New Free Hi-Fi Magazine

yeah, lets be positive. its a free read that covers our hobby - and more than that it talks about products that you may not see every day..

great stuff.

 

OK I'll starts again. Nice to read about some artists that I have not heard off. Esp the singer on page 15 looks very cute. Lots of nice photos of toys. They appear to be mostly about old fashion stereo valves amps. Unfortunately, they are not really that interesting and I believe the market for these have always been small and ever decreasing. Toys like this

http://zerogain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10705 and http://zerogain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10679

got more hits judging from the counter and for good reason. They are exciting and that are what people are really interested in now and the future.

 

Hum, valves are not old fashioned per say....just different.

 

computer audio and valves aren't mutually exclusive wolfie.

 

Nice publication Tonepub. Good to see free online publication of this quality.

The only thing I'd change is the appearance of iPod/MP3 in your pages. iPod & MP3 are the enemy of high fidelity and absolutely do not deserve to appear in the same magazine as WAVAC & Prima-Luna equipment!

It's killing our hobby and you should withdraw support for it entirely. I am vehemently opposed to the proliferation of this format and the (very pretty) equipment like iPods that are breeding a generation of compressed music lovers!!

Down with Apple!!

DT

 

Hi,

There are a few advantages to sticking to long obsolete technologies like Valves and Vinyl. You do not have to chnage what you have every 15 minutes for the latest, the technology is mature and you can just get on listening to music. That is before the sound comes into this at all.

The marketshare of Valve Amplifiers used to be 100% of all amplifiers sold. Since then the cheaper but much worse sounding transistor amplifiers have taken over the cheap and mid-fi market, higher up Valves have never been away.... ;-)

Surprisingly most Computer Audio forums on the various High End Boards tend to be dead, halve of the people hanging out there are actually the "Valves'n'Vinyl" brigade seeking decent sound from digital audio (yet again), the rest are chatting about the relative merits of low grade soundcards, external USB processors and Apple Lossless vs. Monkeyaudio vs. WMA Lossless....

Computer Audio (as opposed to iPod's and iRivers) has yet to make material inroads in the HighEnd.

So usually a few people get very excited when the new gizmos get mentioned, creating a lot of noise, but most seem ambivalent....

Not to be negative about PC Audio, it is no doubt the future, but will take to get into the true High End and out of massproduced "LoFi".

Ciao T

 

Nice to see the page on the old Hafler DH-101 preamp. I still have mine sitting unused in the basement somewhere. Interesting that it pointed out the small power supply as a possible weakness, as that was the area Les W worked on mainly when he beefed mine up in the early 80s, which kept me going for several more years with it. I still have the Ittok he sold me too!

 

Well you're right about MP3. All compression sounds dire. The players on the other hand do have some merit. My Creative Zen Touch plays uncompressed WAV files very nicely, certainly well enough for use while out and about, and can hold about 50 albums that way.

 

I am not having a go at people who like their tube based amps. I was just pointing out that it would be more interesting if we get mag to review some of these exciting new toys that people are actually very interested in rather then concentrating on the same old stuff. At the moment all we have is just some gizmo mags like Stuff to read about these new generation of toys, however all they seems to be interested is how cool they look and not really care about their real audio ability.

 

That's because they sound crap Wolfgang.

And the readers of such magazines simply have no interest in sitting down and listening intently to anything, so there is little improtance attached to the sonic performance.

 

I've split the cable argument from here out into a separate thread. Please lets keep the discussion in here on topic.

Michael.