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.

Radio still kicking, CD sales *ouch*, Target equipment stands – Audiohpiledom March 10, 2015

Radio still kicking, CD sales *ouch*, Target equipment stands

 

Radio Still Kicking(!)

[Maybe not King, but what a shocker – we thought radio was dead]

Via Nielson

“The power of radio extends across all major demographics and ethnicities: 91% of Millennials are reached by radio each week, and penetration among both African Americans and Hispanics also exceeds 90%.”

and more

“Of the 243 million Americans (aged 12 or older) using radio each week, 66.6 million of them are Millennials. This far outpaces the size of the weekly Generation X and Boomer radio audiences, with 57.9 million weekly listeners each. The younger generation also listens to a lot! Millennials spend more than 11 hours a week with radio, and nearly three quarters (73%) of their listening occurs while outside the home and close to making purchasing decisions.”

[Note the different (Non-overlapping!) times per day each age group listens to the radio.]

 

The marginalization of the CD and resulting shrinkage of the recorded music industry. 

 Via The Current.

There are still 140 million CDs sold in the US. Almost a billion worldwide. CDs are not going away for us audiophiles for many decades, and will always dwarf LP sales [IMO]

units-vs-dollars-riaa

Adjusted for inflation…

 

OK. Let’s cry these jerks [the RIAA] a river.

They are selling CDs that cost 20 cents to make [or less, for the entire package] for $20 or so. Made some money with this scam. Created a bubble in their earnings.

Now people are fed up and do not want to pay anything at all. Surprised?

DVDs are the same scam. Even at Costco DVDs cost $18 or so. Expect more shouting when that bubble collapses as movies also migrate from product to service.

Anyway, like all bubbles, the post bubble era will be characterized by a depressed value for music, but it will recover eventually. Think one billion+ people subscribing to music services at $30/month. 

 

Bryston becomes international distributor for Target equipment stands.

via Canada Hifi

 

Glad to see this. I have a couple of Target stands here in my office holding up my monitor speakers – but I had a hard time finding where they are still being sold on the internet for our Hi-Fi Equipment Racks page. Hopefully Bryston will fix that problem.

 

That’s hi-fi for now folks. Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.

 

The evolution of musical enjoyment plus How loudspeakers work – Audiophiledom March 7, 2015

The evolution of musical enjoyment plus How loudspeakers work

The Science, History and Dissappearance of Real Music ENJOYMENT Today by the Masses

This article at Mic covers several topics, all to support the thesis that the Internet / MP3 / Spotify is killing the actual enjoyment of music for most people.

This might be positive for the industry if we can get people to walk into a decent high-end audio dealership –  and if at the same time if there should appear more decent high-end audio dealerships.  Or  maybe they should just go to high-end audio shows –  much better sound there for the most part…. Hmmmmmm…..

The  contrast between high-end audio and what  most people are used to hearing is growing and growing…

“A recent study performed by audio researchers at DTS divided a group of listeners into two groups — one that watched a video accompanied by standard stereo 96-kbps sound (Spotify’s default audio setting) and the other group listened in 256-kbps audio format. The responses in the brains of the group listening with the 256-kbps audio were 14% more powerful on metrics measuring memory creation and 66% higher on pleasure responses. And this was just 96 to 256 kbps. “

 

Lots of links  to articles and graphs in that Mic article…

From Spotify’s voluminous data analyzed by Music Machinery :

song-skipping-by-age

Just what is with you late 40 somethings and late 60 somethings?  🙂

 

Some nice animations about how loudspeakers work. Talk about your audio porn…


 

 

That’s hi-fi for now folks. Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.