the mail was absolute crap if it had the Columbia label on it.

Rich, aren't you in the process of building one that size?

Perry, where in Arizona? Does the guy make center speakers? Cuanto cuesta? Maybe it's THIS GUY?

If you eliminated all those lossy formats altogether, it would be a step in the right direction. Who's to say that "oh, those bits aren't that important, anyway".

Well, that's why we sample PCM at 192kHz (or, on CDs 44.1kHz). Each sample is 16 to 24 bits long. There is a reason that modern DACs are going to 24/192. DSD uses 1-bit samples at 64 times the 44.1kHz rage (2.8224MHz).

Someone also needs a capacitor or inductor on that output. Maybe a tube buffer.

That, and the music.

Well, I'm a neutral party in all this. I've digitized all of my vinyl (24-bit 96kHz WAV) and converted it to Apple Lossless, and it sounds just like the vinyl to me (even with the clicks and pops I didn't process out). This would indicate to me that the real culprit in the CD sound is the engineer behind the console. Surely there were bad LPs made through poor mixdowns, but maybe not as many as there are CDs. Getting the most out of the vinyl medium was a craft, whereas there is little craft in making CDs (just make sure you don't clip, or overflow in digital terms). New vinyl releases are being meticulously made, also. And SACDs (and DVD-As) require a lot of attention because the medium is more expensive, and the artist/manufacturer decided that the work was worthy of the medium - especially if it's 5.1 or better. For me, I'm glad the digital medium came along, especially now that sample rates and word lengths are up. The convenience of having my entire music library on a computer connected to my music system is great.

Because all we can get on vinyl is what microphones (or other forms of pickups) pick up, and they don't have infinite frequency response (some of the best do get to 20kHz), all we're gonna get on vinyl is that. Now, what we get off the record might be something else altogether. Harmonics created by the needle in groove, etc. could influence what we hear, but it wasn't put on the record. The same is true with digital. Everything needs to be converted to digital from some pickup. The limits of that pickup are what we'll get. Digital playback will not "add" anything (except jitter), like a needle in groove could add useful harmonics (and rumble and other bad stuff).

Thanks for that, Mark. Interesting read. I myself have wondered about the efficacy of USB as a transport mechanism, but always told myself that it has to be better than S/PDIF (especially through TOSLINK). I know that Firewire (IEEE 1394) can transmit without CPU interference (it gets a buffer address and just streams to it), but I don't think that's really the issue (and Apple's latest product omitted Firewire connections — what's up with that?). It's the asynchronous nature of USB that worries me. We went away from parallel interfaces because clocks got better and we could deal with serial bit streams as good as (and cheaper than) word width data. Thus the demise of IDE (PATA) and Parallel printer ports (ECP+EEP). Perhaps the dominant transfer mechanism in the future will be eSATA, but the jury is still out on that one.

As I said, I have. My rationale for this is that the disk is actually written (burned with a laser), not stamped. There are other possibilities, too, that I do believe come into play. Unlike the popular myth that error correction just "guesses" at what is right if it can't read a section of a disk, most algorithms just stop at that point and declare the disk damaged and unreadable. Good error correction techniques always get the data bit-perfect through various means, alternate tracks, error-correction codes on the data, redundancy, etc. A dubbing machine will buffer that information into memory (or if you're using a computer, into zeros and ones, first into memory then onto disk). Burning reads this information and re-creates the disk with a laser onto a hard surface, not stamped into mush and allowed to cool. I think the better defined edges of burned CDs are what make them sound better. This could be total bullshit, but it's my rationale.

Somebody with younger ears than mine that can hear over 15kHz. Which side of that Latino S&M queen were you on? :ooo