Running separate ground and power lines for each piece of audio or video equipment is a smart way to run your system for best sound quality. But are there problems from ground loops and their hum?
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Howard Popeck writes: Only a mini test for this one I’m afraid. My notes from that time are not very comprehensive. Anyway … Built in 1978, the Gamma V is a very sensitive and selective rack-mount style digital tuner. It cost around £400 when new, as best I can recall. Construction is all frame and […]
I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve written the abbreviation, Hz—1 kHz, 1,000 kHz. It is, of course, short for Hertz. The car company? Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who first proved the existence of electromagnetic waves. Invisible forces that had a specific periodicity (frequency) that later were named in […]
Macbooks and Windows computers cannot reproduce DSD audio files unless you know the secret. Paul shares with us how to get them through the system.
Many of the sounds we hear every day are entirely fabricated by engineers to persuade us to buy things. Hundreds of items have their acoustics deliberately tweaked to make us happy – according to Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford MORE
I am always fascinated to watch those slow-speed nature videos where you watch flowers open and plants grow. Or, the opposite. A high-speed camera that slows down the wing motions of a hummingbird so we might see what in real life we cannot. Those cameras (both film and video) are essentially digital: frame by frame […]
Living in our little audiophile bubble means that everything we obsess over seems normal. It isn’t until we step outside the bubble and view our little world through the eyes of an outsider that one begins to realize just how far removed from the crowd we are. Terms that seem obvious and normal to us […]
When my friend, Sandy Gross was responsible for marketing Polk Audio in the late 70s and early 80s one of the challenges he faced was acceptance of the brand as a serious contender. It was a tough challenge. Their competitors were pretty serious people including Dr. Amar Bose, Edgar Villchur, Dr. Sydney Harman, and Henry […]
It doesn’t matter that data traveled through millions of switches, miles of cable, fiber, satellite, coaxial, WiFi, and so on. Once downloaded what sits on your hard drive is absolutely identical to what sits on the master hard drive. Yet, when I playback that file in Octave’s state-of-the-art mix room it will not sound the […]
As much as our mental faculties like to focus on one thing at a time, the reality is we do not live in a vacuum. Everything affects everything else. When we opt for a new phono cartridge it has a very different electrical and sonic character than its predecessor. We’ll need to readjust the cartridge […]
Not everything is going to fit you and your particular needs. Yet sometimes we get the wrong cues about the intended audience for a product or service. When that happens, we often blame the product rather than the message. Here’s a silly example. As a vegetarian, I might get excited that a fast food chain […]
Wikipedia describes the Decca Tree as a 3 microphone spaced array most commonly used for orchestral recording. The technique was developed in the early 1950s and first commercially used in 1954 by Arthur Haddy, Roy Wallace, and later refined by engineer Kenneth Ernest Wilkinson and his team at Decca Records, to provide a strong stereo […]
Digital audio is a very complex subject, one most of us don’t really understand at a level deep enough to make a reasoned technological change. Yes, we can change cables, equipment, programs, and even formats and hear the differences. But most of us aren’t able to dig deep into circuitry and programming to make those […]
I often tackle the same question multiple times. With each new answer to the same question, the different angle of attack seems to illuminate the lightbulb of understanding for at least one person. An aha! moment. For me, that’s reason enough to keep trying. We’re all perhaps a bit weary of me beating the DSD horse. I […]
THE BBC is to take an intriguing look at the science behind the human voice with the help of Manchester Science Festival and the University of Salford. Trailing the Electrifying the Voice event on BBC Breakfast and the Today Programme, Professor Trevor Cox explained some of the secrets that make the human voice the most […]
Paul McGowan: Noise Harvesters were launched some years ago and were very popular amongst the high-end crowd. Many are still used today and we get continual requests to bring the product back – which we have. I thought it might be interesting to do a short little series on how the product developed – describing […]
There are many reasons why we launched Octave Records, but chief among them was to add to the small supply of high-resolution recordings as well as to help set standards of what we as the high-end audio community demand in the way of well-recorded material. To that end, I think we’re on the right track. Part of […]
The dictionary has several meanings to the word dither. The most common is to be indecisive. The second meaning is more related to what interests us: to add white noise. Dither is the addition of randomness into low-level signals. Surprisingly, we do this to lower distortion of predictable errors. Here’s a great example from a Photoshop […]
My dear friend, conductor Lowell Graham has what he calls his 30-second rule. “If something does not grab me in in the first 30 seconds of listening, I do not continue. That can be of compositional value, recording, performance and is certainly the combination of all those attributes.” Now that’s pretty sound advice though at first I […]
At first glance, it is not clear to us why an oversized power supply sounds better, or one cable sonically outperforms another. This is because not everything is obvious. It helps to take some things on faith (at least for the briefest of moments). Faith for most of us comes only with great difficulty. We […]
In a recent post, The Bark Syndrome, I identified a problem that is difficult to pinpoint its source. Barking voices. You’ve no doubt experienced on multiple recordings the bark of a loud voice. The signer gets going and suddenly you wince. Your face scrunches. Where in the chain does this change in quality occur? If we […]
Might as well go for broke. This post will focus on 4Ω vs. 8Ω speakers and varying impedances with frequency of those speakers. First a bit of a refresher. It is a misnomer to think that 4Ω speakers take more power than 8Ω speakers. They do not. Loudspeakers are rated according to their sensitivity: how […]
Here’s a good one for the measurement nerds in us all. How to quantify emotional engagement. How is it that a technically inferior technology like vinyl can often better engage us emotionally than a technologically superior format like DSD? And to make matters worse, a vinyl reproduction of a DSD master like those we have […]
It is always difficult to have to reject the hard work of anyone but, in the long run, it’s critical to maintain standards. While auditioning a candidate recording we made of a wonderful musician for Octave, I had the unfortunate task of saying no. No, it’s not good enough. No, it serves neither the music […]