April 2009 PS AV Journal

• Blarney
• PerfectWave Cables, finally!
• Trade up
• High definition audio explained
• CD vs. HRx demo
• Download and burn until the Bridge
• CD and DVD sampler

Blarney
Our oldest son, Lon, just got married to a wonderful young lady and we celebrated the event in Dublin Ireland.  Terri, along with the boys and I all spent a terrific week in Ireland having fun with family and doing a bit of traveling around the Emerald Isle.

I was armed with my camera and Terri the guide book while we headed South to see what was interesting; and there is much to see of interest in Ireland.  We wound up near Cork where the famous Blarney Stone is located.  “Blarney” basically translates to “BS’ and it is said that if you kiss this stone you will gain the gift of Blarney and become a very talkative person full with the gift of gab.

Well, neither of us could pass up the opportunity to kiss this 1000 year old stone and we paid our 20 Euros for the privilege and headed up the stairs of the ancient castle.  At the very top one learns that to kiss this stone you have to lay down on your back and lean out over the edge of the castle in a rather precarious manner while the guide holds your feet so you don’t fall.  To be honest, it scared the BS out of me; which is probably a good thing since kissing the stone adds to that account and heck knows I have plenty of Blarney in me already!  Here’s photographic proof!  Check out how black the place you kiss is.  I guess 1000 years of kissing has made its mark on “the stone”.

And speaking of photographic, I had to figure something to do with all my shots so I made a really nice calendar of Ireland which I am happy to share with any of you that are interested.  Each calendar is a one-off color printing handled by Apple and available by going here for $29.95 including shipping (basically our cost).  You can check out the shots at this link as well.  Unfortunately, Apple will not send these to anywhere outside the US so we have to restrict the shipping to the US for now.  For you camera buffs, these were all shot with the remarkable new 21 megapixel Canon 5d MKII, HD glass loaned to us by Canon, facilitated by our good friend Mike Mount.

PerfectWave Cables, finally!
They have arrived and just in time.  We’ve been inundated by people asking about the PW power cables and folks not too happy that the older line, the xStreams, haven’t been available for a month or so.  All that’s fixed now with the arrival of the PerfectWave AC power series.

Gorgeous to behold and wonderful for what they do to your system, the PW AC Series are the finest power cables we’ve ever made.  What’s unique about the PW series is they represent a real departure from the power cables of the past and focus on both conductor shape and shielding.

I know we spent a lot of Journal space writing about them in earlier notes to you so I won’t go over this again.  However, there’s a great bit of information already on the website and so I would encourage you to go read up on the cables and if you have any questions, let us know.

Check out how the PerfectWave AC cable looks plugged into the PerfectWave DAC.  It’s a marriage made in heaven.  Really, these two were made for each other and they are just stunning together.  Our thanks to VP of Sales Dave Kakenmaster who first proposed the idea of having the designs match and Scott Gibson who created the industrial design and look to these beauties.

Trade up program
So I can tell you that regardless of what you know about these new PerfectWave power cables there’s one overriding fact to consider: they just knock the socks off anything else we’ve ever tried out there.  And this is important because for the next few months you can trade in whatever you’re using and add these beauties to your system.

The trade in deal varies from country to country but here in the US and Canada we’ll give you 25% off the price of the PerfectWave power cable in trade for any working aftermarket power cable you trade in.  The spirit of this is to help you move out what you have and move in what you want.

The trade-up deal is good through June 30th, 2009, so there’s time to audition and make your decision but I am so delighted with the improved openness, pacing and bottom end qualities of these cables that everything I own has been replaced by PW’s, lock, stock and barrel.

Call your dealer, your distributor or call us, but we’re predicting the first shipment of these beauties will sell out before the middle of May.  Have fun!

High Definition audio explained
I told you I was now full of Blarney and let me prove it to you.  There’s a new video I made up on the website that is 8 minutes long and explains how to get High Definition audio in and out of your computer.  Videos are a superior way of transferring info for many people, including me, and this may be a really good way for you to start learning the ins and outs of High Definition audio.

