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JFairfax posted:their DJ stuff seems to be a bit crappy, at least when it comes to build quality which is important for those things. My impression of that is that it's designed for the guy who's going to DJ his friend's wedding and maybe an event at his kid's school once or twice a year, and that it'll hold up fine for purposes like that.
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Mar 13, 2017 14:47
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Alan_Shore posted:Why is the PS1 held up as an amazing CD player but not the superior Sega Saturn? The PS1 had regular RCA jacks for audio and video on the back for the first few hardware revisions. All Sega Saturn units use a custom port design that merges them all together - the only way to get dedicated audio out is through modding the system to add such ports. So, that made the PS1 a "viable" option and when it perfectly plays back CDs (just like any freakin other CD player in existence I might add), some audiophile seeing their cousin play music CDs on it leads to the audiophile deciding it's the perfect CD player. And then you have stuff like this, where an audio equipment review guy who's probably never even heard of a Saturn gets told to try out the PS1 by people who already think it's God, and they get completely taken in like they do by their special cable or w/e: http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/708play/
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Apr 4, 2017 15:06
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Panty Saluter posted:and no one ever seemed to notice the video crosstalk buzz, which is PLAINLY audible in quiet passages Some of the PlayStation 1 audiophile idiots solve this by physically disconnecting the video output as part of their mods, which include putting a custom power supply to replace the default one, re-casing it in some gaudy monstrosity, etc. Others just claim that the crosstalk is actually a smoother soundscape that eases the digital harshness or whatever the gently caress.
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Apr 4, 2017 17:37
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Panty Saluter posted:Which makes sense if you just like to tinker with electronics - whatever, have fun. Well I mean, you end up with them doing this:
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Apr 4, 2017 17:44
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KozmoNaut posted:Here's a good one, about vibrations. A lot of people are just eternally fascinated by being able to change fonts and colors willy-nilly. Or they think it makes their posts stand out, which it does, but not in the way they probably wanted.
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Apr 7, 2017 18:05
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Jmcrofts posted:wait so... what does a headphone amp do? Real ones simply amplify the signal to be loud enough to be heard in headphones that might otherwise be too quiet. You also use them to provide a usable changing volume control to use regular headphones with a device that always outputs at a single volume level.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:10
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Jmcrofts posted:I run my headphones at like 30% volume and have never had a problem with them being too quiet. Am I just using lovely headphones? No, you're just using headphones that are well matched for the kind of audio sources you use. One example of a scenario where you'd need a headphone amp that came up in Games recently: there was a guy who wanted to use the audio output from his Xbox 360 directly with his headphones. However, the audio output from the console is at line level with no volume adjustment, so it was far too quiet to listen to and he didn't want a receiver or something to connect the console to first. So, the solution that works best for him is to simply slap a headphone amp in there to get volume control and volume loud enough to hear all around.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:51
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Neil Young is totally right that the fancy high resolution audio tracks shouldn't have ridic high prices compared to normal releases these days though. They should cost about the same as the normal releases, because they sound about the same and usually don't need special remastering.
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Apr 24, 2017 22:13
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:
The consequence is that now any company who wants to make software or hardware decoders for MP3 can do so without worrying about paying the licensing fees. So, you can expect a slight increase in MP3 usage among small time outfits that currently had to stick with either a free codec or one with lower licensing fees. It also means that it's a lot easier to get "truly free" MP3 support in many open source projects that required users to provide their own MP3-handling libraries or programs before. For instance, the popular open source audio editor Audacity currently doesn't support MP3 export in its default download. You need to specifically download LAME or a similar MP3 package from elsewhere to get the MP3 export functionality, presumably once the patent has fully run out the functionality will be fully incorporated to Audacity.
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May 15, 2017 14:56
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I like to have DVDs/Blu-Rays for shows and movies I really like, only because they still come with a bunch of extra footage and special features that are rarely included on streaming services. Of course, I'm immediately ripping those and storing them on a hard drive, because I don't like actually swapping discs around.
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May 23, 2017 16:54
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synthetik posted:Aren't the twisted pairs in a CAT5/6 cable actually twisted in specifically different lengths to achieve this very thing? I swear I remember reading about that in some class a lifetime ago. Each direct pair of wires, that is each pair where one carries a signal and is matched up with a wire carrying the exact opposite (you do this to make for a larger total signal over long ranges without having to use a lot of power) is twisted together at the same rate. Each successive pair is twisted at different lengths in order that pairs won't pick up on the same noise in the same way as another pair. This is the most common pattern of standard twistings, but there's no particular reason you need to use that specific thing, so long as you make the twists stay out of sync between pairs reliably. You're also allowed by standards to not even bother to twist the pairs for something like up to 10 meters at once, to meet needs like flat cables or simply cheaper cables, though obviously those cables will be more sensitive to local noise:
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Jul 3, 2017 22:48
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Combat Pretzel posted:EEVBlog took that amp apart, the tubes don't do anything useful except adding distortion. Well that's the only reason most people buy a tube "amp" in the first place, so it honestly fits the market.
