Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

We're SE residents now. I WOULD LOVE to.

Need 25m of speaker cable to install home cinema gubbins. Any suggestions? Currently looking at Van Damme hi-fi ofc 2.5 mm cable.

http://www.worldwidemusic.co.uk/van-damme-hifi-series-studio-grade-speaker-cable-25mm-1052-p.asp

Or should I just get whatever is cheapest at Richer Sounds?

This is well reviewed for the price https://www.studiospares.com/Cables-Leads/Cable-Speaker/Speaker-Cable-2X2.5mm_548320.htm Bear in mind though that it's a bit thicker than your average cable so you need a decent gap to hide it in.

It's in a new extension, so would be fitted in the ceiling joists.

I have an idea of what the future of a digital HiFi should look like.

At the moment, most of us using digital files are either doing:

1. Locally owned files are on a NAS, some type of box (Sonos, Squeezebox, etc) to play the files, and some kind of app (or physical accessory) for the remote control.
   
2. Spotify/Google Play/etc streamed to tablet/phone and either directly wired to a HiFi or wirelessly cast to AirPlay or some device connected to the HiFi.
   
   

The disadvantage to the first scenario is the physical ownership and management of the NAS, and the clunkiness of the remote apps. The advantage is the sound quality, usually losless files and a great DAC.

The disadvantage to the second scenario is the crap DAC, and the fact that audio files go via pointless middleman device (phone/tablet) and is dependant on that device to carry on playing. The only advantage is convenience of use.

I basically imagine something that is the hybrid of both of those, that the HiFi of the future has these features:

1. Cloud storage for owned files, i.e. FLAC files - You own this cloud storage, not a 3rd party
   
2. A network connected device with a great DAC attached to the HiFi
   
3. An app that is on the phone and acts as the remote
   
   

The app in question should work against an index of the cloud stored files, as well as allowing you to access anything via Spotify/Google Play/etc.

If you own a file, and have the lossless version, it would play that... otherwise it would play the highest quality source it can find via streaming.

The hardware near the stereo could be a commodity PC or even a Raspberry Pi... it would be low power and fanless, and it would just play whatever you wanted it to. It would have some space for a local cache, enough to store about 20 albums lossless... i.e. you could cache locally a whole playlist for a party, and instantly playback any album you have played recently.

The closest the market currently has to this is the Sonos Controller paired with Google Play Music.

But... Sonos doesn't know how to do cloud storage + cache, and both the Sonos and Google Play are capped on the number of tracks they can handle (65k and 20k respectively), and finally Google Play doesn't actually store FLACs it downsamples to MP3 or just gives you someone else's MP3 to de-duplicate.

So we're actually not at all close to having the ideal digital HiFI.

I am a little curious about this though, and might see if I can hack something up at some point. It seems obvious to me that this is how it should be. A full network audio system, which embraces lossless and owned media, and yet makes subscription sources fully available.

Do share if you do hack something together - I would be very interested (and basically the same for video at some point).

It may be a while, I'll be hacking Microcosm in the evenings for a few months yet. Perhaps this is a Christmas project.

Actually I see that a lot of companies have also glimpsed this future and are calling such devices "Network DAC" or "Media DAC".

They've got it wrong though, they're obsessing about the hardware when in fact once you have a decent DAC chip (which could just be on a pluggable sound card) all you need is commodity hardware.

They should be obsessing about the software instead. People buy convenience, and the software needs to just work and not require horrible third party software to function (I'm looking at you Twonky).

Google play music doesn't have a public api, annouingly, which is holding this kind of thing back. Whilst Spotify is the only api player in town I think it is styfling innovation.

Startup time! I'll invest

Alternatively, a spotify that could manage local files. The app has gotten better with time, but it still lacks the ability to handle a big music 'library', or rather, a large amount of playlists as the setup is now. If it could do that, and also play local files (but not necessarily on the device your holding) we'd be a long way there?

yep - please share, dk.

we are about to renovate our living room, which will mean that i need to find a solution to the imac/router/amp no longer being connected.

Infact to appeal to real audiophiles you don't want a builtin DAC - just a digital out which they can then plug into their very expensive DAC....

A Chromecast I guess matches part of that. Has a digital out which plugs directly into your amp, nice easy interface and blends your personal library with the Google Play one. As you say though, it downgrades FLAC to 320kbps MP3 and can only cope with 20k tracks.

I have a feeling there is some kind of Raspberry Pi project already out there which aimed for something similar but can't remember what it's called or how far it's got.

This is very interesting - I've been thinking about how to do just this thing but seem to get always get blocked at some point.

Ideal scenario is the ability to play and control:
Locally, or cloud stored lossless files (FLAC)
Large onboard storage.
I do want a built-in high quality DAC - with a digital output to bypass if you need.
And most importantly is good, simple software.
Must be controlled via, smartphone/tablet app or laptop/pc via wi-fi network.
The software should be able to simply organise music - I'm not interested in smart playlists, or recent downloads or anything like that. Just, Artist/Album/Title and the ability to create your own lists if needed. Just basic, bare minimum controls. Also can handle any file type.

I suppose you could plug in compatibility for streaming services but there's too many, they all have limited selections or not what I want etc so I tend to not to use them as I find the £9.99 per month or whatever completely wasted.

This is one product that looks usefull, but I'm not sure of the specifics of it's software -

http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/products/network-players/stream-magic-6-v2

The problem here is the price (you are paying for their packaging of commodity hardware and their brand name) and then the software (will it be updated and kept simple enough?).

I think the software part of this should just be an open-source server that sits on a cheap bit of hardware.

Perhaps there will be an open-source uploader part too... to create and manage the indexes of the cloud or NAS stored files.

