I’m away at the Munich show, it’s late and I’m knackered, so I’m waiting to add the niceties of all the internal links until next Tuesday but if you need them now check out the pages list on the bottom right for the links to new pages for Naim Ovator S-600, Neat Elite SX and the Thorens TD 309 Tri-Balance…
May 2009
Thursday May 21 2009. Munich High-End Show. Thorens is delighted to announce that the results of over 18 months of research and development have come to fruition in the shape of the new Thorens TD 309 Tri-Balance turntable. The TD 309 will be available from September 2009 in a choice of Black or Red. Click on an image above to…
Thursday 21 May 2009. Munich High End Show. Naim Audio today launches the Ovator S-600 high-end floor-standing loudspeaker. The Ovator S-600 is a technically advanced loudspeaker system targeted at the music lover. The S-600 has taken three years to bring to market. Naim has a history of designing and manufacturing loudspeakers that deliver the maximum music and emotional communication. Click…
Munich High End Show, 21 May 2009. Neat Acoustics is pleased announce the launch of the ELITE SX. The ELITE SX is a worthy successor to the ELITE SE. The ELITE SX continues the Neat tradition of delivering serious audio performance from discreet and attractive enclosures, by means of unorthodox thinking and the ingenious implementation of some unusual ideas. Extremely…
Chord’s new and extremely pretty SuperShield HDMI is available now. It’s targeted at the entry-level end of the specialist market where the performance:price ratio is absolutely critical. But entry-level at Chord is just an expression that means a greater challenge The SuperShield is HDMI 1.3b certified. It uses 26awg oxygen free copper conductors for high conductivity, and low density gas…
Chord’s new and extremely pretty SuperShield HDMI is available now and will cost £49.95 for a 1 metre, £69.95 for a 3 metre and £89.95 for a 5 metre cable. It’s targeted at the entry-level end of the specialist market where the performance:price ratio is absolutely critical. Click on one of the images and it will open enabling you to…
Very interested to read on Amarra’s website and I paraphrase ‘it’s easy to make music sound good on a computer but hard to make it sound fabulous’. I think they have been listening to my conversations.
Next week I’m in Munich for the High End show and by coincidence will be sharing a booth (or to be more exact one of my clients Thorens is sharing a booth themed Sources of the future as it’s vinyl and streaming with Higoto who are Germany’s streaming experts.
The demos will be of Thoren’s new Tri-Balance turntable, the Logitech Transporter and a Macbook running iTunes with the Amarra software into a Weiss DAC.
Mid April I bought a few downloaded tracks from BlueCoast Records. They were hi-res recordings and not to bad at all.
Since then the guys at Blue Coast have not left me alone. Every few days I get another email trying to flog me some more.
Nearly every application on this planet is easier to reinstall without losing stuff than iTunes.
Computer audio seems to generate emotions when discussing what products to use that really are odd. Ideally one would take a computer, connect a good DAC and play one’s favourite music using one’s favourite app.
If only it were that simple. The more I experiment the more I realise that CA is absolutely similar to analog audio or indeed any audio when taken seriously. Every change is audible.
Of course, just because a change is audible doesn’t mean it matters.
The expression bandied about on forums about Computer Audio is bit transparent. The theory is simple: it’s getting the bits from the Hard Drive out of the computer without them being manipulated/changed in any way.
I’ve tried many music playing apps and they all seem to sound subtly different. Even different releases of iTunes are reported to sort different. Life is far to short to bother to try different releases. As they say tried it once and didn’t like it.
For convenience for quick playback I tend to use VLC www.videolan.org. It seems to play almost everything audio and video and can even stream stuff over my network. It works well for Radio Paradise too.