sdolezalek

Something about that sentence really caught my attention. Broken into parts: "everyone likes music," "everyone is interested in taking a little break," and everyone [wants to] "experience something they didn't know existed," are difficult to argue with. But the part that bothered me was thinking: Just how often do we actually take that little break for music? Given the current pace of life, the distractions, the competition for too little time, the overload of things in front of us we might enjoy if we did take the time, makes me feel as though you are describing a deep seated need we all have, but spend far far too little time addressing: the need to calmly sit back long enough to actually listen to a whole piece of music, otherwise surrounded by silence, to really let it sink in and touch us. At one level, I might think that your system is so astounding (and it surely is) that even the busiest and most distracted of us would snap to attention, drop what we're doing and sit doen next to you for that long listen and all that came with it. A while back, someone else asked whether the unlimited availability of tracks to stream now available to almost everyone actually made music less enjoyable than it was in the days when you brought home a new record album and spent the next week listening to almost nothing else, playing that album from start to finish. Both your comment and that earlier one forced me to ask myself, given how good my own system is, why aren't I taking more time to stop my own busy day, to have that long satisfying listening session,let all else fade away, and be a better person for having done so? Isn't that what music is all about? When did it stop having that power over us? Are we spending far too much time chasing other glittering objects, when real happiness might be 30 uninterrupted minutes in our favorite listening chair...?

In a word: "Complexity." But complexity is really a combination of: a) I'm not capable (short of doing an amount of learning I'm too lazy for or cannot afford the time for) to do it myself (I have bought the necessary microphones and software) b) I'm too cheap to pay to have a real expert do it for me, but a big part of that is not being sure my "expert" actually knows what they are doing c) Because what I ultimately would want is a set of corrections that are doing all of: (i) fixing speaker frequency anomalies (ii) fixing room-based anomalies (iii) doing both of the above while preserving time domain accuracy of the sound at my ears (iv) giving me a result I'm as happy with on day 90 as on day 1 (too many changes sound like an initial improvement only to become fatiguing over time) (v) do what they do seamlessly in the HQPlayer/Roon/Tidal/Qobuz environment I deploy

Ok, this may be a very stupid question: I easily get the notion of disk failure and the benefit of available/reliable backup to cover for such failure. But is digital degradation an all or nothing thing? What happens if you start getting data corruption slowly? I can more easily see this with a CD or SACD or magnetic tape slowly degrading over time, but a "backup" of a partially degraded magnetic tape will copy the degradation not restore it. If I maintain a dual NAS and cloud backup and replace my original and NAS disks every say 5 years and count on my cloud service provider to do same and regularly do backups, am I immune or am I still at risk for gradual degradation?

Chris: The first thought that came in reading this was: "Speakers are still the single largest factor in the gap between the real thing and what we hear in the home...and, closing that gap appears to require extraordinary expenditure on behalf of the manufacturer of such a device." Am I reading you correctly in that regard? For example, is the best DAC, amplifier, pre-amp, etc. as much better than the rest as these speakers were above what else you might listen to? Is there any hope that a speaker with these capabilities could ever be built at "affordable" (maybe more like a new car than a new house) prices?

Chris: You are absolutely onto something, but I think it is far broader than music. I can say the same thing about the amount of "great" photographs now available on the web for free, or the 1000 channels of "free" television that my cable and satellite companies offer me, or the unlimited news feeds. Across most of these I would offer the following: 1) It is so easy to produce something "good enough" that the value of good enough content is both nearly zero and less useful; 2) It is both much more work to produce really great content and it is not clear you get paid for the additional work (so fewer artists do it); 3) The sheer volume of what gets produced means that the occasional "accident" can briefly rise to the top (like the recent picture of the flying Olympic surfer - one hit wonders) 4) As the audience, we now have three choices: a) let someone else (i.e. Spotify, Tidal) curate what we should hear for us (often leaving off some true gems) or allow some news channel decide what we should hear b) try to find the energy and time to go through all the content and make intelligent choices as to what we really love (or is true) c) just arbitrarily limit ourselves and realize that we can actually be really happy with a more limited selection (particularly when we put something of ourselves into it, i.e. paid for it); or d) and this is where Audiophilestyle comes in for me: rely on some trusted friends to point you at content they took the time to find and like and share that finding with you... Thank you!

