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· Train to be a Golden Ear listener!    posted Feb 27, 2014 (show)
  • Philips Golden Ear Workout
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  • I plan to try this... Looks very cool. Maybe I will get to hear what all the other members of NJAS hear!
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  • Comments:
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  • § Very Interesting.
     ⤷ posted Feb 27, 2014 by JimOfAllTrades
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· I just lowered my noise floor - for free!    posted Feb 11, 2014 (show)
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  • At least I think it's free. I called Elizabethtown Gas, my natural gas provider, and they came out and replaced a very noisy, squeaky gas meter in my basement listening room. Ah! The silence. If your gas meter is noisy, call your gas company right away.
· For those who like their music LOUD!    posted Feb 10, 2014 (show)
  • Deadly sound system
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  • You can listen at full volume, but only once. Jens: Please be careful!
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  • Comments:
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  • § They featured this on Weather.com last week.
     ⤷ posted Feb 10, 2014
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· The coolest instruments I've ever seen    posted Feb 10, 2014 (show)
· PHOTO NO 3 AT BRIAN K'S 2/9/2014    posted Feb 9, 2014 (show)
  • Post 82 Image
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· PHOTO NO 2 AT BRIAN K'S 2/9/2014    posted Feb 9, 2014 (show)
  • Post 81 Image
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· DIY Headphone Amp    posted Jan 28, 2014 (show)
· NYU AES Paper and Thesis from Ralph Glasgal    posted Jan 13, 2014 (show)
  • Sent to us by David Nemzer of The Audiophile Society
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  • Ambiophonics Paper
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  • If you want to see how to improve the rather poor frequency response of
    stereo systems, a thesis and an AES paper have been added to the Ambiophonic
    website describing the response measurements and how to make a stereo system
    really flat. The response curves shown in these papers are worth the
    reading of something a bit technical that is not entirely subjective except
    for the 47 listeners that confirm the measurements. Note this batch of
    tests was done using the speakers in a Mac laptop, believe it or not. But
    another series of tests with high quality external speakers yielded the same
    result and that graph is shown elsewhere. Also the basic programs can be
    applied to any PC system and there are already audio components that
    function like the laptop.

    There will be other papers in the future using all types of speakers, media,
    and recording techniques. The color may get truer but the contrast to old
    black and white will remain.

    www.ambiophonics.org/Iris AES Paper.pdf and
    www.ambiophonics.org/Thesis_Iris.pdf

    Ralph Glasgal
· Spring Head-Fi Meet NY Announced    posted Dec 23, 2013 (show)
  • From David Nemzer of the NYAS
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  • NYC spring meet will be held in the Babylon American Legion Hall where the meet was held in 2005- 2006 ,2012,2013.

    I rented the lower part of the hall this time Space will not be a issue can hold 200 people.



    All Vendors and Members are welcome.

    Donations welcome to help cover cost of the room but not required to attend.

    Donations for the Not so Silent auction greatly appreciated as well as a volunteer to run it.





    Directions to :

    Babylon Post # 94
    The American Legion
    22 Grove Place
    Babylon NY11702
    631-669-0094 Meet will be 9am-6:00pm Sat April 5th 2014 must be out by 6:00pm(Breakdown at 5:30pm)

    Not So Silent Auction 2:30pm

    VENDOR SETUP 8:30AM




    1-Via Long Island Expressway(Longway) to Exit 51 South.Take Deer Park Ave
    South (fork to right over southern state parkway)Past Sunrise Hwy (rte27) & LIRR (Long Island RailRoad) overhead tracks.2nd Street(Grove Place) after railroad tracks make Right Turn.go in 1 Block,large building on corner.

    2- Via Northern State PKY to Exit 42 South .Then follow same directions as
    above.

    3- Via Southern State PKY (Shorterway) to Exit 39 south,same as above.

    4-Via Sunrise Hwy to Deerpark Ave(Not 231) South (Exit 40) ,go south untill
    you pass under LIRR Tracks Make Right On Grove Place after you Pass
    Lo-Mans store (on Corner of Grove Place).

