QUICKIES: Black aluminum alloy footers. Equipment racks. Center channel in music. Underwhelming Spotify Lossless. More Paul McGowan/PS Audio USB cable & jitter foolishness.

Hey guys and gals, not much time this week to test stuff but to start I thought I'd show some pictures of the black version of the inexpensive aluminum footers that were discussed last week.

I got these black-colored ones for my center channel, the Paradigm Signature C3 v.3 which is a 3-way, 4 speaker design that sits on my wood/glass component rack. (You can see other pictures of that component stand in my room article, or earlier when setting up the room.)

I picked the black ones since the center channel is sitting straight in front of me when watching movies, keeping it black will not add any color contrast to potentially distract from the show.

As in the previous post, I did some vibrometry measurements using my Google Pixel 8 with app but alas I have nothing to show! Unlike the tall, skinny floorstanding Signature S8 loudspeakers, while playing INXS' "Guns In The Sky" at +10dB above normal listening levels, I could not get the vibrometer app to register significant vibrations at normal gain whether I had the small stock footers or these black ones. Good to know then that my equipment rack and the 45lb center speaker are stable. As such, I consider the added footers more for esthetic reasons than functional; who knows, maybe they'll be more vibrationally resistant in an actual earthquake. 😉

Small GigaPlus 2.5GbE switch on the right side.

I know some companies talk about equipment racks contributing to the sound of the system. And there are whole articles talking about this. As usual, we can buy racks and shelves for a few hundred bucks (like this Monoprice, or this Salamander Designs) all the way to thousands of dollars from the likes of Critical Mass, or Artesania Audio. Absolutely nothing wrong with purchasing good quality furniture!

Not unexpectedly, given the lack of evidence, I'm just not sure about any dramatic claims that equipment racks will change the sound character of one's system unless we're looking at very cheap stuff that rattles when music is playing or your turntable sits higher on the top shelf and skips with room vibrations or maybe the rack just doesn't fit your needs in dimensions! Obviously upgrade if these are issues.

Since I'm putting these footers on my center channel, let's quickly talk about the center channel as well.

Recently, I wrote about quad recordings and I see that Stereophile also had an article lately. Nice to see the magazine taking time to discuss multichannel audio and appreciating the potential outside of some hardware product review.

As you know, quad is 4.0 (4 channels, ideally symmetrical front + rear speaker pairs, no subwoofer). This is totally fine, sounds great in many 1970's mixes, and I think given the simplicity of the 4-speaker arrangement, is easy for music producers to create for (argument presented in this video). If you're interested in the history, check out this recent presentation from Eugene Huo from July 2025:

As the video notes (~4:00), experiments with multichannel sound predated home commercialization of multichannel by many years - decades even - like Disney's Fantasia released in 1941 featuring its multichannel classical music score on "Fantasound". Notice that for each of the common Fantasound set-ups:

The arrangement of speakers always included a center front channel - the "screen speaker" - which in a theater setting helps anchor the dialogue to the visuals we're paying attention to.

In comparison, music lovers have been listening and hopefully enjoying "phantom center" forever since the dawn of consumer 2-channel stereo sound since the late 50's, early 60's. So long as we're sitting in the sweet spot, the soundstage can be very realistic with good high-fidelity when we employ well-balanced speakers in a good, ideally symmetrical, sound room.

Personally, I think having a center channel is a good thing. I very much enjoy hearing vocals anchored to the center of the soundstage when intended. For example, the 3-channel Analogue Productions mix on SACD of The Nat King Cole Story (1991), or Love Is The Thing (1957) beautifully situates Nat in the center of the soundstage creating a solid position where he's singing from even if I'm listening off center. Most multichannel classical recordings and soundtrack scores are also recorded with good use of the center channel - everything from the RCA Living Stereo 3-track recordings to modern releases like the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recording of Holst: The Planets, Fraillon: Earth (2025) in Atmos/multichannel (reviewed at Stereophile recently).

