Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

Downloaded, will read at leisure. I followed the development of compressed audio by the MPEG group closely in the 1990s. Compression then seemed of the essence, given the cost of storage. Not an issue now!

BTW, Wiki confirms that the Ry Cooder record mentioned was the first digitally encoded record on major release.

Interesting that I've not used that term for reducing file size for such a long time. I'm always thinking about compression in terms of applying gain to a signal but reducing that gain as you approach a limit resulting in less dynamic range.

Ha yes! Is music too loud?

I'm not trying to have the most neckbeard argument ever but having just looked it up, pro tools only started supporting 96khz (and 192) in 2002... Admittedly that was 17 years ago but there was plenty of music digitally recorded with it before then.
Apparently Herp Alberts album rise was recorded at 96k in 1979 though, so I guess you're right about how long it's been around!

My point with tape is that often the way things were recorded (the compression has a low-pass effect) means there's not a lot going on to require massive oversampling (although iirc there can be separate issues with the bias tone).

I get that converters aren't created equal and oversampling will reduce audible artifacts so if you've got the gear, great go for 96/24 but in general if something was recorded (or remastered) for CD, you're getting the 'correct' version at 44.1/16 and 192 is like playing a DVD on a 4k TV with no upscaling trickery.

Steely Dan tried to record Gaucho digitally but abandoned the experiment — still sounds mighty fine to me!

Listening to this now. Thanks for the recommendation.

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You're drunk ain't ya?

Obviously very far from an audiophile set up, but I've finally had a free evening to get my Bose speakers and amp out of storage and set them up with the Chromecast audio.

Having to listen super quietly, but it's amazing how different it is from listening on my phone, Bluetooth speaker, TV, etc. I can't believe how long it's been!

Set up is 80% done. Will have to do some slight drilling of the fire place at a social hour and should probably clean the speakers... wonder if it's just age or from when I smoked.

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Goes without saying I'd like a proper setup, and I still wish I'd got an amp with a fucking remote. But this should pass aesthetic muster with she who must be obeyed.

Next up is seeing if there's a way to hook the TV to the amp.

Long term goal is to get a decent nice looking retro amp and tuner, as Mrs H loves all things mid century, so should be a good enough excuse! Then maybe when we get some extra wall sockets look into running the speaker cable up the wall, wall mounting the speakers at the right height and possibly colour matching the speakers as I discovered the surface is designed to be painted.

On the subject of running the TV sound through the amp, I asked a while back about some of the sockets

But from the specs it looks like there is no audio output, which to me means there is no way to run the TV through the amp, right?

Cheers

Headphone mini-jack?

I don't think there is one.

The closest misc hole I can find is this

Which Dramatic_Hammer thought
could be AV in with a breakout cable.

Still annoyed I lost the TV War and mine got sold...it had all the inputs and outputs!

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Yes, it's complicated. CD versions from the early days of CD relied in some cases on much less sophisticated convertors than todays offerings.

In some cases remastering to CD has created the best version, in other cases it's normalised and compressed an entire album into noise.

Yeah I've got older cds that sound like shit, tinny and super depressed.
I've repurchased (usually used) a bunch of stuff that was remastered, it's mostly been a good thing except for the $ and the extra fodder thrown in for the completists to help justify rebuying the album.

A bit, yeah. Sorry. Wasn’t meant to be nasty.

Hah yeah there are some shockingly bad remasters.

There's a site which is collecting the dynamic range figures of versions of albums (http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Kate+Bush&album=The+Kick+Inside).

It's helpful to see which albums have been tampered with to increase the perceived loudness. One of my favourite examples is Kate Bush - The Kick Inside. The dynamics of some of the CD releases had changed until pretty much every track peaks at 0dbfs, the original album exists in a Japanese CD version (TOCP 3005) where one or two tracks are noticeably quieter than the rest of the album.

The Steve Hoffman Music Forum is a great place to find out which versions feature the best mastering.

Very interesting, thanks.

Got media cabinet, amp, front and centre speakers today

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Very sexy.

KEF?

Indeed

R7s

Nice! What's on the floor? If it's tiles please tell me you're putting some kind of ceiling cloud in!

This is a good point. Or a big old rug.