What would happen if you tried same on latest iPad?

To get to this conclusion, need we assume that we all hear alike? What if we not only each have different musical tastes, but we actually hear and perceive sounds differently? If the artist, the recording master and the audience all hear the same way then that "standard" becomes very important. But what about the 36% that doesn't prefer the Harman curve? Are they "wrong" or do they hear differently? What I like about the data that underlies the music is that we can agree whether or not what was played live matches what was recorded and then played back (making a huge assumption that we can and do measure what matters). A flat frequency response is only one such measurement. There are live venues I like and others I don't. Is one venue more correct or better than another? Maybe, if 100% of audiences agreed with me, but I know they don't. This is one of the reason's I have been so pleased with the various choices offered by software like HQ Player, rather than the choices of one DAC designer/engineer. It allows me to make what I hear in my listening room sound as much as I can make it, sound like what I hear with live instruments and voices. Doing that is a function not only of the recording, but certainly also of my playback chain, and the audio characteristics of my listening room. A music studio can really only address the first of these three. The other two are a function of budget, equipment choices, and room choices and how each of those alters the original AND my particular sensitivities to anomalies (in frequency, in reverb, in wave form, etc.) Thus, to me I don't want some majority view of what sounds best -- I just want my output file to look as identical as possible to the original... Your ears may vary ;-)

It does, but only for Sublime subscribers. Interestingly, although they claim that Studio level subscribers have access to all the hi-res content for streaming only (not purchase) this is an example where you can't stream the 24/192 version (only the 16/44 version). As advertised the two tiers never made sense to me: Why should you pay more each month for the privilege to buy what you can already stream (presumably they want to encourage as many purchases as possible). But if they are also limiting the streaming quality then they aren't living up to their sales representations, which say that Studio level gets full access to 24/192 and 24/96 files for streaming..

These days we can always use AI to fill in the missing information!

This is a nuance I hadn't picked up on earlier. If you start with Intel's Core i9 13900K 3.0GHz 24 Core 36MB, then just how fast does the GPU need to be to be helpful? Is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Open Air fast enogh, or would I need to go to the 4090 at more than 16GB to benefit?

I have bought my systems from Puget Systems as well and they have always done a nice job. I'm curious why you wen with AMD instead of Intel specifically for HQ Player? I'm thinking of a new i9/4090 combination but for a desktop solution that then feeds my NAA.

Note that you need to rei8nstall HQPlayer NAA software in Version 2.9

Does anyone have any experience using MoCA 2.5 Network adaptors for 2.5Gb Internet, Ethernet Over Coax? I'm specifically interested in the degree to which this is liklely to transmit additional noise into my data stream (yes, I understand electrical noise can't change digital bits,,,). I would use this only for Ethernet and not run other signals (i.e. video) through this line, but video would run on a second coax cable that travels a similar in-wall path. My current in-wall Ethernet cabling is Cat5e and I'd like to get greater throughput, but not at the expense of adding noise.

Great experience and great article! But your comments on the sound coming out of the Sennheiser headphones seems to just be begging for answers to questions I didn't see above: 1) how much of that quality is lost in the mixing process; 2) how much is lost through the recording format/process; and c) where else does the degradation result from the stream you were hearing?

Puget has built my prior systems and does really good work, but I have tried for the last several years to get them to build an HQPlayer specific machine (the way they do for other software packages), but they haven't felt enough demand and don't really know enough about the specific needs for HQPlayer to make strong recommenbdations.