Like sitting in an orchestra, live recordings by nature also can have naturally captured center content. For example the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense (1984) whether as video or just streamed through "spatial audio" sounds great with a good, cleanly reproduced, center channel.

When we look at studio music productions these days, we see a mixture of whether the center channel is used. For example the multichannel version of George Michael's Songs From The Last Century (1999) features George's sweet vocals beautifully in that center speaker. Others like the recent Lady Gaga album Mayhem (2025) and Phil Collins' 2025 remix of No Jacket Required (1985) use the center to varying degrees for vocals and instruments. Some mixes like the the new Ed Sheeran Play (2025) doesn't even use the center at all except for the occasional object flying by. Likewise the Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo' album Room On The Porch (2025) doesn't use it even though I imagine it could be nice for the front spread with an acoustic/vocal album like this.

While as a hi-fi loving audiophile, I want the mix to take advantage of all the capabilities of the sound system (hence ignoring the center speaker seems unfortunate to me!), I can understand the arguments some have made. For example, center channels are often not as high quality as our front left-right speakers. They're often smaller, timbral matching can be off, might be placed sub-optimally (often too low), and measurements can suggest much to be desired (as discussed here); so if one has a poor center channel, it might actually sound better to not use it for hi-fi music and just have the decoder/receiver redirect the content to the other channels.

Another issue I've heard is that for binaural/stereo fold-down with headphones, the contents of the center channel might not sound as good when processed although I haven't seen definitive evidence of this. Here's an interesting video talking about why the center channel isn't used universally for various reasons including obvious ones like when the engineer is creating a multichannel remix using tracks with effects already "printed" into 2-channels only. See 4:50 in that video talking about the possibility of not sounding right in some situations with stereo or binaural fold-down. Presumably in time, with evolution of the DSP algorithms for binauralization, this should not be a major issue if it even is one currently in 2025.

Again, IMO, I would prefer that audio engineers use the center channel rather than ignoring its presence and resorting to a pure phantom center presentation since it's always available in standard 5.1 and 7.1 bed layouts. Let the end-user decide whether to turn it on/off based on their hardware so audio lovers with full multichannel systems can take full advantage of their hardware.

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In other news, the Most Underwhelming Audiophile Award of 2025 so far this year must go to Spotify for finally releasing their lossless streaming. After all these years of teasing us with this; remember this Billie Eilish and Finneas "unveil" in 2021?!

Despite their rivals Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz doing lossless hi-res typically up to 24/192 since at least 2021, finally, on September 10, in the latter half of 2025, Spotify Lossless for Premium subscribers rewards listeners with up to (... drum roll ...) 24-bits/44.1kHz streams! 🥱

Sure, lossless sounds good, as expected. And no, we don't have to be neurotic about samplerates since the difference between 44.1 or 48kHz and higher are not particularly audible. However, we can also argue that the lossy higher bitrate 320kbps Ogg Vorbis stream wasn't obviously audibly inferior to 24/44.1 lossless in nearly all situations anyway. So if we're going to go lossless, at some level, this implies that we're trying to be serious about the technical quality of the streams whether audible or not.

We know that Spotify accepts lossless 48+kHz sample rates so they already have that content in their library. If they don't have the network bandwidth to support lossless 88.2, 96kHz, and above at this time, that's fine I suppose. But it would have been nice to handle both the common 44.1kHz and 48kHz sample rates. And if one single sample rate had to be chosen, why not go with the higher 48kHz which is commonly supported in DAC hardware, and supported in Bluetooth codecs including SBC, aptX, and LDAC? The only one that doesn't is Apple's standard 256kbps AAC for Bluetooth although later generation hardware like the AirPods Max can go up to 48kHz - that's the direction they're heading. If we're going to be asynchronously resampling audio, why not upsample to 48kHz from 44.1kHz if we have to?

