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 (AliExpress) 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 We Hear It: On requesting artists/albums to streaming services. (Plus adding more RAM and larger SSD to the computer workstation.)

Hey everyone, life's been very busy so not much time to think or work on audio stuff.

A few weeks back in my discussion of Qobuz in Canada, I said: "I'm curious, has anyone out there contacted their streaming service to request the addition of an artist or album? Were you able to get your requests included?"

Well, I received a number of responses, mostly from folks who were happy that Qobuz or TIDAL were able to oblige with putting their requests up. Here's a very well written one that I thought would be good to share with everyone... It brings up important points especially these days as we transition into more music lovers depending on the services to supply our music. Many, including myself these days are collecting more playlists than actual physical albums or spending the time to download anymore.

Qobuz now in Canada. Finally, Roon integration and a taste of lossless multichannel streaming. Thoughts on the future of audio streaming.

Finally after all these years. Despite bugging them at least since RMAF2019, it has taken ages but at last as of April 2023, Qobuz is now available here in Canada. As you can see, price in Canadian dollars is reasonable at CDN$10.83/month yearly subscription or $13/month if you prefer month-to-month. I see a 60-day trial here; there are 3-month trials out there as well so look around for one that might apply to you.

With competition these days, the price is in line with other services offering up to 24/192 lossless hi-res content; here are the current prices in Canada:

Amazon Music HD - CDN$10.99/m ($8.99/m Prime members)
Apple Music Individual - CDN$10.99/m
Spotify Premium Individual (lossy Ogg Vorbis) - CDN$9.99/m
TIDAL HiFi (16/44.1) - CDN$9.99/m
TIDAL HiFi Plus (MQA, likely FLAC hi-res transition in August) - CDN$19.99/m.

Audiophile Survey, early 2023: Who we are (including age and gender). What we use. How we think.

Well ladies and gentlemen, thanks to all who took the time to complete the information in the open "SURVEY: What audio playback system and/or streaming music service are you using in 2023?" post. The survey collected responses from February 11 to May 5, 2023 on this blog, and as usual, the responses came from audio lovers around the world, receiving in total 1330 entries with general information on demographics, broadly what kinds of systems are being used, multichannel playback, interest in masterings, and for those using streaming subscriptions, which ones.

As with any survey, we have to start with some context for the data. Obviously, the individuals who submitted results to me would have been primarily the viewers on this blog although I know the survey was advertised at various audiophile-related forums. I did not do any special advertising personally, other than mentioning it on a few forums I visited like Audiophile Style or Steve Hoffman Forum. I don't maintain much of a social media presence so basically just let the survey diffuse across the Internet.

Given the nature of this blog and its contents, I'd like to think that this survey will tell us about some of the characteristics of the subgroup of intelligent, reasonable, balanced, technically savvy, prudently skeptical, practical audiophiles around the world in the first half of 2023. ;-)

SURVEY: What audio playback system and/or streaming music service are you using in 2023?

Hey there gals and guys. I've been busy over the last while getting some things at work going, so this means it's time for a survey to hear from you ;-).

It's always good to know what audio lovers are doing out there and this could of course help me look at interesting topics to examine in the future. The last time I did this was back in 2019, looking at adoption of streaming services and lossy vs. lossless among the readership - much has changed since then!

I've seen various hobbyist poll results over the last while. A common question being asked these days is "Which digital streaming service is most popular?". This certainly makes sense given the growth of Internet streaming over the years, but much too simplistic! As an audiophile blogger, my interest isn't so much about which commercial service is "winning" since it really doesn't matter too much to most of us I think, and will fluctuate depending on where one lives and what services are available. Instead, audio enthusiasts these days have access to all kinds of ways to listen to music and choices to make including whether we like "spatial audio" as a recent feature.

In Archimago's Musings style ;-), let's go deeper and get a detailed survey going, collecting anonymous data on who you are, what you use mostly, and what kind of systems you enjoy in 2023 - not just what music service...

As We Hear It 2021 (I): Maurizio C on MQA, some ideas about TIDAL, and a few words about audio journalistic legacy...

Generation 1 earphones! For distant aircraft detection apparently...

As you might recall, over the years I have incorporated contribution posts from readers here on the blog. The article that follows was something I wrote back in the summer (2021) but since I was sick and tired of more MQA talk, I held on to it from publication a few months ago. Well, I think the time has come now that a few of the thoughts I wrote about TIDAL have actually come to pass - TIDAL just announced today that the price is down to $10/month, with the lossless 16/44.1 tier, pushing MQA into the "HiFi+" tier for $20/month. We're not sure if the lossless 16/44.1 tier has dumped the worthless MQA-encoded "MQA-CD" content though.

Here's the article with some modifications in light of the recent news...

A comment about MQA leading into 2021; some thoughts about the future of TIDAL and on journalistic legacy...

Here's an E-mail I received in late 2020 from Italy.

December 27, 2020 

To: Schiit Audio, Linn Audio
CC: Archimago

Dear Alls,
I'm an Italian, 60 years old, music lover and Older Analog Hi-Fi Fan and only recently I have converted to digital music, listening almost exclusively through the streaming services (Spotify, Tidal, QoBuz, Amazon, etc.).

Among hi-res listeners, Tidal is the most famous and expanding but they are "Forcing" the exclusive use of MQA format, with large investments, marketing campaigns, reviews from important audiophile magazines etc ..

Unfortunately this Campaign is gaining the upper hand, so much so that MQA Logo is now coveted by both manufacturers and sellers...