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Jul 8, 2017 21:25
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I mean if you want things to sound just like they did at a certain time period, doing stuff like sourcing specific vintage tube equipment or sourcing matching spec parts and assembling new kit to the old schematics is going to get you that specific sound more accurately than "generic tube sound DSP #4959" being applied to your modern equipment. Like there's this recording studio in England, where the entire gimmick is that they replicate all the recording layout of a 1950s studio, with all the distortion and sometimes downright bad sound that would create, simply because the founders of it wondered if they could even do it, and were themselves in 50s-style revival bands: http://sugarraysvintagerecordings.co.uk/the-studio/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-scxybnp0 Nearly all of the main equipment there is from about 1955-1959 originally, obviously with burnt out tubes and the like replaced by identical spec stuff whenever possible. There's also some bits of 1960s and 1970s and even straight up modern equipment available in it as well, usually to simplify doing things like multi-track recording and mixing, though with the ability to stick to the 50s equipment. So like you can show up, record your track, and they'll give you it recorded lossless on an SD card if you need that. It's honestly a great example of where you really do want tubes, because you're not aiming in the least for high fidelity clean sound, it's as much about seeing if you can make your modern band work with the constraints of about 1958 as anything (and though they mostly do studio time for retro style bands, any sort of style is welcome to try to use the studio)
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Jul 10, 2017 16:20
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Some people only tried Bluetooth headphones in the bad old days when the phones would only put out phone-line-quality audio or only a little better, because of how older profiles worked, and simply never tried the newer standards and the headphones that go with. 
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Sep 12, 2017 15:25
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Malcolm XML posted:14kW wtf kind of home has 3 phase power coming in If I remember right, the average home in North America has ~20-24 kilowatt total supply coming into the house and the minimum allowed connection from the utility into a home built in the past like 60 or 70 years has been ~10-12 kilowatts. So a normal person could have a 240 volt high-amp service provided using the +120 and -120 lines coming into the house as one does for heavy appliances, have a really massive breaker fitted for that circuit, and try not to use anything else major in the house and run a 14 kilowatt thing. No need for three phase power. You would however be paying out the rear end for the properly licensed electricians, the materials, and the power company modifications to your service drop that would all be needed to have a legally allowed very high usage circuit built and run to such equipment. But then, dropping $100,000 on a 6 foot power cord is already nothing big to an audiophile, so it's easy to approve such spending!
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Oct 22, 2017 23:59
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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:What are you talking about? Mono is fine because this system is exclusively used to listen to AM radio??? They got digital stereo on AM these days
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Mar 3, 2018 01:55
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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:Now I need another rack You wouldn't want to miss any of that 40 kilobits a second digital quality, naturally.
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Mar 3, 2018 02:08
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Panty Saluter posted:who the hell sells used air filters? more importantly who is buying them (for non audio purposes)? i might not like a car much but im not about to roll the dice and munch the engine Well it does say it was from a garage sale, so it doesn't need to make sense. People put all sorts of poo poo up in them that probably shouldn't be used as anything more than something to stack things on, if that.
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Mar 23, 2018 01:11
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KozmoNaut posted:Well, we can say that the vast majority of people cannot hear above 16kHz* for musical content, because that's the most commonly used lowpass used in MP3 encoding, and it's been shown quite well that most people can barely even distinguish 128kbps LAME MP3 from uncompressed CD-quality audio. Modern versions of LAME sure but there was a good 10 years where 128 kbps mp3 sounded awful due to way the encoders used to work.
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May 3, 2018 17:59
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Proposal: a set of speakers with inbuilt circuitry that actively attempts to monitor the incoming audio to rearrange instruments temporally. Not sure whether we sell it to the audiophiles directly as an upgrade, or sell it to dealers/promotorers to be "normal" speakers they can test their fancy audiophile speaker against to prove their fancy speakers play sounds right. Maybe let's try for both..
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Jul 4, 2018 00:21
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This has the proper way to marker your CDs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THbKEXBk8X0 Endless Mike posted:Pretty sure you had to do that on some Sony-published CDs otherwise they'd install a rootkit on your computer. Nah the way with those was to either just not use them, or hold shift every time you inserted them.
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Nov 22, 2018 01:10
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Blue Footed Booby posted:It's 100% snake oil. That higher sample rate just gets you the ability to accurately reproduce frequencies that you can't hear. No, it also has very meager improvements in frequencies some people can hear. Now the way that MQA does things, a lot of that advantage which is mostly useful for literal audio research scenarios gets discarded to fit the MQA encoding into other data streams, as they do.
