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    What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?

    I'd argue that the audio enthusiast has far more outlets for objective assessment than photography now has. There are far more media outlets still publishing measurements to satisfy objective demands in audio than there are in the field of digital photography today. And that's part of the...
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    What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?

    I agree, but we face an enormous hurdle in getting these concepts across to an audience that has only just got past outright hostility toward that side of the topic. The very real danger here is that important developments in audio get sidelined through active disinterest by today's audiophile...
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    What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?

    I am seriously concerned that the audiophile world is getting marginalised because of its own curmudgeonliness. It's already marginalised because of price, availability, snobbery (and inverted snobbery), and the fact that audio products are intended to last 20+ years is antithetical to people...
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    What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?

    Respectfully Myles, I don't think you quite understood where I'm coming from here. I have no problem whatsoever with the sound of R2R. I know how good R2R can sound (I briefly had a Tim de Para modified Revox G36, and regretted giving it back almost as much as I would have regretted the...
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    What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?

    Actually, if you are really down with the crowd, compact cassette is the thing to go for. LP is beginning to have a negative connotation, because it's all Urban Outfitters wannabes and 'are you still doing that Grizzly Adams impression?' hipsters past their Best Before date.
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    What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?

    Arguably, many improvements seen in the last 25 years are down to audio now being unconstrained by price. We'd never have products like the Alexandria XLF, the SME Model 30/12, or the VTL Siegfried were it not for that ultra-high-end market, and we'd never see products trickling down from these...
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    What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?

    Well DVD-Audio died, SACD is as good as dead in many places, Elcassette never even made it to living enough to die, and DAT made a splash pro-side but died an agonising death in domestic. It's dead and buried now. R2R is essentially a zombie format, reanimated using mostly old tapes and even...
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    Has anyone heard the Devialet D-Premier Integrated Amp/DAC

    Was the hiss noticeable prior to the beta software? I take it you mean '-16dB' not 16dB above the 0dB mark, because if it's +16dB, I'm not surprised you are hearing hiss. That's loud enough that the cartridge is picking up the background radiation of the universe across its coils! Have you...
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    KEF Blog

    It can't be done - the operative word was 'attempt'. But in trying, these companies amassed a lot of useful data that has been applied to their respective loudspeaker systems.
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    KEF Blog

    Not really. From experience, the whole room acoustics issue is often slightly too 'black belt' to introduce at the level KEF is pitching here. There's several stages to this, and the "get them interested with the least possible disruption to real life" part os key. The speaker manual discusses...
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    Is the dynamic range of CD sufficient?

    Er... no. Fortunately, even though 24-bit recording gives a notional 144dB dynamic range, reproducing this full dynamic range is impossible to achieve with our current technology. If you were using a loudspeaker with a sensitivity of a fairly typical 88dB/W/m, you were listening a fairly...
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    Mastering engineer says the LP is the most accessible high-resolution music format

    The distinction is duly noted. However, if the end result is the workman is asked to do a worse job with a better tool because it's a better tool, it's still a worse job. Yes, the seeds of this current trend began long before digital. But there were limits to how far you could go, thanks...
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    Mastering engineer says the LP is the most accessible high-resolution music format

    The operative word here is 'potential'. The dynamic range bottleneck in digital audio is not digital audio, it's a culture of thinking 0dBFS is a goal rather than a limit. Vinyl's great weakness is its main strength here - it's almost impossible to cut a groove at peak loudness without it...
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    How long does it take to develop into a talented reviewer that other audiophil trust?

    Many of us in the UK audio writing fraternity knew Lenny Setright, because he wrote for Audiophile magazine in the 1990s and Hi-Fi World in the last two or three years of his life. He was nicknamed 'Linny Setright' in the trade, because of his undying, rabid love for the Linn system he used.
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    How long does it take to develop into a talented reviewer that other audiophil trust?

    That's OK, I wouldn't trust me, ether. Only this morning, I used my credit card to buy stuff without asking my permission first. But the whole not trusting any stranger's opinion must be a bit tough. I'm willing to take statements like "cyanide tastes of bitter almonds" or even "watch out for...
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    How long does it take to develop into a talented reviewer that other audiophil trust?