The video was prompted by our good friend Walter “Wally” Liederman, who many of you know and have spoken with on the phone.  Walter called me and started asking some technical questions about High Definition audio, how to reproduce it and at the end of our hour long conversation, Walter said “you really need to bottle up what you just said and share it”.

The video starts with understanding what we all want to experience: High definition audio in our listening environments.  It makes the point that while we would all love to have a PerfectWave Transport so we could play these high resolution discs straight away, most of us don’t and may not for a bit of time.  But I am assuming none of us wants to miss out on the experience and so I thought it appropriate to help our Journal readers have fun with high definition audio while they wait.

Once you watch the video and get setup, you can go to www.hdtracks.com and download their free high resolution sampler and give it a try.  What you’ll receive for free is 4 tracks from Rimsky-Korsakov as well as the Mozart Violin Concerto in G major.

To watch the video, simply click here to go to the link.  This will take you to the PS Learning Center.

CD vs. HRx demo
To really understand the full impact of High Definition audio recordings it’s necessary to compare them with the original compromised CD versions.  Trust me on this, it’s worth your time.

One of the greatest delights of recent months has been for me to take the PerfectWave Transport around the world demonstrating the difference between standard red book CD and reference Recording’s HRx format.  It’s just jaw dropping and no one who’s had a chance to hear this demo hasn’t been blown away.  Tomorrow (Sunday the 26th), for example, I am meeting with the LA and Orange County Audio Society at Evolution Audio in Agoura (2PM), and then on to David Weinhart Designs (5 pm) to demonstrate this amazing comparison and explain how it all works.  Feel free to drop in!

First a bit of history so we’re all on the same page.  Pretty much every recording ever made was made at a higher resolution than what you listen to.  For example, Reference Recordings are created at 4 times higher sample rate than you can place on a CD.  Even original analog master tapes sound FAR better than their vinyl counterparts.  The point is, recording engineers are listening to much better musical performances than you are.  That is, up until now.

For the first time, you too can hear exactly what the recording engineers are hearing and you can do it in the comfort of your listening room.  The experience is simply extraordinary.  This isn’t a subtle nuance or “slightly better highs” we often experience.  This is the real deal.  You may have gotten a taste of this with SACD, but the experience I am talking about, which is High Definition WAV files in PCM just trounces anything else I have ever heard.

How do we get to experience this?  Well, you’ll need a way to play this new media which is either recorded onto DVD in a WAV, FLAC or AIFF file, or downloaded into the computer.  Computers can decode these, but CD and DVD transports cannot.  That is, “cannot” up until now.

PS Audio’s new PerfectWave Transport not only plays standard Red Book CD’s better than just about anything out there, it also is the only dedicated transport that plays WAV files directly off the DVD.  What’s cool is that the same transport can play both CD as well as DVD so when we do our comparisons it’s on the same equipment.  We simply slip in a CD, play it for a couple of minutes, take it out and put in the DVD High Definition version and play that.  Bingo.  It’s a remarkable experience.

But what about a computer?  I mentioned that computers can store these files and operate software like Media Monkey that permit these to be decoded and fed to your system through a computer.  All that is true but the quality is nothing like what comes out of the PWT.  This is because computers are great at many things: this isn’t one of them.  A few manufacturers have taken computer motherboards, hard drives and sound cards, placed them into a fancy chassis and called it a high end CD player.  And, indeed, it is but computer motherboards and peripherals suffer from noisy environments; the biggest downside being jitter.  To solve the jitter problem and boast good specs they employ data manipulation and sample rate conversion.  So yes they measure well, but no they don’t sound as good as they can.

What comes out of our low jitter, dedicated transport (using no data manipulation or sample rate conversion) and what comes out of a computer (regardless of its housing) is a pleasant surprise for those of us owning the PWT which, BTW, is still on schedule to ship in early May.  The Betas are shipping as promised next week.

One last thought to contemplate: if all master recordings are superior to their currently available copies, whether on CD or vinyl, wouldn’t it make sense for the struggling record labels to begin releasing their entire libraries on High Definition discs or downloads?  Of course it makes sense and guess what they are doing at an increasing rate?

