MUSINGS: On DRM, MQA, the (supposed) Techno-Libertarian opposition, and Honesty... [Plus a quick look at MQA-CD]

Eugène Delacroix - "La Liberté guidant le peuple" (Liberty Leading the People).

Looking around the audiophile press this past couple of weeks, we see the next installment of Jim Austin's exploration into MQA - "MQA, DRM, and Other Four-Letter Words" in the pages of Stereophile.

I asked myself after reading the article, do I and others who share my views on MQA fit the description of being "in a state" about the threat of DRM? And am I and others who oppose MQA the kind of person he generalizes about when he said this?

Because they are a certain kind of person: advocates of open-source, open-standard software. We meet them at the intersection of audiophilia and information technology. These are the Internet libertarians I mentioned earlier: audiophiles whose sensibilities were nourished in the software industry.

For this post, let's think about comments like those above, and consider some peripheral yet important aspects around freedom in audio data file formats, DRM, MQA, and more...

MEASUREMENTS: Going 10 Gigabits/s home ethernet (10GbE) on Cat-5e cables. (ASUS XG-C100C cards & Netgear GS110MX switches)

Over the years, I have upgraded many parts of my computer system. New motherboards go in and out, new CPUs updated, more advanced GPUs, gigs of RAM, faster and higher storage size hard drives and SSDs...

A few months back, I mentioned that one of the more "boring" parts of the computer system with little actual need for updating has been the wired network system. I have not significantly upgraded anything in many years. While I suspect many of us over the last decade have upgraded our home ethernet systems to 1 gigabit/s ethernet (1GbE), since the mid-2000's, 10 gigabit/s speed has been waiting in the wings for larger scale adoption. In business and enterprise settings, one may have already seen fibre-optic networks (for example, those using enhanced Small Form Factor [SFP+] connectors), but 10GbE in the form of standard copper modular RJ-45 8P8C connectors (also known has 10GBASE-T) has been talked about since 2006 with relatively few of us I suspect incorporating the technology into the home yet (in early 2018). The price point is only starting to dip into consumer territory.

MUSINGS: On the joy of numbers... Yet more on that audio "Subjectivist" vs. "Objectivist" debate.

You might recognize the opening graphic from a previous post years ago where I commented that I actually believe it's healthy to maintain balance rather than seeing extreme polarities. In that post, I mentioned an article by Michael Lavorgna from AudioStream that I thought was grossly off base. That was in 2015. Here we are again in 2018, with another post on AudioStream, but this time penned by Herb Reichert called "Audio Without Numbers" that I think needs to be addressed. (Hmmm... What's wrong with numbers? :-)

Before getting into the discussion, let me lay out a couple of suggestions not just for this post, but also in general when we're simply talking about audiophilia, the science and philosophy behind our hobby.

First, let's talk plainly. Yes, we can bring up the names of long dead philosophers all day long... Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle of classic fame, to more recent men of high thinking like Hume, Kant, Poincaré, Popper, and Kuhn - they likely all have something to say about this debate depending on philosophical leanings around the nature of "truth", "knowledge", and other metaphysical ideas. Over the years, I've dropped a couple of these names as well where I thought a quote or reference might be meaningful, but ultimately so what? Time has passed since these thinkers put down their words, scientific knowledge has advanced in ways that the thinkers above have not been privy to and perhaps they would have vastly different ideas if alive today. For example, other than Kuhn and Popper, the rest of them were gone by the time the double-helix was discovered, or the advent of modern molecular biology or neuroscience to explain sensory phenomena and the limits of perception. Besides, I'm not sure any of them were audiophiles :-).

Second, let's not appeal to scientific domains that more than likely have no practical relevance to the hobby. Yes, relativity, Einstein, and Hawking were way cool guys! Likewise, quarks, hadrons, superstrings, the wave-particle duality, and Erwin Schrödinger and his cat are also very much worth pondering about. While these concepts have great relevance in this universe, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that sound waves, the consumer electronics we're talking about, or even human perception "materially" requires that we engage in laws governing subatomic particles, the space-time continuum, or velocities approaching light speed. Who knows, maybe consciousness involves quantum-level phenomena (as per Roger Penrose for example), but this is highly speculative. To bring forth these theories as if of relevance is IMO at best engaging in some unnecessary science fiction writing, and at worst it makes the writer sound pretentious. BTW, I think audiophile companies need to keep this in mind while advertising their products to maintain some semblance of sanity (folks like this, this, and this likely have crossed the line).

RETRO-MEASURE: 2001 Sony SCD-CE775 5-disc SACD/CD Player (CD test)

Sony SCD-CE775 sitting below the Panasonic Blu-Ray player... A relatively large box - 17" wide, 15" deep, 5" tall.

Every once awhile, I like putting up measurements and thoughts on gear that I either own or borrowed of an older "vintage". I think it's good to have measurements of these older equipment for the sake of perspective! These days, it seems like the moment one buys a new smartphone, wait a few days and we see an announcement for the next generation of product... It was not always like this of course :-).

For this post, let's have a look at the performance of one of my favourite budget audio players that I have owned for the last 16 years - the Sony SCD-CE775, one of the earlier consumer-level SACD players released back when the SACD was viewed as the new-kid-on-the-block of digital formats. This specific model was released in 2001, at around the same time as multi-channel SACDs became available for sale - there was a copy of Kind Of Blue multichannel SACD in the box. I picked this unit up new in the summer of 2002 I believe and it has been a constant on my audio rack since then. My thought at the time was that this would be my back-up SACD/CD player, but as history would have it, with the transition to computer audio, I sold off my Sony SCD-555ES at some point back in 2004 and just stayed with this multi-changer and my old DVD player for spinning disks.

MUSINGS: On Dysphonic Sounds, and Moby's "Fight" Against the Loudness War...

For this post, I thought I'd share some personal experiences and opinions. Back in the "old" days - more than 10 years ago now, there was a time when I used to routinely listen to new albums start to end. I enjoyed getting into the lyrics of new music, learned to sing along, and tried to imagine the message being composed by the song writer and parse the emotional prosody of the piece.

I've been trying to think why I don't do this much any more with the new music I buy. Am I just getting old (in my mid-40's now)? Do the new generation of singers and songwriters not appeal to my taste? Did the music industry "sell-out" with promoting one-hit wonders instead of cultivating those with substance who could "carry" full albums? Is it that I no longer have the time I used to have and instead prefer to do other things (lots of entertainment options these days)? Is it that I have too many albums on my music server now so it's just much easier to make a playlist of individual songs and neglect the album as a "body" of work? Is it that maybe musicians themselves don't bother creating thematically coherent albums anymore (hey, even artists like this guy says so - "Why Tiësto thinks the album is dead")?