Soldato
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Unless you have spotify premium - SQ isn't that good.
If you have your CD's rip and encode them to flac, store them on a NAS, and use a audio streamer to play them back
Low end speakers (~£50-£70) - 2.1 or 2.0?
- Thread starter Mr Jack
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Unless you have spotify premium - SQ isn't that good.
If you have your CD's rip and encode them to flac, store them on a NAS, and use a audio streamer to play them back
I do, but I'm also not massively anal about sound quality, the diminishing returns over a decent brand amp, a nice set of Mission shelf speakers and the convenience of my phone streaming what I want, when i want from where i want are beyond my level of listening ability!
I tend to listen to new stuff (to me) all the time, I typically make a playlist from Spotify recommendations over a month, I'm just a massive fan.
Similar. I used to love collecting CDs, but then CDs can as you say get damaged and be temperamental (more so the CD players and drives on PCs)
I went through a whole exercise of ripping CDs to FLAC years back but never really play the track now as have Spotify premium. Most of the time i'll search for an artist and leave it running on the recommendation or radio or something.
Recently newer dance (techno) stuff - Nina Kraviz, Deborah De Luca, Stella Bossi, Layton Giordani
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I use Amazon Music HD, this is FLAK up to 24/192.
I run however in 24/48 I find it better than 24/96 or 24/192. The reason I believe it's better quality in 24/48, is above this both my ears and speakers can't benefit from the higher frequencies, but more important running at 24/48 there is certainly less harmonic distortion is the DAC chips. I do of course always run in FLAK, and believe there is some audio benefit over their standard / Opus codec.
The other important thing with Amazon Music. It has an exclusive mode, where Amazon HD takes exclusive use of the audio device. When enabled I can hear an improvement in sound quality, exclusive mode gives a cleaner sound. If you have ever had an amplifier with a 'direct mode' where some of the amplifiers input circuits are disabled, it's similar audio improvement to that.
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Associate
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"Royalcore Sentimental Suspense" is apparently how my evenings sounded.
ABSOLUTELY no idea.
There should be a thread with the most ridiculous genre thrown up by Spotify and its round up.
Soldato
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So you are a an audiophile. The more you spend the better you think it is.
Soldato
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Actually they are. Scary. Worth every penny. I've owned subs from £30 to £2000
Soldato
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No I wouldn't put ported subs in car
Here's another one for you. Hours to weeks in some cases.
Running-in period for hifi speakers
The loudspeakers used in speakers are complex mechanical parts which require a running in period in order to work to the best of their abilitywww.focal.com
And they are right, it takes a good period of time and at high levels with a lot of bass in some cases, same applies to headphones.
If you can't hear the difference from none broken in high end speakers or headphones, it means they are not for you and you wasted your money on something you can't hear the difference with. I hear how bad some speakers and headphones sound when new till they are broken in right and for sure after the break-in if they still sound bad they go back for a refund.
They're not right, they're lying. This is because focal are a speaker manufacturer, they have a big financial incentive in making you believe it takes that long (because doing so reduces returns/refunds). If you believed them, I have a bridge to sell you.
Find an independent source (not someone with a financial incentive in convincing you it takes a long time) that has taken scientific measurements to prove what they say (like the guys at audioholics did, and concluded it takes minutes not weeks) and I'll be interested. The differences you are hearing are called observer bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_bias), the sound isn't changing, you're just getting used to it, either that or your speakers are faulty. Always double check what you hear with a calibrated measurement microphone.
Andrew Jones explains speaker burn in, and how speakers change over time.
Do speakers change all that much after 100 hours of 'burn-in'? Part 1
I've interviewed Andrew Jones a number of times, but we never discussed speaker burn-in, now we have. Hope you enjoy it! In the Andrew Jones interview Part 2...www.youtube.com
ELAC's Andrew Jones, speaker burn-in ISN'T that big a deal, Part 2
ELAC's Andrew Jones addresses questions about how speakers age, do they wear out?Here's Part 1 of the interview, Do speakers change after "burn in"? https:...
I'm not posting the above for yourself, but the people in this thread that don't believe speakers change over hours, days or even years.
AJ gives a great and in-depth explanation of what exactly burn-in is and how it happens and its effects, but nowhere in either of these videos is he specific as to the timeframe (I suspect this is deliberate on his part), other than saying "less than 100s/1000s of hours" or words to that effect (near the end of the first vid).
The previous link you posted (https://www.audioholics.com/loudspeaker-design/speaker-break-in-fact-or-fiction) is more informative on this topic, it includes numerous technical details, formulas, and most importantly they present evidence. Nothing anyone says is worth a crap without evidence to back it up. And that evidence is consistent with my initial assertion, break-in takes minutes only and almost certainly happened during QA for the driver/speaker. Nobody has yet presented evidence to the contrary (Focal's marketing blurb does not count as evidence, sorry).
Interesting (unrelated) point in the second video: around 7 minutes in AJ confirms that an under-powered amp driven to clipping CANNOT fry a speaker coil, correcting a common misconception that tons of audiophiles make. I'll have to bookmark this for future use. Thanks for linking these vids.
First, small nitpick, the lossless audio format is called FLAC, with a 'C', it's an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec. 'Flak' is a term that refers to a range of German WW2-era anti-aircraft guns, the word is a contraction of Flugabwehrkanone (meaning aircraft-defense cannon), the word 'flak' in English came to refer to any anti-aircraft fire.
24/96 or 24/192 (or higher) is indeed not beneficial to your listening experience, mainly because you can't hear it (as you say) and because it's likely most hardware in the signal chain can't reproduce it. However it is not detrimental, it is merely pointless (and a waste of storage space or bandwidth). If your gear is working correctly 24/48, 24/96, 24/192 should sound identical. I keep all my FLACs in either 16/44 or 24/48, anything more is a waste.
Exclusive mode probably sounds better because the windows audio stack still makes a mess of sample rate conversion. Why Microsoft still can't get it right is a mystery.
Same with Creative soundcards - can put them in direct mode and sound quality noticeably improves but annoyingly it means any software using exclusive mode takes over and knocks any other sound source out.