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Jan 4, 2019 12:27
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Hellequin posted:Old Sony stuff from the '70s has a good reputation for being fantastic quality and being crazy reliable. I've got a matched set of a Sony amp/receiver/speakers from 1975 and Sony turntable from '76 and they're great and sounds wonderful. Plus you can pick up a lot of this old stuff off of eBay or Craigslist for very reasonable prices. I think my entire hi-fi ran me $600 in total after some very minor repair/refurb costs. Japan was already the "cheap overseas Asian manufacturer" country of the 50s through mid 70s though, lol.
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Mar 12, 2019 15:42
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Proteus Jones posted:I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here? The accusation was that once everything moved off Japan we lost "quality affordable equipment". The point is Japan was already the "cheap junk" manufacturer of its day, so the accusation doesn't make sense. Also consumer audio equipment quality has only gone up over the years so it's bogus on that end too. You can get equipment that blows away any stuff from the 70s for cheap as hell in the modern world.
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Mar 12, 2019 21:03
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I've known quite a few people who ended up with XLR based home sound setups, just from scavenging equipment from gigs and dayjobs. 
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Apr 17, 2019 02:10
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:Hah, that's a bummer. It'd be cool to be able to, say, clean and scan a platter and have that converted into a digital file (I mean, I used to run the tech side of my dad's LP/cassette tape digitizing business in high school, and not having to do everything in realtime would have been a huge resource saver), but I can see where tracking with a no-contact method would be difficult. Still, if someone threw $200k at the problem... Scanning a record to make a clean audio file out of is already a thing that's been possible for many years. You only have to do it once is the thing, so you skip out on the issues you get with a laser player where you need to deep clean the record every time you want to play it. For that matter, with either some nice magnification or simply a very high quality scanner, you can scan in a CD and decode all its data since the pits and lands that encode are plainly visible - often discs that have been damaged in some way but haven't completely been damaged through to the actual data layer can have all the data recovered by a careful high quality scan. Both of these are somewhat awkward things to pull off and there isn't typically an easy ready-to-run program around, but various researchers and companies have the capabilities.
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Oct 22, 2019 23:41
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polyester concept posted:why do people want to digitize their old records? I can't imagine the average person has that many vinyl-only releases that have not already been available on CD or whatever other digital format for decades by this point. The only reason not to buy it on a new digital format is if your time is worthless. It's actually something of a pain in the rear end to get an official or pirate digital version of a lot of random stuff you wouldn't think would be hard to get. So if you already have the music you want to listen to on a record that's in good shape, and you wouldn't need to sit there through the whole play process just to get a digital copy, isn't it obvious why you'd want to?
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Oct 23, 2019 02:54
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Phanatic posted:I knew a guy in high school who had this record player that tray-loaded the album, like a big CD. And the needle tracked radially along the record, instead of swinging in an arc on a tone arm, which was supposed to give better sound quality because the needle was always presenting the same aspect to the groove. But the cool part was that it had a laser inside, to optically detect the space between songs and then you could skip from track to track by pressing a button, just like a CD. There were quite a number of those designs in the 70s and 80s, and a variant of that sort of needle mechanism was used for playback of the CED format of video discs (which used discs with a physical groove in them). I don't think they've been manufactured in large quantities since the 90s though. Some of the fanciest ones were capable of flipping the needle around so that both sides of a record could be played without the user having to remove the record and flip it over, such as the one featured in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oeTqAogMvA Naturally tho, in those dual side playing ones skipping on the traditional platter arrangement means the whole thing requires quite a bit more complexity all around and you certainly get more need for maintenence and repairs.
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Oct 30, 2019 00:47
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:How does the reverse side work? Is there some kind of tension on the needle to make sure it keeps the right connection to the groove? Sorry, that's probably in the video, but I'm on mobile and trying to puzzle out how you'd do that with physical contact involved. I know there are Laserdisc players with the laser capable of flipping onto a second carriage and reading the bottom side of the disc, and even that had technical limitations. Essentially in this player, you have the motorized tone arm assembly (needed to handle the track skip and arbitrary track order playback) mounted on an additional motorized assembly that can flip the needle portion over and then move the whole arm down to press up from the bottom instead of press down from the top. Works decently but means there's a ton more stuff to need repair over time.
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Oct 30, 2019 17:19
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BobHoward posted:Fishmech, you’re falling down on the job here, you didn’t bother to watch the video you yourself posted and have thus managed to avoid existing in your favorite posting state (being technically correct). It has two styluses and therefore two tone arms, one for each side, probably because it was way cheaper and more reliable to build that way than the Rube Goldberg idea you imagined. It’s still overcomplicated and bad, but not in that way. I watched it but it was like 6 months ago when it was originally posted, so I was going off memory.
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Oct 31, 2019 06:15
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