But something like this should suffice at the cheap end:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/11/raspberry-pi-wolfson-audio-card/

A Pi plus sound card for less than £100.

I've seen that there are projects in Go for dealing with FLAC and WAV already. Go is a good candidate for this given the low memory requirements, the ability to cross-compile to ARM as well as Intel.

A super simple interface on top of this stuff is all that is needed.

Perhaps v1 merely has:

• NAS/local files support
  
• Google Drive support
  
• Spotify API support
  
• FLAC support for files from local/cloud storage
  
• MP3 support for files from local/cloud storage
  
• A super simple web interface accessible via the local network for playing, searching, etc
  
  

Perhaps v2 has:

• Google Play Music support
  
• Amazon S3 support
  
• Dropbox support
  
  

I'd go for Google Drive first because it works out to be the cheapest cloud storage, Dropbox is 2nd (for the first TB) and Amazon S3 is third.

I'd open source the whole shebang, and yes you could use an external DAC or just rely on the on-board (depends on your sound card).

Large onboard storage.

I'd strongly disagree with this.

Either it's cheaper to build your own NAS, or you can wait and watch cloud storage prices continue to go down whilst internet connection speeds are getting faster.

Building storage into "the little box that aggregates all digital music" suddenly makes it a big expensive box.

Whatever this new box is, it should focus on merging some APIs from streaming providers, and logically merging local and cloud storage. That's really it's prime job.

And ideally you'll be able to have multiple little boxes in your home, and thus be able to control and play music in different rooms.

Essentially I'm describing something that reduces Spotify, Google Play Music, Amazon streaming and all others to just commodity services... you put them all behind one API and they become invisible. You should be able to change provider with virtually no impact to you (though some parts of the catalogue will change according to the provider).

It also reduces your local storage, NAS storage and cloud storage to just being "your files", and it should leave these as-is. I'm really saying that if you store FLAC in the cloud it shouldn't transcode it, bandwidth and storage is getting cheaper, stay lossless always.

And all of this should be behind one simple interface... you search and find, you play whatever. If you own files of higher quality, play those, if you don't then find and play from the streaming provider. The streaming providers should fill gaps.

And the interface should merge all of this together... to give you some control over some of the variable costs... i.e. cache owned files to reduce AWS S3 transfer costs, or prefer one streaming provider if they are not capping things or have higher quality.

All I want is a super simple search, find and play.

But without draining the phone battery, or requiring specialist hardware (that will cease to have support in 5 years), and without compromising on quality of files.

Maybe the onboard storage isn't a mandatory, but I do like the idea of a simple all in one - I don't mind the cost for convenience. I have so many USB external drives floating around that it just gets annoying.

When I say large, I mean 125 - 250GB should suffice for a pretty vast music collection, even at high bit rates. And do it with solid state memory. Obviously expandable via external source.

The reason I like local storage is because the general broadband speeds are not fast enough yet. Maybe it's just my household ( 3 people ) but our router and connection struggles when we are all online at the same time. Eg: One person streaming a film, someone else will have downloads going and maybe a bit of uploading etc. but I've had buffering issues with spotify in this scenario.

I have to say, I hadn't considered the Pi + soundcard option. That would be a nice little project and while I'd struggle with the hardware I reckon I could design and build a nice case for it all.

Whatever this product could be, there's definitely a need and want for it. My current setup is so frustrating I end up just plugging my phone into the AUX of my amp and listening to whatever is on there!

I'm liking this idea... At the moment I use an Odroid U3 (much faster than RPi) running Squeezeplug (Squeezebox server). That gives me access to Spotify, iplayer radio etc as well as locally stored music all from one interface controlled by web gui, phone app or hardware RC.
My wife, who is very tech literate, will tend to always use Spotify rather than locally stored music even tho we have the flac version at home because she can find something with one search rather than possibly 2. This even though shye would rather hear the uncompressed version...ease of use trumps that. Having everything available from one search, always playing the hi8ghest quality version available would be perfect!

BTW, google play music allows casting to Sonos. That would be a nice feature too, to leverage investment in existing sonos hardware.

Re: onboard storage. VB is technically correct, but you won't sell many to mass market consumers without a bit of onboard storage, IMO.

BTW, google play music allows casting to Sonos. That would be a nice feature too, to leverage investment in existing sonos hardware.

Google Play downsamples lossless, limits to 20k tracks, and Sonos limits to 20k tracks.

Otherwise, yeah, all good.

How much more expensive would it be compared to the ongoing cost of cloud storage and the premium price for fibre optic broadband? I'm not at all convinced but for me that is moot as cloud storage and domestic broadband don't offer the reliability of local storage.

I mentioned local storage as a cache within the box so that anything you listen to frequently would instantly play and things you don't listen to much would have a few second pause to start streaming.

Otherwise you could choose to store things on a NAS and everything is very close to local... it's the other side of your room.

As to cloud stuff...

Cost of cloud storage, 1TB per year = $100 at the moment, and prices keep going down.

Cost of bandwidth, I have 150MB down for £18 per month (Virgin Media).

My entire music collection of 92k FLACs is 2.1TB.

If it is possible to queue up multiple cloud accounts, or a mix of local + cloud... I could have the whole thing lossless for circa $200 per year, accessible at that lossless quality from anywhere.

As for where things are headed, 5 years ago Dropbox didn't make a lot of sense, minor convenience, and now it makes a lot of sense. 10 years ago Dropbox would've been pointless. 5 years from now, and storing 2TB in the cloud and listening to it at maximum quality is going to be fairly normal. But one should start building this soon, as in 5 years time we'll be paying rent to Google, Spotify, etc if we don't work out how to control our own media.