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.

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. :-)

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:

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.

MEASUREMENTS: The Intercontinental Internet Audio Streaming Test...

Time to go intercontinental. :-) [Scene from the old movie War Games.]

After the ethernet cable results last week and the absence of any difference, there was discussion about an extreme internet music server test. What if instead of maybe 100 feet of ethernet cable from server to player, we had thousands of miles of cables in between?

With help from Mnyb from the Squeezebox Forum, we were able to orchestrate a test to demonstrate the extremes of measured performance with the server system basically on the other side of the world. He lives out in Västerås, Sweden approximately 100 km from Stockholm. A direct distance of:

MEASUREMENTS: Ethernet Cables and Audio...

Remember folks, this is what an "ethernet frame" looks like. It's data. There is no "music" in there until decoded and prepared for the DAC! Notice the CRC bytes for error detection. (The numbers represents how many bytes for each segment.)

0. Preamble

Hey folks, over the years, I have been critical of high-end audio cables... Previously, I have shown that RCA analog interconnects can result in measurable differences with channel crosstalk changes with long lengths. But the digital interconnects themselves do not result in measurable differences even in terms of jitter (TosLink SPDIF, coaxial SPDIF, or USB). Although my HDMI receiver's DAC isn't as accurate or jitter-free, different HDMI cables don't seem to make any measurable difference either. The only caveat to this being that a digital cable can just plain fail, in which case the distortion to the audio signal has a particular (annoying) characteristic which is clearly audible and not a subtle change (eg. a poor USB cable sound).

So far, I have not seen any further measurements to suggest my conclusions are inaccurate. I have seen audiophile reviewers and forum posters still claim digital cables make an audible difference and when questioned they provide lots of words but no actual empirical evidence. It has been awhile since I've seen any articles claiming objective evidence for cable measurements - haven't come across new ads or audiophile articles although of course I may have missed some.

However, as computer audio expands, there will be opportunities to "brand" more hardware as somehow "audiophile approved" and companies that make audio cables likewise will naturally capitalize on new lines of interconnects / cables... And as expected, cost of these things will be commensurate with "premium" products.

Which brings us to the concept of "audiophile ethernet cables" (see here also, and recent mainstream press exposure of the "madness"). Let me be clear. If I have issues with USB cables, or SPDIF cables, making any significant contribution to audible sound quality (assuming again essentially error-free transmission of data), there is no rational explanation whatsoever that ethernet cables should make any difference. The TCP/IP protocol has error correction mechanisms that allow for worldwide transmission integrity (otherwise Internet financial transactions should be banned!),  and is asynchronous so there is no temporal dependence on exact timing mechanisms (jitter not an issue with adequate buffer to reclock and feed the DAC). So long as the "protocol stack" is functioning as it should between the devices, there will not be any issue. Systematic errors causing audible distortion either means hardware failure or poorly implemented communication software. Therefore the expectation if we were to test or "listen to" different ethernet cables is that there would be no difference.

Since I like to make sure objectively, let us at least run a few tests to see if indeed evidence can be found to support the hypothesis.

MEASUREMENTS: Bob Dylan's "Shadows In The Night" - when 24-bit HRA isn't! (Qobuz)

Of shadows... and hot air...

A reader gave me a tip about the new Shadows In The Night album from Bob Dylan. The allegation is that the 24-bit high-resolution downloads of this album are in fact NOT true 24-bits as claimed!

To start, here's a video to show what the inversion-null should look like with a true 24-bit audio sample:

MUSINGS: The ongoing Vinyl vs. Digital debate...

The always assertive Batman. But assertiveness isn't necessarily correct...

(Just a shortish post this week... I've covered much of this in the past.)

As I mentioned in the comments section of the previous post on HRA, there have been discussions recently again around the sound quality of vinyl compared to CD. I assume it started from this article "Why CDs May Actually Sound Better Than Vinyl" from the L.A. Weekly. Overall, I think it's a good article! Some excellent quotes from veterans in the audio engineering business like Bob Clearmountain and Bob Ludwig. We even have the pleasure of an interview with James T. Russell - the "father" of digital optical media. Folks... These people know what they're talking about, so do not take their comments lightly.

Despite the fact that there's nothing ground breaking in that article, it's no surprise that the vinylphiles are up in a tizzy. Michael Fremer has now dragged out an old 1996 article about "Does Vinyl Have Wider Dynamic Range Than CDs?" (the PDF in the article). Let's talk about this...

