Richard Jernigan -> RE: Uncompressed / lossless audio files (Apr. 22 2018 1:49:28)
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In the late 1980s I started reading Stereophile magazine--while it was still in the small format. I thought they were either nuts, or the world's greatest deadpan humorists. They kept writing about how different CD players sounded different. Before moving to Kwajalein in the central Pacific, there were a couple of things I wanted: a good classical guitar and a good set of headphones. I bought a spruce/Brazilian "doble tapa" (actually a double back) from Manuel Contreras Sr. in Madrid. Though Santa Barbara is a fairly small town, there were two "high end" audio shops there. One of them was run by an engineer who used to work at the Delco defense plant. He demonstrated a pair of six foot ( 2 meters) tall electrostatic speakers. I asked him to play one of the Julian Bream CDs made in Wardour Chapell by the well known recording engineer, speaker designer and entrepreneur John Bowers. The speakers sounded horrible--extremely overemphasized high frequencies. I asked the owner if he wanted to know what a guitar really sounded like. He said,"Sure." I went home, brought back the Contreras, and played it sitting between the speakers. The shop owner said he was amazed. He had a pair of Stax Signature Lambda headphones on sale. I listened to the Bream CD on them, and bought them on the spot. The owner looked a little disappointed. He said, "I thought I was going to get to take them home." Next I went around to various places and listened to CD players with the Staxes. Guess what? The CD players sounded different. I bought a mid-range Sony: $350, when consumer decks were going for about $150. I was happy at Kwajalein for a while. The Staxes are still the cleanest transducer I have ever heard, but they don't kick you in the chest on the bass like a good speaker. I started carrying around the Staxes and a half dozen CDs I liked when I traveled to USA, Europe and Asia. The $1,000 Sony and Meridian CD players sounded a little better than mine, but not worth that much money to me. I heard lots of $10-25K systems that sounded really, really terrible--and a few that were pretty good, mainly in England and Germany where people actually listened to live classical music. A small shop in Honolulu gave me a good deal on some used B&W 803 speakers and a new Adcom amp. I was fairly happy. A couple of years later I stopped by the Honolulu shop and plugged the Staxes into a Linn CD player. It cost as much as the other two high end jobs, but sounded much better to me. My investments had been going pretty well, and you can save some cash working at Kwajalein, so I bought the Linn. Next time I was in Houston, I dropped by the Linn dealer. Ended up buying a pair of Keltik speakers, and had them shipped to Kwaj--all 440 pounds (200 kilos). Linn had been following a fairly radical path in speaker design for a while. Instead of putting an analog crossover network in the box with a set of speaker drivers, they designed daughter cards to go on the front ends their amps. Each speaker driver gets a separate channel, with its own frequency and phase tailored by the daughter card on its amp channel. The Keltiks were the best dynamic speakers I ever heard. Just a tiny bit less clean and detailed then the Quad electrostatics, but they will really kick you in the chest on both classical and rock, which the Quads can't do. A friend said he was interested in buying the Adcom and B&Ws, along with my Sony CD player. He and his wife came to listen. She is a professional violinist, played in various symphony orchestras, including Boston. Another guy came along to listen as well. He is an M.I.T. PhD electrical engineer, who worked as a professional sound engineer before he went to M.I.T. He worked on some of the classical guitarist Christopher Parkening's commercial recordings. All three said the Linn rig was head and shoulders above the Adcom and B&Ws. I've never tried to tell one amp from another. I don't know whether I could. But the difference between the Linn rig and the other one was obvious right off the bat. I think a big part of it may be moving the frequency shaping to the front end of the amps, taking the somewhat non-reciprocal crossover network out of the feedback loop. But another factor may be that each of the four drivers in each box gets its own 200 watt amp channel. The only time I entered an audio shop after I bought the Linn rig was after I retired and moved back to Austin. I wanted a setup to go in my computer room. I bought some used Linn bookshelf speakers, a used Linn subwoofer and a used Linn FM tuner/CD player combo, all for a $few hundred. I can play Youtube stuff over Wi-Fi. If I want to listen to something critically I get out the Staxes, but the the computer's sound card is the weak link, along with Youtube lossy compression when it's low quality. I haven't tried distinguishing high bitrate MP3s from uncompressed high quality audio--never had any reason to. I don't consider myself an audiophile. I just wanted some gear that had a tonal balance about like that of a symphony orchestra in a good hall, which includes powerful bass when called for, and where you could hear some detail in a good recording. No recording sounds like the real thing, but it's surprisingly rare to hear a rig that meets even the few requirements in the second sentence of this paragraph. And it's rare to hear a recording that actually sounds pretty much like a guitar. Engineers like to pile on a bunch of processing, and players seem to like it--if in fact they have any control over the final product. Most professional classical musicians I know have pretty cheap sound systems. Most of them say, "It never sounds like the real thing, so why spend a bunch of money?" RNJ
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