Look Ma, no wires

The Logitech Squeezebox Duet has me convinced that all music will eventually be on storage drives. The Duet looks too easy to use, and that is the secret. Lets face it; most changes in the world of music were not made in the name of greater audio, but greater ease. CDs never needed a needle delicately lowered on to them to play, and MP3 players do not need to change discs. This same mentality will eventually make your hard drive into your music library. 

While several roadblocks have stood in the way, two of the biggest have been wiring and control. Logitech looks to have dealt with both of these. The Duet is a wireless interface between your computer and stereo. The system uses your Wi-Fi network to transfer music from your computer to the Duet receiver attached to your stereo. Don’t worry audiophiles, the data stays digital until a 24-bit Wolfson DAC interprets it back into music. Wolfson DACs have long been considered among the best of breed. The music can be stored as MP3, Apple Lossless or any of half-a-dozen popular compression schemes. 

The other roadblock is access. The Duet slaps that down with a color remote that gives you full control of your library, be it on a PC or Macintosh. The 2.4-inch color screen displays song titles, artists, cover art and more. Selections are done via an iPod style remote.  

As a bonus, you can now stream music from online sources such Pandora and Rhapsody. This is what gave Wired Magazine such a big smile. I played with the original version several months back and loved the concept but was only OK with the remote. The new version looks like a big improvement and the streaming is a sweet option. 

If you want to expand your music network you can add more receivers to other music systems throughout your house. At $399.99 for the initial rig and another $150 per additional receiver, this is not cheap, but it is nowhere near those $10 grand music servers that high-end audio loves.

DRM means just say no

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is about as popular as venereal disease. DRM is a combination of software and hardware that tries to prevent unauthorized copying of material. This doesn’t sound so bad on the surface, unless you are a black market pirate in China, as the goal is to protect the rights of creative folks that have tons of time on a project and would like to get paid for their work. The problem is that the system becomes a problem in itself.

A good example is iTunes. If you buy a song from the iTunes store, you can download it to an iPod, burn it to a disc, but you cannot transfer it to another computer. You bought it but you can’t do what you want with it. If you have both a desktop and laptop, DRM says never the twain shall meet. 

DRM is more than inconvenient, it restricts creativity. How can you remix a tune if you cannot copy it? It can also stop the music. I have seen DRM encoded discs refuse to play on older CD players. 

While I am a full supporter of intellectual rights, there needs to be a better way to deal with the issue. The DRM Blog has a nice summary and commentary on the problem. The original source for his diatribe is a recent Wall Street Journal article. Both agree that we need an update. 

In the meantime, there have been some changes in the music industry. A trend toward DRM free music has been growing. If you like to download the occasional song and use it as you like, check out Amazon.com’s music store. The collection is good, the DRM is gone and all the files are compressed at 256k. While 256k is not lossless, it is a much more palatable compression rate than iTunes usual 128k. Unchained music is a good thing.

Warning! Your speakers may be in danger

Consider this a public service announcement.  Computer Audiophile has a new blog entry that discusses the possibility of damaging your speakers if you are using a Windows-based PC as your music server. Several cases have come up where computers are generating intense blasts of distortion that can ultimately damage the tweeters in your speakers. While not all cases are exactly the same, there are two consistent factors.

1. In each case the user was making adjustments to the music data or settings. They may have been changing the name of a song, or managing how the system processed the music, but all adjustments seem to be through the software. Hardware alterations or changes were not mentioned.

2: Windows was the operating system. There are no known cases with Macintosh or Linux based systems.

The issue seems to be the computer losing synchronized clock speed. The clock is how computers keep all the ongoing processes aligned. When the alignment is lost, Windows can cause a blast of white noise to come ripping through your system, and your speakers. It does not seem to be another one of those Vista problems either; there are known cases when XP was the operating system. Nor can we point at one particular music player. Both MediaMonkey and Windows Media Player have been in the chain when this happened. 

This is the kind of thing gives audiophiles the sweats. Better speakers are often more susceptible to damage. In order to wring out each nuance of the music, speakers, and particularly tweeters, are made to be very sensitive, and thus very fragile.

To make matter worse, traditionally speakers are the most expensive part a good system. They can make the greatest impact to the overall sound. This new issue is not the kind of bang for the buck most audiophiles envisioned. 

I am not suggesting that we all disconnect our stereos right now, but this is a reminder that high-end audio from our computers is a brave new world, and it does not come with a warranty.

Going down

Music with realism and authority means music with bass. It is that driving bottom end that turns string quartets into symphonies and gets you twisting in your chair. Full range speakers deliver it with ease, struggling only for the lowest notes, but bookshelf speakers are going to need help from a subwoofer. 

A subwoofer is a dedicated speaker that reproduces the lowest frequencies, from 150 hertz down to 20 hertz. Below 20 hertz you cannot hear sound though you can still feel it. Usually subwoofers are single box solutions. You add one to a system and suddenly the tympani has joined the band. Computer speaker manufacturers often include one in their better all-in-one packages.

Picking the right subwoofer depends on the quality and quantity of bass you want to add. Small subwoofers can add plenty of impact but may struggle to get the lowest frequencies. Larger units can go deeper but take up valuable space. Of course, as with everything in audio, you can get carried away with subwoofers. Here is a homemade subwoofer the size of a wine cellar. 

A small room will not need as powerful a subwoofer as a large space since the walls reinforce the bass frequencies. That coupling has both good and bad sides. While the walls add free bass, they can also accent certain frequencies creating imbalances in the music.  There is a nicely detailed write up on subwoofer placement in the Audiophiliac that offers fine tuning tips. As with your main speakers, taking the time to properly position your subwoofer will add precision and life to your computer audio.