    5- Long Island Railroad (LIRR) to Babylon train station,( about one hour from Penn Station)one block south to Grove place.Hint if you are at the Ticket booth & look across the parking lot,you will see the Babylon High School Parking lot across the street.
    Walk Across the street thru the Babylon High School parking Lot you can see the hall Yellow building.



    For those driving I have been advised not to park on the street by the hall as the town has been issuing tickets. Parking lot next to & behind the Hall Also can park in the School parking lot DO NOT PARK IN Church parking lot across the Street from the Hall.Pay attention to signs when you park.School parking Lot Best Bet.


    Enter Hall thru the Front Door on Left of the Hall.

    There are doors at the rear of the room to bring in equipment.


    Places to eat & drink close by within walking distance,Kitchen in hall will be open for lunch.
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  • Comments:
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  • § This is a great time for anyone wanting to hear different headphones or amps or both. Always a fun day.
     ⤷ posted Dec 29, 2013
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  • § See the headfi thread http://www.head-fi.org/t/691862/official-new-york-spring-meet-sat-april-5-2014
     ⤷ posted Jan 22, 2014
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· DSD Backgrounder    posted Dec 13, 2013 by JimOfAllTrades (show)
  • Wiki on DSD
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  • With DSD audio seemingly taking the audiophile world by storm, I'd thought I'd better give some background.

    What is DSD? It stands for "Direct Stream Digital" but in fact it's really "Delta-Sigma Digital". The direct part refers to the fact the source file is not sent using filtering, just "directly". DSD is largely the result of efforts by Sony, though Philips and other partners did some of the heavy lifting, including Ed Meitner of the Meitner DAC fame.

    What is delta-sigma? DS is a way of using substantially cheaper digital components to encode and decode electrical signal digitally than traditional PCM chipsets. Also, DS is a more flexible conception. While PCM is limited to the specs of the chipset, DS allows for variable encoding quality. There's a mild trade-off with DS between bandwidth and dynamic range, but for 44.1KHz audio, you can achieve up to 120dB of dynamic range, or about 20 bits instead of 16. Why is DS cheaper? Because it only employs a single bit to encode audio data, but encodes it much quicker than traditional PCM, 16x faster for normal implementations. Single bit ADC's and their "equivalent" DAC's are substantially less expensive to produce than 16-bit devices. The problem is that one-bit digital recordings by definition would have very poor dynamic range without what is called "noise shaping".

    Noise shaping is the heart of how DSD works. As with MP3's, the variable encoding needs an algorithm to "reconstruct" the PCM waveform. It's the art of the algorithm builder that determines the resulting sound quality. Also, there's no reason the algorithm needs to be fixed, since it can work in the digital domain in real time (these are time based filters). Instead, the algorithm can change on the fly as the signal advances. A similar noise shaping can take place with PCM equipment, but PCM devices tend to start with fixed filters since they have to work in the frequency domain. Keep in mind that you don't need to filter the signal on the encoding side, for the most part. All the noise shaping is done on the decoding side.

    What was Sony's motivation? By all accounts, Sony had several motivations. Not the least of which was their constant battle with Philips over what are called FRAND patents and licensing agreements. Philips had won the war over VHS and redbook CD, and DVD licensing was essentially abandoned to gain the favor of computer makers, meaning that Sony was left out in the cold over a significant source of consumer product income. Sony had also invested heavily in it's various studios, particularly movies and classical recordings. They needed tie-ins to increase sales in these areas since CD sales, while increasing in the early nineties overall, was not increasing in several Sony investment areas such as classical and jazz back catalogs. A new "audiophile" format would have a chance to payback those investments. "Audiophile" though should remain in quotes since the default specs would have essentially been the same quality as 44.1/16 redbook CD. In fact, the original specs were shaped around 44.1/16 to make the encoding compatible with professional PCM editing gear. Thus was born the SACD. Keep in mind that while SACD was theoretically capable of encoding 120dB dynamic range, PCM editing equipment before the age of 24 and 32 bit ADC's were not, and so only analog masters directly encoded to SACD could take advantage of the increase. This is fine for a company like Sony trying to sell it's analog back catalog again in a new format, but not for studios trying to push new artists. Also, DS suffers from an innately higher noise floor as the frequency increases. At any rate, SACD's went nowhere in the market for their first decade.

