by Michael

Our inner ears generate their own sounds

Our inner ears generates its own sounds – which might account for some dichotomy between measured and subjective quality of some high fidelity systems.

Seems to me that this effect, linked to below, would tend to make the subjective experience better than it would ordinarily be. Both aiding listening and confounding ‘golden ear’ evaluation of absolute quality of high fidelity audio

“Not only can the human ear detect sounds, it can also generate them. If the ear hears the two upper tones of a major triad, it produces the fundamental of the chord which can then be measured. This phenomenon [is] called “otoacoustic emission”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-audiometric-reliable.html

 

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 by Michael

Audiophile’s Guide to High-end Audio Subwoofers

Moved the old Audiophile’s Guide to High-end Audio Subwoofers page to the new website. Updated it. And isn’t it interesting that there are fewer subwoofers available now than even just a few years ago.

For example, the Krell take-no-prisoners wait-a-half-hour-after-eating subwoofer presented at CEDIA 2012 is no longer found on their website.

Perhaps REL is just continuing to grow market share. Perhaps full-range speakers are just getting better at handling the low frequencies. Perhaps hybrid home audio / home theater systems are no longer as popular as they were a few years ago.

Whatever.

Still fun things even though we never actually had one here. Talked about it some. Mostly back when we had a combined home audio / home theater system.

But never actually did anything about it…

Apparently not a lot of you all did either, though many people we talk to USED to have one at one time or another.

 

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 by Michael

RMAF 2014 October 10th – 12th Denver, Colorado

Just a month until RMAF 2014, our local version of a high-end audio show.

The Rocky Mountain Audiofest website seems much improved. Looks like no overflow rooms at the neighboring Hyatt this year.

Now in its 11th year. Yow. Somebody is getting old and I think it is me.

We are not showing this year though we thought seriously about showing the Acapella Atlas speakers. But… considering we do not have a room at the show, I guess we will not. :-/

We are going to do a show report, I think, again this year. But since there are so many Audio Federation-like show reports these days, seems like we need to do a un-Audio Federation-like show report to differentiate ourselves.

Wonder how the heck we are going to do that….? We have ideas.But perhaps it will be better left as a surprise. Don’t think the major websites will copy this for several years – but you never can tell.

[Yes. Sorry. It irritates that dozens of sites copied our approach to show reports. Life was so much easier when show reports were just Stereophile posting 10 photos and us posting 1000. Also irritates that I moved the show reports around too much over the years and people couldn’t find them sometimes.]

Lately, and for the foreseeable future, show reports will be here and the archive of the photos and information from shows will be on Ultimist. We might get a little behind, but we’re trying hard to manage all this and make it happen before the turn of the next century.

It was fun putting stuff up on Instagram for the Newport Beach Hifi Show, but not too many audiophiles over on Instagram yet and integration with Facebook there is puzzlingly absent [aka very, very poor] considering that Facebook bought them years ago now.

So. Yes. Stay tuned for the bestest Audiofest 2014 Show Report Ever 😉

 

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