I believe we are at the beginning of a whole new era of High Definition audio, released to the general public at the same quality it was recorded at and available on the open WAV format.  The whole miserable failure of closed format releases on DVDA, HDAD and SACD is finally over thanks to these great pioneers like Reference Recordings, Chesky, Linn and Naim just to mention a few. 

Oh yeah, and thanks to the engineering staff at PS Audio for making the first player to reproduce them.

Download and burn until the Bridge
If you had a chance to view the video you’ll know that you can use your computer to stream High Definition audio to your DAC if you don’t have a PWT.  You’ll also know it isn’t yet the best way to do that until two things happen: the PWT is in your home and the Bridge is released.

The PWT, as well as the upcoming Bridge for the PerfectWave DAC, will be among the only two perfect ways to get High Definition audio into your system without any compromise.  Several other companies are offering network access but so far we remain unconvinced they are achieving identical performance through the network.  To achieve the performance level we are writing about you’ll need either a PWT or a PWD with the built in Bridge and Lens.

The Bridge, which is our optional network interface card for the new PerfectWave DAC won’t be available until perhaps November 2009.  Getting the Bridge and its new remote control to match perfectly is going to be a challenge.  We’ve made a great deal of progress, even showing the Bridge and an early version of an iPhone remote at last January’s CES, but there’s a lot of work left and we’ve been focusing all our engineering efforts on shipping both the PerfectWave Transport and DAC this month.

The Bridge will be the interface between the outside world and the PerfectWave DAC.  Through the Bridge you will be able to access and play all music stored on either your computer or an external hard drive - or even a storage device located somewhere other than your home.  It’ll handle internet radio and provide a wonderful seamless experience.  High Definition audio played through the bridge will be indistinguishable in performance from optical discs played on the PWT.

Which brings me to the point of all this.  For those of you purchasing the pair of PWT and PWD, think in terms of burn-and-play through the combo rather than trying to somehow use your computer to reproduce downloaded High Definition audio.

This is what I am doing in the interim between now and when the Bridge ships.  Burning a DVD is simple, quick and easy and you can make some awesome compilations of both high res and normal res media on the same disc.  You can also make an easy comparison between the computer output and the PWT output, both into the PWD.  One note of caution: make sure you check with us first before building your burned compilation.  We just want to make sure you choose the superior DVD format known as “UDF” .  UDF is the default of all MAC computers, as well as what Reference Recordings uses, but some burn software (like Nero) sometimes use another format for their default and we don’t want you to use this.  It’s a simple matter to choose UDF. 

Really, this is the way to go.  Once the bridge is released this can be accomplished directly through the PWD taking the data from the hard drive and the PWT will return to being used for its primary purpose, as an optical disc reader to access and listen to your library of discs.

CD and DVD sampler
Through the kind permission of a few of the labels, like Reference Recordings, HD Tracks and Chesky Records, every PWT shipping out of the Boulder facility will be accompanied by a DVD sampler that includes both a High Definition audio track and the CD track of the same music so you can easily compare the two.

We are so excited about this opportunity to turn the world onto the benefits of these new discs and the new High Definition audio experience that we’re going to go ahead and have a bunch of these printed up and give them out with every machine.

If you can’t tell, we’re pretty darned excited about all this.

Till May
Yikes!  May is the month I face turning yet another year older.  Sigh.  But it’s also the month where the two long years of development time for the most exciting products we’ve ever designed are being released.  It’s also the starting point for high-end audio folks like you and me to get immersed in the beauties of High Definition audio.  What a great time for us all.  It’s really cool to be in at the beginning of something extraordinary like High Definition audio.

Next month we’ll release the two PerfectWave HDMI cables we’ve had under secret wraps for a while.  There’s one very affordable and one that’s not so affordable (out of solid silver) but oh man, what a great performance combo with the PerfectWave HDMI, AC cable and PerfectWave audio products.

Enjoy!

Paul McGowan

Top

You must be logged in to comment