    What's happened since? Well, since the late nineties, the rise of 32-bit editing audio (with about 24-bit of effective resolution) chipsets has allowed the rise of better quality DSD recordings. Also, a number of the patents and licensing agreements that bound up the technology have expired. The result is a lot experimentation in the high-end audio market. DSD sampling rates can now be increased to 2, 4 or 8 times their original speed, which helps them match up with 192KHz PCM digital. Many DSD-ready DAC's do their noise shaping internally now, which means there isn't a requirement to convert to PCM before the DAC. There were a lot of efforts by engineers like Ed Meitner to develop DSD-native studio editing equipment, but all the major studios were and still are wedded to PCM-based software regardless of the available hardware, so those efforts dried out. Thus, only when analog recordings are directly encoded to DSD does the codec escape any connection to PCM. The vast majority of DSD recordings are still PCM-based. Whether all of this will end up reviving the format is anyone's guess since the source material is still very limited and most mass-market music production is geared towards MP3-quality files, not even redbook quality.
· Jazz Jam Session    posted Dec 12, 2013 (show)
  • La Tavola Cucinna
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  • Fellow Members and Friends:

    I host a jazz jam (Leo Gayten Memorial Jazz Jam) in the Edison area every thursday night. It is at a restaurant called La Tavola Cucinna, at 700 Old Bridge Turnpike in South River. The hours are from 7;30 until 10:00. The food is superb and the great martini menu is half - price on jam nights.
    Please note we will play this week on the 12 th of December, but will be off on the 19 th and 27 th of this month. We will return to our regular scheduling on the 2nd of January, 2014. I play keyboards and sing on this gig.

    Hope to see you there!

    Thanks

    Steve Malski Niles
· Super Regulator Boards now available    posted Dec 10, 2013 (show)
  • Post 74 Image
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  • One of the top-performing regulator from the NJAS bakeoff, the Jung-Didden Super Regulator, is now available as a PCB pre-order from DIYAUDIO. (Boards for the original 1995 design went out of stock at Old Colony Sound many years ago.) These look to be easier to deal with as they have a silk screen and provision for mounting a heat sink directly on the board. Cost is $19 which, if i recall, is about what OCS sold the originals for.

    Jan Didden has a write-up on the Linear Audio (Netherlands) site: http://www.linearaudio.nl/linearaudio.nl/images/pdf/superreg_article.pdf

    I have no financial interest in the project. If you're retrofitting a preamp, these are the ones to get.
· 50,000 watts, Over 4.5 tons of gear!    posted Dec 4, 2013 (show)
  • Who wants to host this system for a meeting?
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  • Audiophile Club System
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  • Sent to us by David Nemzer of the NYAS. Wow!
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  • Comments:
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  • § It's for disco DJ's though.
     ⤷ posted Dec 4, 2013 by JimOfAllTrades
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  • § Yes. Jim, but if you read all the way down, they did try it with more audiophile music sources. The point is that they were trying to recreate a home audiophile type of system on a large scale.
     ⤷ posted Dec 5, 2013
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· Stonehenge may have been musical in nature!    posted Dec 4, 2013 (show)
· Holiday Music at the Mountainside Library    posted Dec 4, 2013 (show)
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  • This Thursday evening, December 5th, from 7 to 8:30 PM, the Mountainside Library will offer a wonderful musical evening for your enjoyment. Slight Imperfection will entertain you with winter and holiday selections on celtic harp and guitar. Come join us and enjoy the spirit of the season. Registration is encouraged: please call 908-233-0115.

    Lynn Favreau
    Director, Mountainside Public Library
    Constitution Plaza
    Mountainside, NJ, 07092
    Tel: 908-233-0115
    Fax: 908-233-7311
    CD&L Delivery# 2337
    Email: favreau@mountainsidelibrary.org
    Web: www.mountainsidelibrary.org
    Text the MPL: 908-913-0156
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