MUSINGS: What Is The Value of High Resolution Audio (HRA)?

I promised not to talk about Pono anymore, so I won't to a significant degree :-). This article is one about high-resolution audio in general.

It has been interesting seeing the audiophile press's responses to articles such as:
Gizmodo's "Don't Buy What Neil Young Is Selling"
Pitchfork's "The Myth and the Reality of the $43 Download"

with these:

Analog Planet's (Michael Fremer) "Gizmodo Won't Post My Comment So I'm Posting It Here"
AudioStream's (Michael Lavorgna) "Is High Resolution Audio Elitist?"

As I had laid out in this blog a number of moons ago (March 2014 to be exact) in "High Resolution Audio (HRA) Expectations (A Critical Review)...", there are many challenges to overcome in order to perceive an audible difference between a true high-resolution recording and the same track down-sampled to standard CD (16/44) resolution. This challenge is significant and technically difficult; culminating in the ultimate question of whether one's own hearing mechanism is even capable of the feat. (Remember folks, aging is good for wine, not so much for hearing acuity!)

I think there are a number of issues here and it's important to treat each separately without getting overly simplistic into a single declaration of whether HRA is "good/needed" or "bad/worthless". Furthermore gentlemen, there's no need for name-calling or ad hominem attacks.

'Last' Words on PONO - Mastering Analysis & General Comments

(A friend thought the new Broadway musical hilarious.)

At some point in a relationship, we reach the end of the honeymoon...

That's of course not describing my personal relationship with the Pono idea since I've been critical of the hype put forth by Neil Young and others (like John Hamm) since the start. I'm suggesting rather that the honeymoon between anticipation for Pono with 'the world' is about to end as the Kickstarter pledges have shipped and the public can start to purchase these PonoPlayers and browse the PonoMusic Store. What will they find? Would the public expectation for music that "sounds like God" be satisfied, or would there be many who at the end of the honeymoon recognize faults which up to now were perhaps graciously overlooked.

MUSINGS: Miscellanies on audio encoding (Dolby Atmos & Meridian MQA Concerns)

Hey everyone. It really gets dark in January in Vancouver; just the kind of weather to cozy up in bed with a nice book or maybe some spirits in front of the hi-fi system :-).

So, I thought I'd offer up a few miscellaneous thoughts this week as I looked over recent CES reports.

I figured it'd be good to spend a few moments on the new encoding techniques that came out or were announced in 2014. I think the biggest advancement in audio encoding (at least as it pertains to the home) this past year was Dolby's push for Atmos into the consumer space. Remember that Atmos has already been out for a couple years in the movie theaters since 2012's release of Pixar's Brave. This happened with announcements in June 2014 and the first Atmos-encoded Blu-Ray came out on September 30 with Transformers: Age Of Extinction. Not exactly a movie that will win Academy Awards (maybe in some technical categories), but appropriate to show off some sound effects I suppose.

With Atmos (and other techniques like Auro-3D and the upcoming DTS UHD/MDA), digital processing takes another step up... We all know about the role DSP's have played in home audio including bass management, then room correction (like Audyssey MultEQ), and now we have dynamic, object-oriented sonic rendering in 3D space adapted for one's speaker configuration on top of the typical multichannel (5.1/7.1) mixing. Cool.

I'm unclear whether this will have much relevance for audiophiles (unlikely I would think) given the relatively small numbers of "multichannel audiophiles", but it does represent a true technological step forward. The question is whether many folks will be able to have a home theater setup capable of experiencing a significant difference given the "need" to increase the number of speakers. Even having a dedicated sound room (the solution to the WAF issue of course!), I'm really not keen to cut holes in my ceiling for placing speakers up there and running even more wires to the audio rack for height channels. Dolby's push for ceiling-bounce speakers (like these Definitive Tech A60's [see review]) is an interesting though compromised solution when it comes to fidelity. From a physics perspective, there's only so much that can be done with what would be small up-firing speakers, room interactions, and the timing/phase issues that need to be accounted for. Even if there were compelling high-fidelity music to be enjoyed, I doubt many if any of these up-firing solutions would be acceptable for audiophiles used to very low distortions in their existing speaker systems. I see that Kalman Rubinson in January's Stereophile suggested the potential for 3D speaker arrays to be used for even more effective room correction. Hmmm, not sure if this would be worth it if those extra channels actually are of inferior sound quality... One could be creating more problems than it's worth.