[It's unfortunate that for audio we have both 44.1 and 48kHz. Since the early days of video, 48kHz has been the standard as it's easily divisible by the 24fps film frame rate legacy standard from the late 1920's. Base-48kHz has been by far the digital audio norm in video distribution since the early days of Laserdiscs with 384kbps AC3 soundtracks to DVDs and HDTVs; obviously remaining the dominant samplerate with modern Blurays and UHD streaming content. Dolby Atmos as the main immersive format these days is currently universally distributed at 48kHz samplerate.]

The non-integer 44.1kHz originated as a common denominator for PAL and NTSC VCR equipment with Sony championing this samplerate when they introduced the Sony PCM-1600 "PCM adaptor" to get the digital audio data onto higher bandwidth VCR tapes (typically old U-matic and Betamax). The technology got released commercially in 1979 but there were professional models as early as 1977. A bit of a shame I think that CD Audio, as the brainchild of Sony and Philips then stuck with that fractional 44.1kHz number.

In the music world, Decca Records standardized on 48kHz as far back as 1978 with their Decca Digital Audio Recorder. By 1987, Sony's Digital Audio Tape (DAT) standard replaced those clunky VCR recorders and were able to capture at the higher 48kHz which became the de facto high quality professional audio standard. While 44.1kHz was supported by the DAT specs, for a time, they were paranoid about piracy from CDs so a number of less expensive / consumer-level DATs skipped 44.1kHz recording but could still do 48kHz such as the US$2,000 Sony DTC-1000ES in 1987 (also see SCMS copy protection scheme which affected DATs). The bottom line is that there has been a lot of music sourced in 48kHz for decades now. The difference between 44.1 and 48kHz obviously isn't large, 4kHz samplerate = 2kHz of extra audio bandwidth may not be audibly significant with good DACs, but it's still extra bandwidth over 20kHz for more graceful filter roll-off.

[There's a lot of detail here I'm obviously skipping - see here for more on the evolution of digital recording.]

Beyond the just 44.1kHz limit, there's still no multichannel/Atmos streaming in Spotify - again, disappointing that the streamer with the largest user base simply isn't even trying to do anything to advance sound quality. To be clear, I have no animosity towards the company since I have a subscription and my kids use Spotify mostly. However, minimal meaningful change like this cannot elicit much excitement among hi-fi subscribers after all these years.

Wake me up when they're serious about lossless native master resolutions and introduce Spatial content. 😴

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Finally, I see that Paul McGowan continues to misinform audiophiles so they worry about USB cables with DACs - in September 2025 even!

Oh boy, haven't we stopped worrying about USB cables since something like 2013? And recognized that asynchronous USB is one of the least jittery ways to achieve DAC playback? Good USB DACs easily isolate themselves from whatever noise he's worried about (maybe his PS Audio/Ted Smith stuff is crap and can't do that?). Since when has putting a USB hub in the chain helped to any significant degree? He claims "it helps a lot" - what utter nonsense!

What I see here is simply Paul McGowan, an old man who cannot update his knowledge/awareness, using apocryphal stories of old, shamefully promoting mistruths year after year, generation after generation. A manufacturer fomenting audio myths as a tool to sell questionable goods for themselves and buddies like AudioQuest. This is seriously low quality content, and an example of what's wrong with manufacturers in this industry.

And I also see he's still trying to summon the jitter boogeyman a few days ago:

Notice he doesn't even answer the heart of the question - "What does it sound like when jitter is present?". Rather, he's literally trying to explain by handwaving that everyone should be concerned! What sad videos that not only do not provide answers, but seemingly are designed to just make audiophiles feel more concerned over literally nothing, sigh... (As usual, don't worry about jitter unless you have a very crappy DAC these days.)

With that, don't let the snake oil salesmen get ya (down); they too have to eat I suppose, just don't feed them. 😉 I see in the comments section to the videos that many are informed and can see through McGowan's foolishness.

I hope you're all enjoying the music, dear audiophiles!

Heading off to Central Europe shortly - Prague, Budapest, and Vienna - for work/vacation time. Enjoy the fall everyone. Cheers! 🙂