This is tempting... but, there is one problem that makes me want to hold off just a bit. Here's what's included in the installation instructions for Windows 7 Beta:
To protect your MP3 files:
Sheffield Labs recording legends Bill Schnee and Doug Sax will be demonstrating 24bit/192KHz audio recorded on Blu-ray discs at CES '09 this week. These recordings are suppose to appeal to audiophiles that want better quality audio than CDs or MP3s (duh!!). I'm not sure what they mean by "giving consumers an unprecedented opportunity to experience digital music that rivals 2-channel analog sound," but I'm guessing they are referring to vinyl and/or reel-to-reel tape, which technically, CD already achieves. Yah, yah, I know vinyl has a better frequency response if you can ignore the noise floor, but you need pretty high end turn tables, cartridges, etc. to achieve this.
I'm not sure if this will be an improvement over DVD-A and SACD, but since those disc formats failed, it's worth trying again. It looks like they will be using a music-only format which utilizes Blu-ray disc technology.
Since I don't have any plans to purchase a Blu-ray player, this doesn't really appeal to me. Personally, I prefer just downloading the high res audio from an online music store and storing them on our media server. All my physical discs are stored away in a closet.
Eventually, I plan to purchase a Blu-ray drive for my HTPC and then I'd like to give these a listen. I'd still want to rip the tracks to the server and use my music library software for playing from my PCs.
For more info, click on this article's title and it will take you to the press release.
BTW, I decided not to go to CES this year. Lots of reasons... the economy, tired of big trade shows, better ways to spend the money, etc., etc.
For those of you who may actually read this blog, I apologize for not writing anything since June. I'm still around and hope to start posting more frequently.
We haven't made much progress lately with our product development. There are a couple of big hurdles, which we don't have a lot of control over that have slowed us down.
One of the issues that we have to deal with is multichannel audio playback of Blu-ray movies. Our product should be a pretty good match for the HD audio codecs, like DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD. Both provide lossless encoding of up to 8 channels of audio with a bitdepth of 24 bit and up to 192 KHz sample rate. The highest resolution will probably be 24/96 most of the time and many titles might be 24/48. With such high resolution it seems a shame to play this quality of audio with just a basic audio/video receiver. I think you'd want really high quality DACs and powerful, low distortion amps to play back this HD audio in its full glory. That's one of the reasons we think our product is a good fit for HD audio. We plan to include the highest quality DACs and amplifiers.
So here's our problem. Since our product is meant to be connected to your HTPC and will perform the duties of your soundcard, it is dependent on the movie playback software for decoding the audio streams. Currently, the most popular software for Blu-ray playback is Cyberlink's PowerDVD Ultra, ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theater, Corel's WinDVD 9 and Nero's Nero 8 Ultimate. From what I understand, none of these programs will let you play DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD without downsampling, unless your hardware supports a protected audio path (PAP). Basically to play Blu-ray movies with AACS copy protection using an HTPC, the hardware must have a PAP to play the original HD audio if the bitdepth and sample rate are more than 16 bit and 48 KHz. Without PAP, the HD audio has to be downsampled to 16 bit/48 KHz as per the AACS specification. The basic audio path starts with the software player, which decodes the audio from either the encoded DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD into multichannel LPCM (linear pulse code modulated) data. Next, the LPCM is transmitted to the DACs, which convert the LPCM digital data into analog waveforms. Finally, the analog waveforms are amplified and output to your speakers. So, the reason for AACS and the PAP is to prevent people from getting the digital data and making perfect copies of the original HD audio. The critical part of the audio path that needs to be protected is between the software player's output of LPCM and the DACs. Unfortunately, there's no hardware standard for PAP that can be used with any hardware device. You have to develop your own proprietary hardware/driver solution and get each of the software players to support it. Unfortunately, there's no industry group working on a standard either. Maybe Microsoft will provide some support and guidance with Windows 7, but I haven't read anything that gives me hope. Actually, I'd be surprised if Microsoft came up with a good solution since it seems they're not too motivated to support Blu-ray in any way. So, to say the least, I'm a little pessimistic about PAP and HD audio playback with Blu-ray movies. There are some workarounds, but it's a PITA. You can use AnyDVD HD to decrypt the Blu-ray disc, then you split the audio and video into different files, convert the lossless HD audio track into a multichannel lossless audio format like WMA lossless or FLAC, and then recombine the audio and video into a MKV file and play it back with something like Media Player Classic. Like I said, it's a pain in the ass. You also lose all the extras.