Modding the Dekoni Blue ("Arch-Mod5"). Streaming audio: Apple Music to be "true hi-res lossless" stereo with multichannel (Atmos) in June.

A couple weeks back, I measured the Dekoni Blue headphone which as I noted, is itself a "modded" Fostex T50RP Mk 3 planar-magnetic (aka "Regular Phase", aka "isodynamic") headphone. It would be completely remiss of me if in a review/discussion of the Dekoni/Fostex I were not to spend some time talking about modding!

Modding has an very long tradition in the 'head-fi' world and I think it's been generally recognized that the Fostex headphones are the classic headphones to perform surgeries on. Much of what I'll be talking about here will be nothing new to those deep into this stuff already. For more on modding, check out this Headphonesty article for a background.

To start, as always, we need a plan and a "vision". As I mentioned in the last article, the Dekoni Blue sounds pretty good for the most part, so my job isn't to change the performance completely, but to rather refine what is there. If a headphone sound highly objectionable, one should really just move on and buy something else! Let's review the measurements I published last time for the Dekoni Blue with the supplied earpads and see what we can try...

RETRO-MEASURE: Klipsch Forté I speaker impedance. (And it looks like Qobuz responds to Amazon...)

Well guys, I'm still working on the Autoranger amplifier test system looking at standardization of the measurement technique and settings which is a pretty big job still, so this week I thought I'd show you some data I grabbed a few months back while working on the speaker impedance measurements series (Part 1, Part 2).

Every once awhile, I'll drag up an old device for a quick measure. Previously it was stuff like my old Sony SACD player, or the old laser disk player. This time, I went over to my dad's place to have a listen and measure his main speakers - the Klipsch Forté (original first version) made back in the 1980's until the early 90's I think.

Front and Rear of Klipsch Forté from the 1980's. Note the large 12" rear passive radiator.

I thought it was good to have a look at this device since there's been buzz lately about the latest model Forte III (Stereophile review, Darko review, Darko bought a pair). Also, a couple years back I ran into this Stereo Review article by Julian Hirsch on these speakers from 1986 as an example of what SR tests looked like back in the day:

POLL RESULTS: Music streaming service adoption among audiophiles in 2019...

Click on image to zoom.

Yeah, I know. Music streaming as a subscription model is the latest "revolution" for music lovers. This is why I decided to put up the recent poll in mid-March while we were concurrently also running the blind test as reported on in the last few weeks. Above, you see the overall results based on the visitors to this blog.

Remember that for the poll, I allowed voters to select up to 3 options. As a result, even though there were 616 respondents, a total of 809 selections were made. This means that up to ~30% of people selected more than 1 option and these are represented in the percentages above.

GUEST: Future Proofed (and didn't know it) - Adding Streaming to My Existing Hi-Fi.

Every once awhile, it's great to have a guest writer put up their thoughts on the Musings. I've always lived by the principle of "it really isn't what you got that matters, but how you make the best of it". I think Allan's post here is a nice example of that. These days, we have all kinds of products and technologies easily available at good prices, but when mixed with streaming services, sometimes one needs to do a bit of digging to get everything to work right the way one desires. One could spend countless dollars on things that might or might not really be of value. How we use what we have can take all kinds of forms and ultimately is a reflection of us taking control to satisfy our needs while reflecting understanding of how the products and services work... This Guest Post is a nice reminder of that!

Take it away, Allan...

GUEST POST

by Allan Folz

Introduction

Last spring on this humble blog I wrote a guest post reviewing the Sony HAP-S1. At the time I had a number of complaints with regard to the feature set. Indeed, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to keep it for the long-term. My biggest problem with the HAP-S1 was that I could not use it with any of my preferred Internet streaming services. The HAP-S1 has a pair of analog inputs and I bought it thinking I could use those with the headphone jack on my phone and laptop to be able to play back music streamed from the Internet. Also, while I knew when I purchased it that it didn't support Bluetooth, I had planned to get a Bluetooth to analog-out receiver that I could connect to its analog inputs. Unfortunately, after I received the unit I discovered there is a limitation in that the analog inputs can only be used to drive the HAP-S1's internal amplifier. Since I was using the line-out of the HAP-S1 to drive a pair of self-powered monitors, there was no way to get the signal from the analog inputs to the line-out. Instead, I'd have to move the monitor's input wires from the HAP-S1 to the phone or laptop each time I wanted to switch sources, which was a non-starter. (Or purchase a pre-amp, which was far more expense and space than I was interested in undertaking.)

MUSINGS: On Music Streaming, now that Apple's in the game...

So, the big news this week is Apple and the streaming audio announcement; Apple Music. Of course music streaming services have been around for years: Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody, Google Play Music, XBOX Music, Rdio, KKBOX (Asia), etc... Take your pick. Oh, let's not forget the mother of all media streaming - YouTube! Then there's also the FLAC lossless audiophile "darling", Tidal.

As usual with Apple announcements, it seem like the word "revolutionary" gets used rather liberally (along with describing objects as having "magical" properties). According to Apple, this announcement is "revolutionary", just like MQA from Meridian is "revolutionary" I guess. Lots of revolutions going on these days :-).

Supposedly this new Apple Music service will be streaming 256kbps AAC (not verified by Apple yet) and as expected from the fringe, some folks still are up in arms over the use of lossy compression with streaming services. It's as if lossy compression is morally evil and the mere mention automatically taints the product as deserving to be treated with disdain. Well, I guess I just don't see/hear it that way (the times I actually stream music off the Internet).