Time will tell and certainly an interesting technical development to keep an eye out for if one has a multichannel setup now that the "800lb gorillas" (Dolby & DTS) seem to be seriously getting involved with their usual hardware partners (like Denon, Pioneer, Yamaha...).

The other "advancement" in encoding technique in 2014 comes from Meridian and their MQA. This certainly got lots of air time in the audiophile press late last year. Smart move throwing a fancy party (oooooohhhh... 69th floor! The audio must have been orgasmic!) and inviting your media friends of course - everyone loves a good party! Let us spend a bit more time on this one.

MEASUREMENTS: Tascam UH-7000 USB Interface (Part II: As an ADC)

TEAC & Tascam combo with size differential. The E-MU 0404USB in the background to the left.

Alright, it's time to spend some time looking at using the Tascam UH-7000 as an analogue-to-digital converter. Remember in the first instalment, I showed that this device is already a very good DAC. This time around, I wanted to see whether this device did the job well as an ADC; my main desire being to use it for vinyl needle drops and to see if it can be used as a good measuring device in comparison to the Creative E-MU 0404USB I've been using for the last couple years (which I bought mainly as a DAC back in 2009).

Happy New Year!

Hey folks, welcome to 2015 :-).

I was hoping to post on the ADC component to the Tascam UH-7000 today but the wife and I decided on a surprise trip to Disneyland instead with the kids.

Let's aim for next week...

Happy New Years to all!

MEASUREMENTS: Tascam UH-7000 USB Interface (Part I: As a DAC)

0. Preamble

Well, look what Santa brought me early this month:

So apparently I had been "nice" in his books so he decided to see about getting me an upgrade on an ADC device for vinyl recording and measurement accuracy :-).

This is the Tascam UH-7000, part of the "pro" line of audio interfaces made by Tascam/Teac. It's a simple 2-channel model. On the front we have 2 large knobs to control the preamp input level for each channel - rotation feels smooth - good enough for reasonably precise volume adjustments. There's the "Phones Level" knob for headphone volume and when the "Link Line" LED is lit, this also serves as a master volume control for the microphone/XLR inputs. Holding down one of the two buttons for a few seconds above the "Phones Level" knob allows you to turn on the +48V mic phantom power. There are the corresponding multicolored 20-segment LED indicators; very useful to check for clipping.

Here's the rear of the unit:

To the left are the analogue inputs. This unit is meant for professional audio use so there are no single-ended RCA connectors to be found. Instead to the upper left we have 1/4" TRS balanced inputs, and XLR balanced below for analogue input. Analogue output is via balanced XLR connectors, and to the right we have XLR digital (S/PDIF or AES/EBU) in and outs, a USB 2.0 port below, and of course IEC connector for power cable.

MUSINGS: Passion, Audiophilia, Faith and Money

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.   --- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Human passion is an interesting phenomenon isn't it? With it, we as individuals can strive to achieve in ways we look back on and marvel. Passion drives creative pursuits like symphonic compositions or visual masterpieces. Prosocial acts of compassion and love flow from this most mysterious fountain to produce individuals of such distinction that we cannot help but show reverence. Scientific achievements likewise require the passion to fuel the drive for understanding whether in creative ways (consider Einstein's "thought experiments" resulting in the theory of relativity), or the power to endure and overcome the monotony of experimentation (how many prototype light bulbs did Edison make?).

As a community, a common passion provides the glue that bind us together. A sense of vision; of purpose. Consider the joys of a close-knit family, teamwork (hopefully!) at one's place of employment, or the excitement fuelling the rise of one's favourite sports team, or the pride of one's nation in the Olympic Games.

Passion also ties us together in less grandiose ways of course... For whatever reason, the fact that you're reading this post probably means you have an affinity to audio of some form. Perhaps you're an avid album collector revelling in the ownership and experience of music, or maybe passionate about the hardware side; the fascination with the equipment itself which can enhance the joy of music. Given that I have put together many articles on this blog on the hardware, I must count myself also in some way as part of the "hardware" subculture of audio.

As much as human passion (and emotion in general) can be positive, we must be careful of the converse effect. Consider notorious individual "crimes of passion", terrorist groups, racial acts of hatred, or destructive cults and religions throughout world history. Again, these are the extremes, but they highlight the dangers inherent in individuals or groups when emotions rule, but rational thought, and reality-testing become suppressed.