The thing that really bugs me about this is all the encrypted formats used in Blu-ray have been cracked. So the pirates have no problems getting the unencryped stream from a Blu-ray disc. Legimate owners of Blu-ray discs can't play the full resolution HD audio, but pirates can still copy it. Hopefully, the current trend toward DRM free music will carry over into the movie industry and they'll relax the PAP requirements in the future. Maybe they'll be more open to this if Blu-ray player and disc sales don't increase during this holiday season.
I've subscribed to a thread dedicated to advanced topics in HD audio on AVS Forum where someone brought the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable to our attention. This is a $500 ethernet cable. Now that's outrageous. Somebody please explain to me the benefits of such a thing. Anyhow, what's really hilarious are some of the customer reviews. Here are some of my favorites:
"A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the "directional markings" on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews. I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile - I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance."
- Michael McKinley
"If I could use a rusty boxcutter to carve a new orifice in my body that's compatible with this link cable, I would already be doing it. I can just imagine the pure musical goodness that would flow through this cable into the wound and fill me completely -- like white, holy light. Holding this cable in my hands actually makes me feel that much closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. I only make $6.25/hr at Jack In The Box, but I saved up for three months so I could have this cable. It sits in a shrine I constructed next to my futon in Mother's basement. I only gave it four stars in my review because I can't find music that is worthy enough to flow through this utterly perfect interconnect."
-G. P.
"As excited as I was to open my new Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable, I was much more dissatisfied by Denon's customer service experience. Apparently the result of an improper connection and the cable's high data transfer speed, I mistakenly caused the collision of a pair of positrons (i.e. leptons) at several hundred GeV. While the resulting mini black hole theoretically proved the validity of superstring theory and may result in endless new perpetual energy sources, it also stained our Berber carpet. When I phoned Denon customer support, the representative I spoke with--whose English was horrible, by the way--was discourteous and unhelpful. Regardless of my data transfer or particle acceleration needs in the future, I will not be shopping with Denon again."
- Mark E. Putnam
"Like an idiot I didn't follow the instructions that came with the cable. Instead, I "accidentally" ground them up in a blender along with a pile of Monster cables. What came out was a green, glowing, runny substance. I wasn't sure what I could do with it, so I threw it out of house and onto the garden. What happened, no one could have expected. Apparently most of the ooze found its way onto a family of turtles. It began to physically change them. It has been two weeks now and I have four teenage turtles in my house constantly breaking things with their martial arts. I'm about out of pizza and would like Denon to explain how these seemingly flawless cables could have caused such a problem. I read all of the warnings and didn't find anything in them about not blending them up and pouring it on turtles. I would like a full refund, or at least, Denon to cover my pizza bill."
- C. Whalen
"My wife and I have been trying to conceive for almost a decade. We've tried every form of therapy, artificial insemination, and some other, more questionable methods. Then I saw this product. The Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. I just KNEW that it was the answer to our prayers. When they arrived my wife gave me the look of a defeated woman with nothing but a feigned hope. But I had faith! That night we wrapped ourselves in the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable and tried one last time for a child. Nine months later our daughter was born. Thank you SO MUCH Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. I'm only giving the product a 3-star rating, however. I was hoping for a true heir and I don't feel like buying a new cable."
- Steve O
"I got these cables to pull my Audi out of the ditch with Jed' pick-up, and they broke all up on the first pull. I knows it wasn't cause he was drunk and popped the clutch, these cables jest aint no good."
- Robert Cole "Jed's friend"
Never knew Amazon's customer reviews could be such a great source of entertainment. Learn something every day...