Going eye to eye with speakers

You can make good stereos sound great and great stereos sound cheap. It is all in the speaker placement. 

Over the last 15 years speakers have been put on a diet that would make Dr. Atkins proud. The once proud behemoths of the living room have shrunk to the size of tennis balls. While the new sizes are often esthetically more pleasing, they lose the automatic advantage of proper speaker height. Speakers perform best when they are properly aligned to your listening position and adjusted for the room. John Atkins of Stereophile Magazine just released a very nice primer on speaker placement. Atkins mentions a special CD to help you adjust the sound but he also gives general placement strategies that will work for everybody.

One aspect he does not emphasize enough is speaker height. If you pull the grill off your speakers you will usually see two or more drivers or individual speakers mounted to the box. The smallest one is the tweeter, a speaker designed to do high frequencies. The brain uses high frequencies for cues on location. If the speakers are properly placed and you have a good recording, the musicians will audibly float between the speakers. The proper height for tweeters is the same height as your ear when you are sitting down to listen. If you put them too low, high or aimed away from you, clarity drops. This is why speakers mounted in the ceiling that fire straight down, sound muddy across the room. 

Atkins also goes on about triangular placement and room acoustics. It is a quick introduction to a topic that has generated thesis papers, but if you just follow the basics about height, placement and alignment, your audio may take on a new life.

DAC?

In the world of digital audio, the Digital to Analog Converter, or DAC, is your interpreter. It takes gibberish, in this case 0s and 1s, and turns them into the analog waves that your brain identifies as “Paradise City.” Every computer with a sound card includes one of these little wonders but there is good reason to look at outboard units.

Sound cards are seldom designed with great audio in mind yet they are a required stop on the way to your speakers. Since every audio system is only as good as its weakest link, this is where music goes to get  lobotomized. 

Enter the external DAC. These miniature components are designed to accurately reproduce every nuance of the original recording. If you hook one up to your computer through a USB connection, and reset your computer to output audio though that USB port, you bypass that nasty old sound card and take a giant step toward high fidelity.

DACs used to be just for esoteric stereo systems but companies like Cambridge Audio are rolling out new units at reasonable prices. The DacMagic is their latest gadget and Computer Audiophile offers a quick review. One aspect targeted is upsampling, a process where the DAC looks at what it is being fed and tries to add some educated guesses at what may be missing. Digital recordings are like digital pictures; the images are created by dots, and the more there are the clearer the image. There are differing opinions about the value of this process, but when done right, I have heard upsampling give digitally recorded music a more realistic and fluid sound. 

If you have gone through the trouble of recording your music in a lossless compression scheme, your next step is getting the translation right, and that means adding DAC to your vocabulary.

What’s under the hood?

If the heart of a car is the engine, the mainspring of an audio system is the amplifier. Just like a heart, the amplifier is a muscle that powers your music. And, just like a car, it can come in different wrappers. One very sweet packaging job comes from Peachtree Audio who has their Decco integrated amplifier. 

Amplifiers come in three basic configurations: amplifier, integrated amplifier and receiver. The amplifier is only power, feed it a signal and it gives back more of the same. An integrated amplifier contains a preamplifier in the same chassis. The preamplifier does low-level amplification and serves as the dispatcher for your system, routing signals and letting you choose what you want to hear. The receiver adds an AM/FM tuner to the box.

Peachtree has taken the integrated route. You have what you need to get the job done but are not overwhelmed with clutter. In fact, in true audiophile tradition, the controls are positively sparse. There are six buttons and a dial on the faceplate. That’s it for options. What makes this elegant box stand out is how computer friendly it is. Input options include USB, coaxial digital, optical and analog so the Decco can handle whatever your computer can throw. USB is a huge benefit as it allows you to bypass your computer’s soundcard and let the Decco’s built in DAC (digital audio converter), handle the conversion from bits to Brahms. It is also easy to use as Steve Guttenberg found while reviewing the unit for his blog. 

The Decco delivers a warm, rich sound thanks to it’s tube based preamplifier and reasonable 50 watts per channel of power. Tied to efficient speakers, that is enough power to fill any office or small room. The Decco is also a pretty piece with curved edges and an optional real wood case. So you get good power, great looks and it plays well with others. What’s not to love?

Wandering afield

This may be a blog about all things stereo and computer audio, but one of the great thing about blogs is that you can go where you like. This time we are turning the eye inward. Why do a blog at all? There are many engines to drive creativity: fame, passion or boredom, to name just a few. But how about the classic, money? I would have thought the two mutually exclusive; there over four million blogs on WordPress alone. I could be wrong.

There is an intriguing article in Slate about making money blogging. In it they talk about bloggers who make upwards of $200,000 per year. That is some serious cash for a couple of hundred words. Actually, there may be little writing at all. One site mentioned is dedicated to funny cat photos. The income is driven by advertising revenue, which is related to traffic. Here is where conflict can arise. Profitable sites need lots of traffic, which means lots of posts, which could mean sacrificing quality to quantity. Merlin Man of 43 Folders talks about the conflict and the article points out his own contradictions. The piece ends with the opinion that quality posts attract traffic yet it freely admits that gossip, photos and viral videos bring the most hits. Hmm…, how bad do we want to line our pockets?

I also stumbled across a blog listing the 10 easy steps to making money blogging. It hits some interesting points on mechanics and workflow, but as I read it I kept thinking about the old joke about how to get rich; write a book about how to get rich.