The Amazon Fire TV arrived on Friday and immediately replaced both the Apple TV and the Sony network media player in my family room system. One box instead of two, one SMPS instead of two and one ethernet connection instead of one.
The beauty of the Amazon Fire TV box is that I can now easily watch Netflix or Amazon Prime Video without changing inputs of my DAC or TV. Less chance for a macro to go wrong.
Having purchased a Thunderbolt ‘sound card’, the Zoom TAC-2, to make life easier when measuring loudspeakers it was too much of a temptation not to try recording some vinyl. This post is even simpler, linked below are four recordings of an excerpt from the same Nat King Cole track. The only change between recordings was the sampling rate. All are 24Bit Aiff files, one is 44.1, one. 88.2, one is 176.4 and the largest is 192kHz sampling.
So does the record cleaning help? A simple answer: yes. It doesn’t make damaged records perfect, but it does clean out crud, whether that is excess mold release agent, leeching plastizers, or just dirt. On some records is removes a good amount of the clicks and pops and on others it just removes a level of low-level masking.