I decided to update the design of this blog. Our current blogger template has two columns with the left column taking about 75% of the screen space, which leaves 25% for the right column. I had also just added the last.fm widget because the Sonific widget doesn't work any more. Sonific's website is gone and they no longer support their widget. The last.fm widget, along with a few others I was using, align along the left side, but are located in the right column. The text and widget alignments in the right column have bothered me for a long time, so I was trying to find some way to fix it. The text in most of the lists was aligned to the right and some of the widgets would only align to the left. Anyhow, I think it was a mess.
A few days ago, I tried testing out a few new blogger templates. I wanted to see what it would look like if I used a 2 column template with the large column on the right side. Basically, just a mirror of the one I was using. So I looked at the ones that are included with Blogger and searched the web for any others I could find. I found several that looked like they could work. Many of these will let you look at a preview, but you can't really tell if they will work unless you try them with your own content. So, I backed up my template to my local computer and tried a few of these other templates. Since I had this backup, I figured nothing terrible could happen because I could simply restore and our blog would be back to what it was before these experiments. Well, I was wrong. The actual blog articles are intact, but the list that I had for links, music stores, interesting forums, articles, etc., are all gone. I'm not sure why this happened, but I think the format for these link widgets must have been different on some of the experimental templates and they wiped out the ones that I had.
Oh well, I'm going to try to reconstruct them from memory. I should have saved each URL separate from the blog, but I didn't... I'm also going to take this opportunity to redesign the blog so everything will align a little better. So it might be a little while before everything is back to normal.
We can now add HDtracks to our list of online music stores that offer true CD quality tracks and albums. I just discovered them a few days ago and they offer music from a wide variety of independent labels. There's an impressive list of artists, including Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Muddy Waters, John Prine, Aaron Neville, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jean-Luc Ponty, Gary Burton, Norah Jones, Chuck Mangione, Patricia Barber, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Robin Holcomb, and on and on...
You have a choice of these download file formats (in decreasing file size order) - AIFF, FLAC and 320 Kbps MP3s. And this is something the other music stores should also provide - they include a very nice PDF file with all the cover art and liner notes. Oh, and of course, all the tracks are DRM free. In the near future they will offer select tracks in high resolution 24bit/96KHz formats. Hopefully, this will include some surround recordings.
HDtracks was founded by David and Norman Chesky of the audiophile record label Chesky Records. On their 'About' page they state: "In an age when there is a computer in every home, we have grown accustomed to accessing music at the touch of a button. But, what about the quality of that music? Why should the sound suffer because of convenience? With HDtracks, we have discovered the way to have it all: world-class music, unrivaled sound, and files that play in any environment."
They have a free sampler album (there's a link on the front page of their website), so I decided to test out their download process. After registering (don't worry, it's painless), you get an email that includes a link to the freebie. I can't remember all the details because it was a few days ago, but once I clicked on the link and followed the instructions, a little download program (Java applet) started and displayed the default settings for destination folders, etc., and provided a big button to start the download. Each track was listed and a progress bar indicated that the downloads were very quick. This was for the FLAC files. Overall, I was pretty impressed. HDtracks seems to have done it right, a great selection of music and their download process was very quick and easy.
I've been pretty busy lately, so haven't had time to post any articles. Earlier today I received a nice email from someone (won't mention names unless I have permission) who's also a big HTPC proponent. He mentioned that he's been following Amplio Audio and anxiously awaits updates on our amps and our next article about Vista audio playback. Well, that was the kick in the ass I needed.
BTW, if you read an article that you would like me to follow up on, or have any questions, please feel free to use the comments at the end of the posts. I realize that most people are comfortable with email, but I'd like to see these articles become more of an open conversation that anyone can contribute to.
Anyhow, back to the topic... In the original Part 1 article I mentioned comments I read in a thread on diyAudio titled "Is Vista really capable of bit perfect output?" The original poster started by explaining that the sound quality when playing audio/music with his computer was better than using his expensive dedicated audio components. There are a couple of reasons some may believe a computer based audio system can never sound as good as dedicated stand-alone components. One is that the computer is just too electronically noisy to pass an analog signal without some distortion. The second reason is that the computer software and/or operating system modifies the audio data before passing it to the soundcard and DACs, thus distorting and/or damaging the sound quality.