The folks on the Squeezebox Audiophile Forum bring up interesting articles on the web every once awhile. Recently, there's this discussion about this ethernet cables and jitter article. On the surface the author makes a case for timing being inherently important in audio. Sure, that's true. But of course, for anyone who understands the asynchronous nature of ethernet data communications and how jitter originates in the DAC and can manifest in the analogue output, it's quite clear that the simplistic explanations presented just makes no sense. Yet in the "hardware audiophile" subculture, it's somehow encouraged to accept magical thinking such as this about needing "better" ethernet cables and those who are bold enough to state the facts are often painted as "closed minded" or those unable to hear the reported subjective difference are branded as having "cloth ears" or accused of not using equipment of adequate resolution (or adequate price?). Of course, audiophiles of this variety discount objective analysis that "captures" and measures the sound and refuse to acknowledge methodology which would remove subjective biases as if they are immune to well described psychological phenomena (eg. banning discussion on ABX or blind testing in some forums).

When a group of people gather together with a common passion, share ideas initially based on some semblance of fact but in time builds and are fuelled by purely subjective testimony, and ultimately discounts divergent opinions (confirmation bias), what we end up with is a subculture based on faith. It's quite evident that this is what has become of discussion around high fidelity audio reproduction in many parts of the Internet and in the print magazines in general. Where there is faith, fought with vigour, breeds a form of religion.

Since time immemorial, money and religion have always been intertwined. The sale of items of faith has always been a high margin proposition (consider the sale of indulgences). As a business, audiophile equipment is of course about the profit motive. However for years now, claims have been made about various dubious hardware (particularly tweaks, cables, "room treatments") and in recent years software (like OS optimizers and playback software) based on articles of faith without any evidence whether directly (see p. 128 in the January 2015 issue of Stereophile for a contemporary example) or indirectly through published articles in the audio "press". The question of journalistic ethics is certainly questionable with a number of websites where financial supports remain undisclosed. Complicit in this is the audiophile mainstream media's apparent lack of courage and conviction to take a stand to question or test these claims in any reasonable manner as to whether these items make any discernible difference. I can only presume with the loss of subscription income, magazines probably are at a point where they are at the mercy of advertising dollars to survive (in this regard, we can't blame them I suppose since "biting the hand that feeds" them will lead to their own demise). But without a media willing to engage in critical thinking to sort out faith from science, how then can the typical audiophile be educated? I cannot help but believe that in the face of all of this, independent blogs and message forums become important for critical thinking in this day and age (and not just for audio).

Much of what I describe above isn't unique to the audiophile world. Consider homeopathy, alternative health care, or the nutraceutical industry where likely much (or all) of the "effect" is placebo, yet many subscribe to the beliefs wholeheartedly and spend significant dollars as well. At least there are some regulations in that industry and even Dr. Oz got his hands slapped before the Senate earlier this year. Many of these alternative theories can of course be discounted, but medical science still holds many mysteries to be discovered as it develops and secrets of the body are revealed. The thing about audio of course is that this is a mature applied science we're talking about (especially digital computer audio), not discovering some new frontier in genetics for example! We could argue about audibility of things like 16/44 vs. 24/96 knowing that maybe 16/44 is cutting too close or that there could be filtering issues with some DACs around the Nyquist frequency. But there are other things like ethernet cables where there really is nothing to argue about by virtue of what it is and what it was engineered to do! All of that stuff about timing and jitter (referring to the article above) are just not possible "issues" between otherwise error-free ethernet cables. A belief or "faith" that it is possible constitutes some kind of magical thinking which when systematized (as the Industry might want to do to instill fear and uncertainty) adds to the overall audiophile myth. Not some new frontier for science to explore, but certainly more ground for manufacturers to create revenue from the unsuspecting audiophile told to expect an upgrade in sound and cheer-led by the press.

I do not begrudge companies for making £1,600 ethernet cables. If money went into the materials used in construction of these cables, I'm sure they'll look and feel nice. But Patek Philippe makes nice expensive watches and they don't claim superior time accuracy. But Chord feels their ethernet cables sound better ("big differences") and evangelism from the "priests" in the audiophile press continues (here, here) with not a shred of evidence over these years. (Could it be? There just is no evidence other than mere testimony? And how much money are you willing to tithe to the Church of Audiophilia?)

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Merry Christmas everyone! No matter how busy the holidays may get, I hope you find peace, love, and time to enjoy the tunes. :-)