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Side by side
I think most of us are comfortable with side-by-side comparisons. Take two amplifiers and within the space of a few minutes decide which sounds more musical. Easy peezy. It gets...
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Over etched
The search for inner detail is somewhat like a treasure hunt. We get excited when new cables and/or equipment peel back obscuring layers, exposing that which has been waiting to...
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Stay tuned
In 1967, LSD and counter-culture advocate Timothy Leary produced an album mirroring his famous call to "turn on, tune in, drop out." Though it's unlikely to have made Billboard's top...
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Walls vs. ceilings
The four walls of our rooms are both friend and enemy. They contain and support the generated sound field while at the same time distorting music's reproduction. We cannot live...
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Distance affirmation
One of the more satisfying affirmations happens when two or more unrelated people make the same sonic observation. We send out an update and emailed observations roll in. "What happened...
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Pete Kelly
When I think of the actor, Jack Webb, I cannot help but think of Dragnet's Sgt. Joe Friday. But there was much more to Jack (real name John). Jack Webb...
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Staying relevant
Our minds are like muscles. They need exercise, change, and challenges to grow and stay relevant. We all know this to be true yet how many of us actually give...
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Microphone madness
Without microphones we'd not have much in the way of recorded music. We'd instead be stuck back in the days of yelling into a horn in the hopes of directly...
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Processes
As one whose direction is steered with his engineer's nerd brain, I am continuously fascinated by processes. For example, what kind of process do nut processors employ to individually open...
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Nyquist
Swedish electronic engineer Harry Nyquist figured something interesting out. If you want to capture sound using digital audio conversion, you need to sample at twice the frequency you hope to...
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Conflating D and A
In yesterday's post on tone controls, there were a number of comments about the use of DSP, yet few about the differences between analog and digital controls. There is no...
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Tone control
There was a time in our HiFi history that the ability to electronically control music's tone was necessary. Necessary because the entire chain of electronics and speakers were bad enough...
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Decaf
The taste of decaf coffee isn’t the same as caffeinated, in the same way that Diet Coke, vegetarian bacon, or high-end MP3 players aren’t the same as what they started...
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Hertz
I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve written the abbreviation, Hz—1 kHz, 1,000 kHz. It is, of course, short for Hertz. The car company? Heinrich Rudolf Hertz...
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Sample Rates
There sure is a lot of confusion over sample rates. We hear about CD-quality sample rates at 44.1kHz (and its multiples), or another common sample rate, 48kHz (and its multiples),...
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AC Receptacles
For those of us with long memories here’s a flashback. Remember when preamps sported rear-mounted AC receptacles to power the rest of the system? The first memory I have of...
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Teachers
I was filling out a group of standard internet security questions and the one that is almost always front and center stood out to me. What is the name of...
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The Price Of Flat
There’s really no such thing as a ruler-flat loudspeaker. Loudspeakers are such inaccurate mechanical devices that if one were to attempt anything other than a relatively flat frequency response, enormous...
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Ringside Seating
On most recordings, there is a combination of close and distant miking. The close miking gets us a closer-than-natural intimate view of the instrument or performer, while the distant microphones...
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Is Higher Better?
Working with DSD and PCM has been a real learning experience. The two formats sound different from each other though it is unclear why. Is it the analog to digital...
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