Thursday 26 March 2015

MUSINGS: Gone 4K / UHD - A "Look" At Ultra-High-Definition...

This week, I thought I'd take a break from just the audio stuff and discuss a new "toy" I got 5 weeks ago. That's right, as the title suggests, a 4K / UHD screen; it's a computer monitor to be exact:

A view from behind the commander's chair :-). BenQ BL3201PH on the table.
Remember that there's a separate "body" defining 4K movies at the local movieplex - the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI). They have "true" 4000 pixel horizontal resolution like the 4096x1716 (2.39:1 aspect), or the very close 3996x2160 (1.85:1) resolutions. Whereas for the smaller screens like computer monitors and TV's, we have the UHD "Ultra High Definition" standard defined as 3840x2160 (16:9 / 1.78:1). So although it's not exactly "4K" horizontally, it's close and I guess "4K" is a better advertising catch-phrase than "2160P". Needless to say 3840x2160 is 2x the linear resolution of 1080P or 4x the actual number of pixels.

Tuesday 17 March 2015

MUSINGS: Audiophiles "Us vs. Them" (Objectivists vs. Subjectivists) Attitudes and Envy!?


Since I'm stuck at LAX on my way home from a wonderful Spring Break with the wife and kids down in Texas as well as a Caribbean cruise, I thought I'd polish my response to Hal Espen's comment in the last post... BTW, I enjoyed visiting Bjorn's in San Antonio just to see the audio and home theater gear they had on display. Some really nice stuff and it looks like they're upgrading their main demo room to Atmos soon. I appreciated the knowledgeable staff and friendly attitude; taking time to demo the gear even though they knew I didn't even live in the USA.

So Hal, nice comment:
Pure confirmation bias from beginning to end. None of this really exists. : )
You can't have it both ways. Either your blog is about providing the little bursts of brain chemicals that us vs. them skeptics receive when scientism is seen to be crushing audiophilia, or you're going to go wafting into the subjective realm of the subtle and imaginative "classy" pleasures of reproducing music electronically, as you do with evident misgivings here.

Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on>
Gets right to the heart of some of the heated debates and arguments I suppose... I guess I "swing both ways" in some regards. :-)

Saturday 7 March 2015

2015-02-27: HiFi Centre Grand Reopening...

About a year ago, I reported on the B&W Nautilus demo at the HiFi Centre here in Vancouver. That was at their old location... As of late February, they're now in the new place near Vancouver Chinatown and to celebrate, they had a nice (re)opening event (February 27, 2015). It caught some publicity from the Stereophile web site as well.

I decided to go check it out after work on the Friday and see the new space. For fun, here are a few cell phone snapshots of some of the gear on display. Note that it was well attended and I purposely tried not to take shots with people in them to protect the innocent :-).

Upon entering the main building, we see a Nautilus "shell" display; HiFi Centre has always had a good partnership with B&W:

Sunday 1 March 2015

MUSINGS: Audio Quality, The Various Formats, and Diminishing Returns - In Pictures!

Let me be the first to say that graphs and charts where audio formats are plotted out in terms of unidimensional sound quality ratings are ridiculously oversimplified and can be very misleading! However, they can be fun to look at and could be used as bite-sized "memes" for discussion when meeting up with audio friends or for illustration when people ask about audio quality.

Since they're out there already, let us spend some time this week to look at these visual analogies as a way to "think" about what the authors of these works want us to consider/believe. I'm going to screen capture without permission a couple of these images to explore. As usual, I do this out of a desire to discuss, critique, and hopefully educate which I consider "fair use" of copyrighted material; as a reminder to readers, other than a tiny bit of ad revenue on this blog (hey, why not?), I do not expect any other gain from writing a post like this.

First, here's PONO's "Underwater Listening" diagram released around the time of the 2014 SXSW (March 2014):
PONO: Underwater Listening

Others have already commented on this of course (here also). I don't know what ad "genius" came out with this diagram, but it is cute, I suppose. I remember being taken aback by this picture initially as it's so far out of "left field" (creative?) that I felt disoriented when I first saw this thing...

How audio formats would evoke a desire to compare underwater depths remains a mystery to me. Obviously, there's a desire to impress upon the recipient two main messages - a direct correlation between sampling rate (from CD up) with quality, and to make sure the MP3 format gets deprecated as much as possible (1000 ft?!). On both those counts, this image gets it so wrong, it's almost comedic. Clearly, one cannot directly correlate samplerate and bitrate with audio quality because the relationship isn't some kind of linear correlation. Why would CD quality be "200 ft", and 96kHz "20 ft"? Surely nobody in their right mind would say that 96kHz is 10 times perceptually "better". Sure, there is a correlation such that a low bitrate file like 64kbps MP3 will sound quite compromised with poor resolution, but without any qualification around this important bitrate parameter, how can anyone honestly say that all MP3s sound bad? I might as well say that Neil Young's a poor-sounding recording artist because the Le Noise (2010) and A Letter Home (2014) albums are low fidelity.