NJAS Wall Posting

NJAS Member Wall Postings and Comments

This guy is hysterical.
Ebay auction for McIntosh C40 Preamp
Great stuff!

Sennheiser's Urabanite Microsite
Sennheisser Urbanite
Ha!
Comments:
§ Funny!
⤷ posted Sep 21, 2014

Unveiling at UCPAC in Rahway, September 23rd
Restored Wurlitzer Organ at UCPAC
For our organ-loving members.
Comments:
§ I hope we can have a big turnout. This theater is one the greats. Having this organ restored is a perfect excuse to get out and spend time at the Union County Performing Arts Center, in Rahway.
⤷ posted Sep 11, 2014

And you thought YOU had an LP-buying problem!
Brazilian Bus Magnate Buying Up All the World's Records
Submitted by Paul of the Audiophile Society (NYC).
Comments:
§ In this guys case, one LP is too many and a 1000 is not enough !!
⤷ posted Aug 30, 2014

An article I have been working on for Linear Audio will feature an archival playback preamplifier for materials recorded even back to the wax cylinder era. As you may know, compensation systems were not well defined before 1952. (Even after the RIAA curve became the "standard" some manufacturers expressed their own preferences!).

I was impressed with Gary Galo's design in LA#5, but the thought of wiring up so many switches made me cringe. Instead, I've implemented the design with digital potentiometers and low noise, low THD analog mux. Control is via an Atmega processor or Arduino.

Motivating me were cases and cases of 78's left by a departed relative.

If anyone has interest, I will have PCB's made, but you'll need to have a little skill with surface mount components. The compensation network is designed so that it can be implemented on almost any low noise preamp design whether it uses discrete components, op amps or tubes.

Buy tickets on line
For audio club discount of 10%, the page requests that you contact Chester Group.

For sale or for free?
From Ron of the Audiophile Society (NYC):

Someone may be interested in 40's Shellac tunes.
Contact Ron Nagle, Leave message @ 1-718-238-6786
Pick up ? in Bayridge Brooklyn. Thank you, RON

Ron did not specify if these were for sale or were being given away. Please contact Ron directly for more information.

Lorin Maazel and Tommy Ramone, R.I.P.
Tommy Ramone passes
Tommy was the last surviving member of The Ramones. An era has ended.

Also, Lorin Maazel has passed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2014/07/13/lorin-maazel-1930-2014/

May both of these very different, but very influential musicians rest in peace.
Comments:
§ Add to the list Lionel Ferbos to the list. At 103 he was the last original New Orleans style jazz trumpet player.

http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2014/07/lionel_ferbos_the_longest-tenu_1.html
⤷ posted Jul 22, 2014

Electronics World "Capacitor" series
Jan Didden received permission from Electronics World to archive Cyril Bateman's very comprehensive articles on capacitor sound and distortion on the Linear Audio website. I had saved the articles when they came but, alas, they were damaged in one of those freakish NJ rainstorm/floods.

Cyril is updating his articles, now 10 years old, in Volume 9 of Linear Audio.

These speakers sounded fabulos
Comments:
§ I think you mean Rob Paull. Ron Paull is the retired Libertarian politician. Although, he could potentially be an audiophile!
⤷ posted Jul 3, 2014

Eilon Paz, photographer
Dust and Grooves, by Eilon Paz
Submitted by David Nemzer of the (NY) Audiophile Society.
Comments:
§ That is sooo cool!
⤷ posted Jun 27, 2014

Scenarios for Non-Audiophile Studios
I had two conversations with NJAS club member Bill Cesanek about recording high-res. According to his research most studios don't bother with high-res or anything audiophile related at all, so the final product typically could have been much better.

Now, back in 2003, when the NJAS took a field trip to a recording studio in Philly, the 24/96 master sounded much better than the mixed down redbook version of the recording we heard being taped. They were hardly a bunch of audiophiles and the redbook version wasn't finished yet, since they do compression and other things to "make the CD sound good in a car" as they put it. That was their target playback venue. They were doing everything digitally, too, since all editing was done on Apple computers with Pro Tools. This is the Adobe Photoshop of sound editing. Digital means that you can't up the sound quality by increasing the resolution or bit-rate. 24/96 is a fixed resolution. Transcribing the file to 192 will not add any additional information to the recording.

So, if the studios really don't care about sound quality, what advantages are there for high-res recording? Well, it occurred to me that there are some incidental advantages:

1) Newer electronics. Even w/o trying, the studio is probably using a better ADC and recording path chain simply because the high-res electronics is newer and better. New mics now come with 24/192 ADC's built-in and the signal going to the patch panel is digital already, for example. For studios that care a little, if they use high-res, they are more likely to have better cabling (or at least newer cabling) and pre-amps and patch panels, etc.

2) Better editing potential. It's just easier to edit and mix down recordings made at high resolution because you no longer have to fight with the limitations of 16/44.1. While high-res files are huge, new HD's are big enough and fast enough to handle them. That said, almost all mix downs today are to MP3's more so than to redbook.

3) Getting rid of tape. While part of the newer electronics idea, it also an old school/new school thing. Tape was the best technology for decades, but it's not as good as 24/192--even consumer level 24/192. Why? Tape has a lot of limitations, and while analog is better than redbook, it's not perfect. For one thing, the entire process of magnetization is not linear, and a lot of circuitry is needed to overcome that and all the electronic noise generated by the equipment. Meanwhile ADC's are the size of a grain of rice and use less than a watt of power.

So, what's the practical upshot? Any use of high-res by studios means that at some future date any such recording can be mixed to create an "audiophile" version. All the bits are there to make a better recording. Even if the initial release is MP3 quality, as long as the samples remain high-res the recording can be salvaged. If studios, on the other hand, just use older redbook tech, then all hope for the recording being improved is lost. There is some potential that tape masters could be transcribed to high-res but the entire recording chain was likely to be noisy and degraded, so even though tape is better than redbook, it's less likely to produce a truly revelatory new mix. That is, the final version will be saddled between redbook and a true 24/96 recording in terms of quality. Had the original tape version been somehow done the way an audiophile would do it, you could up the quality again, probably to 24/96 levels, but probably not much beyond that.

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