    Generally, trust does not emerge until a few months after you retire or die. You then have about a year of trust, then periodic moments of being remembered as a trusted resource. Audiophiles have long, long memories; they want the reviewers they trusted when they started out to still be in...
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    How to Revive High-End Audio

    Yep, I go along with all this. We might have been arguing both ends against the middle!
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    How to Revive High-End Audio

    I absolutely agree with your first part and completely disagree with the latter. People are not engaging with their music in the way they used to. We have become host bodies for smartphones, but this is not an irreversible position in everyone. Audio has been so low on the priority list for...
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    How to Revive High-End Audio

    You presume both too much and too little of the music lover. Domestic music technology currently flies very low under the radar. For example, there is almost no coverage of High Definition Audio in the mainstream or tech CES reports, aside from a page on Fox News' website. It's entirely possible...
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    How to Revive High-End Audio

    Then we lose. It's that simple. Where we start from now is almost a nadir in music replay. We need to work with what they have, whatever it is, and build from there. If you start out saying lossy files have no place in high-end audio, all you do is disenfranchise 10 years worth of music lover...
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    How to Revive High-End Audio

    Perhaps it's because it would be the worst thing you could do, IMO. First, the trend now is to move toward streamed solutions rather than iTunes. It's still the largest elephant in the room, but there are some younger elephants (such as Grooveshark or Spotify) that just might grow into...
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    Raidho speakers: has their sonic signature changed in the last 10 years?

    I think the simple answer is 'yes'. The latest loudspeakers are considerably better executed than previous models, and that has changed the performance significantly. There is a big learning curve that comes with these loudspeakers in terms of positioning, support and system integration that...
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    Death of Stereo Followup

    Yes, but you are dealing with two groups of people who can't count to 'C' - Hormonal teenage girls, and A&R men.
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    Death of Stereo Followup

    I think the reason for that is to do with the rise of the bedroom studio in the 2000s. This has led to thousands of 'All The Gear, No Idea' DIY engineers blindly following every other DIY engineer. The deaf leading the deaf. It's physically impossible for music to get more loud and less dynamic...
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    The most abused song at audio shows... ever: "Keith don't go" Nils Loftgrin live

    Agreed. Diana Krall gets singled out because her music is played almost endlessly at shows, along with all the other audiophile standard issue pieces. Some of them are musically pretty good (Jazz at the Pawnshop and the Sheffield Drum Record are not among the 'musically pretty good' line up) but...
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    The most abused song at audio shows... ever: "Keith don't go" Nils Loftgrin live

    I think what's played in demo is different to what's played privately. At least that's my hope. If all this remarkable equipment is only being used to play Diana Krall at home too, that's a travesty.
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    The most abused song at audio shows... ever: "Keith don't go" Nils Loftgrin live

    Not at all, but you need to have the stones to accept there's more to this than simply a room filled with people. If you play the full selection of audiophile-chummy unthreatening choons - Rickie Lee Jones to Norah Jones - you are likely to have a very high seat occupancy. But, you'll also...
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    The most abused song at audio shows... ever: "Keith don't go" Nils Loftgrin live

    It depends where you are. 'Keith Don't Go' is popular in US shows, but 'No Sanctuary Here' by Chris Jones is played more often than Nils Lofgren in a lot of European shows. From a demonstration perspective, it's a problem. You know there are a few dozen tracks that are audiophile 'dingers' -...
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    Objectivist or Subjectivist? Give Me a Break

    I agree entirely, although I'd say rock can periodically take the sophisticatometer needle off zero, but it's usually so self-defeating in terms of commercial success, the artistes either give up or go mainstream. Strangely, the ones that held true to the cause were often the bands that were...
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    Objectivist or Subjectivist? Give Me a Break

    With you 100% on this. And +1 internets for the music, too. That said, dark ambient is still a bit too much like listening to a ventilation system for me, without the excitement of the occasional gurgle.

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