What sources?

I've heard your sources, and I think this is a good move.

 

Bub,

meeeoooww!

anyway,
Iuse CDP, TT and home cinema thru mine (on occasion)

andy c!

 

I used to have your sources but upgraded.

 

You may think you upgraded, but how can you tell?

 

yawn ...

This thread may have served its purpose. It will be interesting to re-run this poll in six months time; I wonder whether there will be increased take-up in Internet and use of hard disk (or I hope solid state memory).



... and many thanks for the explanation of optimod.

 

Absolutely fascinating data, Ditton. I think I speak for the entire online audiophile community on this one. A "landmark" thread, well done that man!

Who'd have thought that 83.56% of audiophiles have a CD player?

 

CD player sales are doing well. According to the latest data, they've leapt to an astounding 83.78%.

 

[delete reaction: "get a life ...."; draw breath and ...]

On the assumption that your comment contained a large dose of sarcasm (99.37% perhaps), let's not debate the exact figure, nor question whether this represents an increase on some other estimate of CD use.

First, ZeroGain is not necessarily representative of the hifi consumer market, but it is a bunch of enthusiasts whose practices and views are worth noting. If we didn't think that, then why lurk and post on ZG? Personally, I wanted to appreciate what folk here thought was important in terms of source - what they have plugged into their main set-up.

Second, I expect that this snapshot will change over time, most obviously with the decline of (the legacy) cassettes and the increase in non-CD digital replay.
- I had expected CD-replay to be higher; this brought home to me the strength of TT on ZG.
- I had expected Internet + hard disk usage to be higher
- I was surprised that less than half had a radio connected, as I rate this highly (as I read does a significant other)
- but all in all, the results are not earth-shattering, and confirmed prior thoughts about the ZG community

Third, I had thought that the purpose of a thread was to generate comment about the subject of the thread, rather than just offering a blank wall for graffetti

- that said, as said, the results were not earth shattering, nor should I be surprised if someone with spray paint in the hand, and nothing else to do at 1am, cant resist the opportunity of a blank wall ...

 

Don't let Bub put you off. Please continue this ground-breaking research.

 

humour is a funny thing ..

 

Some frequency dependant compressors have expansion capability as well - simply because high frequency sound will be compressed more heavily than low frequencies...
One of THESE might help, and here's a load of choices, including the Manley and Avalon offerings:
http://www.muzeekworld.com/recordingproducts-compressors.htm
Problem is that you can then make most recordings sound "nice" - which then begs the question whether hifi is about listening to music and always enjoying it, or about accuracy of replay..
Bit of both sounds good to me!

 

** realism and/or accuracy **

** beauty and/or truth **

** cake and/or eat it **

Life is full of choices ...

Apparently, really clever/gifted people can achieve truth through beauty!

 

I voted for Internet and Other, other being PC. The reason I did that and not hard disk is because I regard "hard disk" as an iPOD type device, a PC is more than just a hard disk...

 

"hard disk" may now be too loose a term. PCs and other computers have storage devices, typically spinning 'hard disk' storage. For hifi 'replay' purposes, that's noisy, due to both mechanical spinning and fan, and to interference from neighbouring electrics. The solid state storage, such as on an iPod, is also a 'hard disk' but one that has advantages for hifi replay.

Need to tease out some terminology for future use.

Would also need to tease out of 'Other' the AV stuff, the PC etc.

 

I reckon mine tops the list here it goes.

1) Marantz CD6000 OSE LE CD Player
2. Project Debut MKII turntable
3. Philips STR1500 freeview box
4. Sony STSE300 tuner
5. Compacks DVD player
6. Thoshiba NICAM VCR
7. Cheapo sound card
8. Gemini XL200 connected via a mixer (CDP can also be connected to his via headphone out to the mixer by passes the signal path for HIFI duties).

 

ditton,
i think the real definition is noisy and quiet - an ipod isn;t solid state (well the shuffle is i guess) it's still got a hard drive in it which spins and requires mechanical gubbins to recover the data.
building a silent pc isn;t a huge chore and neither is siting it in a closet somewhere out of the way so i'd not worry too much about physical noise.
interference from neighbors systems can be eliminated by using a wired network rather than wifi and it means you can microwave things without dropouts too.
i think the biggest 'must' is having a dedicated music server though - i use a very old p2 400 with 256 mb ram and about 1/2 tb of sata hdd's i also use this as my print server too. even this improved things with my original sbox after running the server on my laptop for a while.

 

'dedicated music server' - maybe that's the terminology. And you are hinting at the desirable qualities for a dms ..

this is an area I ought to know about but I've just not tried enough. best just get in there and do it I guess. time to ethernet ..

 

Hi,

Well, that is pure prejudice.

You can have replay from a PC where the noise levels are whisper quiet, late at night and where electrically you get as good performance as anything (especially via USB).

How do I know?

I'm listening to one.... ;-)

Ciao T

 

its certainly a priori, m'lud. I've always liked using ram, and find it difficult to believe that delivery from solid state will not be better than from spinning disk.

So, its intended as conjectual, rather than prejudicial. but I accept that without having tried it, it does come across as prejudice - and I'm against that.

 

ditton,
tcpip (the protocol for most / all networks) is incredibly robust - if it wasn;t the internet wouldn;t work - this is how data gets from your pc to the squeezebox. also the hdd will have ram buffers and the drivers may also be buffering using main pc ram too. also the sb2 has a huge (30 seconds for natively decoded flac about 15 seconds for wav) ram buffer in it which the sb uses to cache data recieved over the network. add to this the fact that cd is about 1.4 megabits per second (iirc) and a standard wireless network is 54 mbps (wired is about 100 mbps) so data could be resent a fair few times before buffers would underrun.
all in all i'd say that (with a squeezebox 2) is as close to running off a ram buffer as possible - without actually running off one... if you see what i mean.
cheers


julian.