by Michael

SACD, DVD-AUDIO, HD-DVD and BLU-RAY

I saw both HD-DVD and BLU-RAY demos at the local audio (Mirage, KEF) / video mart.

Besides coming away with a vow to never underestimate the capability of some stores to treat people like they were marks at a carnival,…

I was not able to determine much visual difference between the new HighRes video formats and their ordinary DVD bretheren.

There was not more clarity or detail or color variety or…., except in perhaps a few rare scenes, (say one out of every 10 seconds the image would tighten-up and there would be increased definition).

This is partially because DVD upsampling… I mean upscaling technologies are getting better and better all the time – and partly because the monitors are not all 1080p yet.

We’ll see more at CEDIA 2006 in Denver, but all this seems mightily familiar, doesn’t it? How SACD / DVD-AUDIO are better, but not worlds better, than the format they were trying to supplant.

If, for the money, an ordinary Mary or Joe can spend a modest amount more on the player / video screen to get more improvement than what a similar investment in the new, ‘risky’ format offers… well…..

The one thing that the new video formats have going is CAPACITY. At 10 times the capacity of an ordinary DVD, things like T.V. series anthologies will fit on fewer than, well, let’s see: the 78 episodes of Star Trek would fit on only 2 discs, and on only 1 disc when the next generation[sic] DVD discs under-development come out.

Anyway, I originally hoped that these new HD discs might be used for highres audio – but now I wonder about the future of the format itself.

Perhaps it will be up to the HTPC and ipodPC crowd to take the format where no recording conglomerate will be able to go: because there will always be the inevitable HD-DVD-burners on computers….. 🙂

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo 0 comments
 by Michael

CEDIA 2006 here in Denver

CEDIA is in only a few days (Sept. 14th).

Not sure what to expect. A lot of cables and brackets and LCD TVs I guess. Nordost will be there – their cables work inside walls and under carpeting very nicely – So at least one high-end audio company will be on the floor there.

Next door is T.H.E. Show – which is where Kharma loudspeakers will be exhibited along with presumably other high-end gear. There is even talk that we might end up exhibiting there [Hey, I just live here – it is not as if I know what is going on here half the time].

In any case, we got tickets awhile back and we will be trying to find a place to park along with the rest of the Denver Natives and have us a look see [parking in downtown Denver is like parking downtown in any big city – except there are no city-owned parking garages or nor hotel-owned parking garages – at least there wern’t last I checked.

There will be pictures taken – but please don’t expect a HE 2006 deluge – I am going thru a 12-step program all summer to try and calm down my camera-clicking trigger finger.

We’ll see…

It just might be too boring to take many photos anyway – Audio Federation does not do installation or trunk slamming…. and for good reason. I mean, yes, there is good money there – great in fact….But HT does not focus much on good sound – at least not much beyond the basic ‘impressive’ stage. Enjoyable? Emotional? Magical??

Hopefully, we’ll get around to setting up a Home Theater system here sometime soon – with all of those things. But, fair warning, it will likely have out-wall speakers and out-of-closet equipment racks and cables strewn across the floor, …. 🙂

in CEDIA 2006 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Just Plain Finicky

No, not us.

Well, yeah, I guess we are finicky too… But this is about finicky audio systems.

I’ve heard a recent $200K system sound like my old $3K (Adcom / ADS / Toshiba first generation CD player) system when a different transport was introduced into it. Slow, atonal, washed out, muddy, etc.

I’ve heard a different but similar system brought to its knees with an unbroken-in powercord was introduced on the DAC. Bright, glaring, headache-inducing.

I could go on, and you know that I do, sometimes, do go on. But I will spare us.

So, what does this mean that highly tuned systems can be detuned so easily?

1. That systems are highly dependent on each and every piece of equipment and cabling to sound their most optimally very best

2. That there is some level of instability involved in system configuration

3. that system optimization may be quite similar to optimzations in other fields, that there are locally maximum configurations and that to get from one to the other one will likely be ‘detuning’ the system along the way. That similar to Simulated Annealing optimization techniques, many people more or less randomize their system configuration and then let it settle, after which they test to see if the system is better than it was before. Unfortunately, I think this ends up to more of a Random Walk for many people – who use faulty scoring to determine what ‘best’ is, as well as what to ‘heat up’ to get to the next better configuration. [For those of you in Math, Engineering, Operations Research or Computer Science – this will all be wonderfully illuminating, humorous, and not really very useful as far as I can tell… at least not right out of the box].

4. That many people (aka reviewers) who seem to put random pieces of unbroken in equipment in their system – and like it – have very strange and chaotic interpretations of ‘better’ [unless this peice of equipment is either WAY better than the piece it is replacing OR the piece it was replacing wasn’t broken-in either and theis new one just sounds bad in a different way that is Oh Such A Relief because the old one was driving them crazy].

OK, Summer is over. It is cold here (55 degrees F here Saturday afternoon). It is getting dark around 7:30-8:00. Time to go back inside with a good sack of CDs/LPs/?s. [AKA the Blog will get updated more often]

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy 0 comments