SUMMER MUSINGS: Multichannel and the audiophile - recent articles and thoughts, 2025 update.

Preamble: In this article, I'll clearly be supportive of multichannel/Atmos music playback for audiophiles. This in no way should be seen as disparaging to those who feel that 2-channel stereo is completely adequate if not optimal for their listening! Simplicity, space considerations, availability of content, budgetary factors, perceived artistic intent, subjective preferences always play into the personal choices we make.

After 25 years of collecting multichannel content since the early days of DVD(-A) and SACD, currently about 15% of the albums on my music server are 3.0+ multichannel. With hopes that this continues to grow, of course!

Every once awhile I'll look over some of the posts I've made over the years to see if there's anything substantial I might revise or provide an addendum for. Most of the time, it's just for historical review to consider my thoughts back then, but sometimes, I'm encouraged to see how nicely things have changed over the ensuing years. Such has been the case for multichannel audio, so I thought I'd make this post as a review and pointer to the topic of multichannel music as an audiophile.

The first time I wrote a post titled "multichannel and the audiophile" was back in 2019, also during the summer - "SUMMER MUSINGS: Multichannel and the audiophile. MCh streaming with a TV Box. And Thoughts on the Future..."

As you know, things have changed since then with the advent of "Spatial" streaming thanks initially to Apple Music's push into the territory, the "chicken or egg" concern I discussed around not having enough multichannel music content has been addressed very nicely. As expected in that 2019 post, streaming came in the form of lossy EAC3 compressed audio. While we didn't quite get the 1+Mbps 7.1 data rate I was thinking about, EAC3-JOC Atmos with 5.1 bed channels at 768kbps is still high bitrate for audio and an excellent-sounding standard that's hard to fault. In my own testing, this bitrate has generally been "perceptually transparent" compared to an equivalent lossless TrueHD-Atmos encode using Dolby's reference Media Encoder (recent version 3.7). I'm sure there are some edge-case killer samples where TrueHD would audibly beat EAC3 (similar to killer samples like jangling keys with higher frequency details or detailed hand claps used in lossy compression testing), but I believe differences would be hard to spot even in volume-controlled blind listening side-by-side with actual music!

Of course, if you have access to the lossless TrueHD-Atmos Blu-ray or download, go grab that over the EAC3 version as a more accurate representation of the intended Atmos presentation potentially with higher number of bed channels like 7.1. I just don't think we need to get neurotic over the high bitrate lossy vs. lossless divide.

Linn DS streamers: Majik DS(/1), Klimax DS/2 and Klimax DSM/2 measurements. (Examples of "high end" audio.)

The Linn Klimax DS/2 here at home for auditioning back in 2024.

Readers might recall about a year ago, we ran a blind listening test using hi-res captures of the analog output from different DACs to see if there was a clearly audible difference between a very cheap DAC (the Apple USB-C headphone dongle) versus much more expensive "audiophile high-end" streamer DACs which were the Linn Majik DS(/1) and Klimax DSM/2 Katalyst. If you don't know the results of that online study, here they are, and the subjective comments around what was heard.

While I showed 0dBFS 1kHz THD+N results for the Majik DS and Klimax DSM/2 back then, there was quite a bit more data collected as part of the preparation for that Internet Blind Listening Test that I did not publish. Even though my friend linnrd (who has contributed to these pages), as suggested by his screen name, happened to be quite the Linn fan, I appreciate that he is not blinded to the complexities of human preferences. He's well aware that both subjective impressions and objective performance play their part and he was totally open to me running measurements on his Linn digital gear to examine for technical accuracy.

For this post, let's dive deeper into the technical performance of some Linn streaming DAC gear. Here are the devices I'll be showing results of...

SUMMER MUSINGS: Paired speaker testing, more crossover thoughts, running tests ourselves and for ALL speaker reviews!

Paradigm Signature S8 v.3 speakers with grilles off. miniDSP UMIK-1 microphone for some simple testing with Room EQ Wizard (REW).

Well it's summertime which means (hopefully) a bit more opportunity to enjoy the nice weather around here in Vancouver with the family, more time to listen to music, maybe a little trip out of town on weekends.

As for my audiophile interests, it also gives me time to think about the broad topics and maybe run a little bit of testing here and there. Often these summer articles flesh out ideas and results covered over the last few months I may have left aside or on the "cutting floor" when writing.

This post will be along those lines in that these results were actually captured back in the January-February 2025 timeframe when I was doing the ferrofluid replacement for my tweeters, and then subsequent discussions about "audiophile" crossover parts and addressing beliefs of people like GR-Research/Danny Richie.

Since I grabbed these measurements and pictures when I was considering the importance (or not) of crossover part affecting sound quality, I thought I'd post them with some further summertime-meandering and related discussions.