There are several ways to avoid the first problem. One is to purchase a good quality soundcard that is properly shielded from any electro-magnetic interference. The other is to use a product who's analog circuitry is external to the PC. All FireWire and USB based soundcards fall under this category, as do a new generation of USB DACs. The product Amplio Audio is working on falls under this category as well. Up to this time, we have been using FireWire and it still proves to be the best technical solution.
The second problem is a little more complicated. Sound degradation caused by the operating system was true with Windows XP and standard WDM drivers. XP's audio engine relied on a mixer (KMixer) that would resample all audio to 48 KHz so everything output from the PC would use the same sample rate. There are some ways to avoid resampling, but if you adjusted the volume or simultaneously allowed sound output from other applications (including system sounds), resampling was performed. That means the CD's 44.1 KHz sample rate was always converted to 48 KHz. Another problem with this audio engine was that to lower the sound volume, the data was simply truncated to a lower resolution. So 16 bit audio was reduced to 14, 12 or 10, etc., bit data to get a lower volume. This can dramatically decrease the sound quality.
This is where the thread then moves on to the bit-perfect discussion. To avoid degrading the sound by modifying or truncating the bits, you could use a driver like ASIO that bypasses the Windows audio engine so that the original source audio data is not changed all the way to the DACs. This is how you could get bit-perfect output. Of course the software players had to provide support for these sort of drivers. Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center do not. So you had to use other players like J.River's Media Center, Winamp (with a special ASIO plug-in), Foobar, etc., to achieve bit-perfect performance. Now with Vista, a couple things have changed. First, the audio engine is much better. Even if the audio is resampled, the algorithms are much better and the effect on sound quality is not nearly as bad as what happened in XP. They've also improved the volume control so that they no longer truncate the bits to reduce sound levels. Instead, it converts the data to 32-bit floating point, then performs the volume adjustment calculations and then converts back to the original sample rate. This basically gives you lossless attenuation. It's not bit-perfect, but there is no degradation in sound quality. Some dedicated audio hardware that uses high quality DSP chips use this same technique. For the purist, who still want bit-perfect operation, they can still use ASIO drivers if they've been updated to work under Vista. These drivers will also bypass the audio engine, just like they did with XP. Vista also supports a new feature called "exclusive mode". Exclusive mode also bypasses the Vista audio engine and will provide bit-perfect playback. However, you need an application that supports exclusive mode and most I'm familiar with, like J.River Media Center, Windows Media Play, Vista Media Center, Foobar, etc., don't.
Getting back to the diyAudio thread, the bit-perfect discussion mentions that there is a newer software player, called XXHighEnd, that uses Vista's exclusive mode. There's another program called XMPlay that can run in exclusive mode when using a WASAPI output plugin. The sound output from a program using an ASIO driver or running in exclusive mode should be identical, because bit-perfect is bit-perfect. However, several people, including the original poster and the developer of XXHighEnd (not the same person), claim that XXHighEnd sounds better than other bit-perfect solutions. In fact the original poster was also a big fan of using Foobar with ASIO drivers, and he claims the sound has improved a lot when using XXHighEnd. When asked how something that outputs the exact same data can sound better, the developer doesn't provide any answers that satisfy the skeptics. The closest he comes to any technical explanation is that he does something to minimize jitter. But that doesn't make much sense given the way the audio chain works. If the audio data is buffered and the DAC is driven by a local clock, the audio software player shouldn't have any effect on jitter. He also admits that he doesn't know why it sounds better, but that there are many ways a software application can have an effect on the audio quality and he's just been tinkering around trying to find the best sound quality. That's where things get confusing to me. Or as another poster/skeptic put it:
Last August, I received an email from Magnatune telling me about their free compilation album called "Seduction Music." They also said they were going to offer a new free compilation every month. So everytime they sent me another email, I was planning to pass this information on to my readers. Well I never did get another email announcement, so that was the last time I posted anything regarding Magnatune's free monthly compilations.
Well I guess just because I didn't get any more emails doesn't mean they stop providing free compilations. In fact, I followed my old link from the original article and discovered a new compilation titled, "The Art of Persuasion." I apologize for missing the last 6 or 7 months. Hopefully they will repost some of those in the future.
