CanJam, Bye-bye SACD, DIY digital active speakers, NEST enters home audio – Audiophiledom, March 13, 2015
CanJam, Bye-bye SACD, DIY digital active speakers, NEST enters home audio
CanJam in Southern California: March 27, 28, 2015
“Over the past couple of years, I’ve been to all of the wildly successful Southern California Head-Fi Meets organized by third_eye (Ethan) and warrenpchi (Warren). Witnessing the growing scale and quality of their meets, the three of us met to explore the idea of turning next year’s Spring SoCal Head-Fi Meet into a full-blown annual CanJam event.
And so, on March 28-29, 2015–at the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel–CanJam will return to California, as a standalone event, bigger and better than ever!”
SACD is Going Bye Bye
This is kind of like taking BOTH the red and blue pills.
For those of you with large SACD collections, now would be a good time to buy your ‘last, best’ SACD player.
Those would be the players from EMM Labs… if you want the best at comparatively a reasonable price… or from those ‘other manufacturers’ for some of you other types :-), or, at the low end, the last few remaining Sony Blu-ray players that still support SACD. Over on Steve Hoffman Forums they like picking up some of these sub $150 players before they all disappear completely:
Sony Blu-Ray players with SACD
We have about 80 to 100 SACDs, mostly dual layer luckily [90% of the single-layer, pure SACDs, were bought from the Sony website itself many years ago for fairly cheap. I guess that was a clue :-)].
One has to wonder how long Blu-ray will be with us… I guess as long as it is used as a back-up medium for PCs, for however long THEY are with us. :-0
Anyway, it certainly has been a long time coming, and it has been a long time since player manufacturers have touted how well they do SACD as Redbook CDs continue to get better, and better, both the media itself and the playback hardware. And recently, of course, there are the various flavors of DSD formats – similar to SACD but not physical-media-centric and not controlled by Sony.
Easy DIY digital active speakers
This guy runs digital music out the HDMI port of his laptop into a multi-channel $200 Sony amplifier. From there, one set of 3 channels go to power each of the drivers in the 3-way crossoverless speakers. and the other 3 channels power the drivers in the other speaker.
To my ears, the Sony amplifier leaves something to be desired [like some decay and fineness of resolution, etc.] but this is a fascinating idea. All the hard work is done in the laptop, which means it is done in software, which means free or very inexpensive and very malleable allowing you to optimize for your ears, your room and your speakers.
Home Audio is going Big Time
Nest is entering the home audio business, and having thought about how a innovative tech company would approach our industry for several years, I think things as we knew them are going to get turned upside-down and inside out. This is the guy who is ‘the father of the iPod’ and the silly little smart thermostat company that sold for $3.2B. If this pans out, our hobby will really grow, finally(!), but few of the current players are going to participate in this growth [except but for the old saying: a rising tide raises all boats – but in this case it’ll be a tsunami].
That’s hi-fi for now folks. Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.