I've been following this thread on diyAudio Forums titled, "Is Vista really capable of bit-perfect output"? There are some comments that I thought readers of my blog might find interesting. As you can see I added Part 1 to the title of this thread. I don't know if this is really going to be a multi-part article, but what the heck, I'll add it to the title just in case.
The original poster starts out by telling us what audio equipment he's using. He has a PC running Vista Ultimate. For the PC's audio, he has a MOTU 896HD sound card, which is an 8 channel 24/192 audio interface that costs around $1,000. This is connected to his PC via a FireWire connection. He uses the digital AES/EBU outputs of the MOTU to connect to the digital inputs of his Esoteric D70 external DAC. Esoteric, which is a division of Teac, doesn't look like they still sell the D70, so I couldn't find a link to their product information. Anyhow, it is/was a pretty highly regarded $6,500 stereo DAC. It's a shame that he's only using 2 channels from his multichannel MOTU interface. Next, the analog output from each channel of his D70 are sent to Pass Labs XVR1 active electronic crossovers. Each of these babies normally cost $5,000. Each crossover is taking a input signal and dividing them into high-pass and low-pass outputs. For a stereo system, you normally have the left and right channels feeding a single XVR1 and it outputs the low frequency and high frequency signals for each channel. So that is two channels in and four channels out. In this case, since he has 2 XVR1s, I assume he is splitting it up so that the left and right channels are each getting 4 output channels. These 8 outputs are connected to 8 Hypex UcD700 amp modules. So that's 4 amp modules per channel. I have no idea how much he paid for his amps, but that's a lot of power. Each one of these UcD700s provide 700W rms power. That's 2,800 Watts per channel. Most likely, this was a diy project. It might not be as expensive as a commercial product with similar performance specs, but based on the other components in his system, I doubt he scrimpted on the parts for his amps. Just to give you an idea of the price of a couple components he probably included, the amp module and matching power supply for the UcD700 cost up to $500 and $350 respective (using the current exchange rates). Since he probably has 8 of each, just those components cost $6,800. Next add in the transformers, interconnects, chassis, etc. and his amp probably cost at least $7,500 - $10,000. The amps are feeding a pair of Wilson Benesch Chimera loudspeakers that cost somewhere between $21,000/pair and $33,000/pair, depending on your source of information. So, if price is a determining factor, this approximately $50,000 sound system must sound pretty damn good.
Now why would someone connect a PC to a high-end system like this instead of an expensive high-end audiophile CD, DVD-Audio, or SACD transport? Actually he does own one of the $7,500 Esoteric P70 transports, but still prefers the sound through the PC. When asked if the PC chain was really better or just different, he responded that it was definitely better. Then he gave an example of a test he performed to compare the sound of a CD playing from his P70 transport to the sound of the same CD ripped as a WAV file to his hard drive and the same song downloaded from Linn Records website in a 24/96 FLAC file. He said, "When played through Foobar, the FLAC version is simply stunning. The Wav version is very good, though flatter than the FLAC. The CD played through the transport sounds more edgy, less fluid and less solid." Then someone responded that there must be something wrong with his transport because he has a modded version of the same one and it sounds perfect. To which, our original poster responded:
"I agree, the standard P70 is a stunning transport. I've not heard any modded versions, so can't comment on their performance."
"I don't think there's anything wrong with my transport though. It's dead silent when playing CDs and handles (my wife's!) badly scratched CDs easily. It literally blows my Pioneer DVD, acting as a transport, out of the water. No, I'm pretty sure it's doing a sterling job, given the constaints of the ancient 'red book' standard."
"But as you yourself admit, the standard P70 is not perfect. You reckon that the modded version sounds "even more relaxed, richer and bigger". Well, I reckon you get all of this (and maybe more?) by extracting and playing wav/flac files well."
"As for 24/96 FLAC files, I'd venture that no transport on the planet, modded or not, comes anywhere close to the sound quality you can get from them. If more and more companies start offering these downloads, I think the audiophile community is simply going to have to start taking more of an interest in PC music."
I guess I will make this into a multi-part article, since I'm going to go ahead and post this now and then continue with the discussion about Vista playback in the following parts.
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