Rooms always effect the sound, so you do need to check on headphones. And I'm sure if someone could decide on which monitors are actually the finest, then they'd be bought, but nobody can decide what's best. Although the real bad news is that accuracy and transparency cannot be acheived at any cost - at a recent recording session I attended it was obvious that most of the sound quality didn't make it past the microphones (a pair of the nicest classic tube Neumann's I've seen in a long time).
If you don't want to hear the room, use headphones! But seriously, tannoy etc. make nice studio monitors, but the classics are the big B&W 601 and the Quad elelectrostatics for monitoring classical recordings. Out of all of these, the Quads are the only ones that don't use any kind of resonance to produce their bass sound, and IMHO, still sound the best.
Nope - you're removing room resonance, which can be a good thing, but that does nothing for the resonances produced inside the speaker cabinet (or port) that is uses to produce bass. Try a pari of Tannoy westminsters or other large-ish horns and hear the difference.
It's a horn. A horn is an acoustic transformer, which matches the impedence of the cone to the impedence of the air, giving a very effecient energy transfer. That means very, very fast bass, with more attack than any brute force method you describe. Your speakers are the equivalent of hitting a feather (the light air) with a golf club (heavy cone). The feather won't go far as there's a big impedence mis-match. The horn gradually makes the air the cone is trying to move match with the weight of the cone, so to speak, like replacing the feather with a golf ball in the above analogy. When the cone moves the air now, it moves easily because of the matched impedence.
To give you an example, my small horn speakers with a 7.5 watt amp go as loud as my brother's PA speakers on his 750watt amp. Do the logarithms and that means that my speakers are 20db more sensitive than his - because of the horns! (actually about 6db of that is due to bigger magnets, but the rest of the increase is down to the horns)
So, the end result is many, many times superiour, with louder sound, with less distortion than your "box" speakers.
The horn is an acoustic transformer that links the cone to the air in the room very effectively. For good results, a bass horn has to be very large, on the scale of the wavelength of the notes it's reproducing.
The bass you hear on your home hi-fi is most likely produced by resonance, something you should avoid if you really want to hear what those bass notes are sounding like. But resonance is cheap! Large bass horns are neither cheap, nor easy, but they sound so much better...
"The closest thing you can get to a single-driver full-range speaker right now is either an electrostatic, which dosen't go very low. There are many single-driver designs out there, but I haven't seen any that hit the trifecta of high sensitivity (for your 10W Single Ended Triode tube amp, of course:), low distortion, and wide frequency range."
The "classic" single driver is the Lowther, which is extremely efficient, covers the range, and when used with the correct horn, produces beautiful music. I rarely use more than 1 watt with mine, but one I put 10 watts in and got some very clean sounding music at 120db, which is not bad for technology that goes back to the 30s.
Sure, that's bad C style to write that, and I don't think I'm suggesting C is perfect. I'd prefer it mandatory that {} are used in the above situation to make it perfectly clear what's intended.
But I can count { easier than counting white space.
These things are not wrong because they're "morally wrong" but because, for instance, I wouldn't like it if they were done to me! I don't steal because of morals, but because I wouldn't want to be stolen from. These things are laws for practical reasons (they work) not because of any misguided sense of morals - where do you think your sense of morals comes from anyway? You were not born with an in-built sense of morals.
And if one of my programmers wrote C doe like that, they'd be fired. Neat and readable code is a necessity no matter what language you're writing. Good use of { } makes for readable code. White space is too easy to screw up and doesn't print well. I remember the old days of typing in programs from magazines. If languages back then had been the type that uses white space for block structure, then nobody would have gottten a magazine type in program to work (not that they ever used to work anyway, but that's besides the point).
"Well, no offense but you're stupid" Offense taken!
{} for block sructure works very well in paractice. Sure, it's good "style" to tab in your code so to help visualise block structure, but to enforce it's use is harsh in the extreme. And at least I can see a { or } in printed code. Seeing white space is altogether more difficult!
I think it's more than just a case of what you're used to. It's like putting full stops at the end of sentances, and starting them with capital letters. It's a clear, visual sign to structure. White space is unclear unless you turn on "display tabs" or something similar in your text editor.
Standards are only worth anything if they're open standards. If I can't open an MS Word doc in a foreign application because they keep the "standard" proprietary, then that's not a "standard" at work, but a competition crushing monopoly!
"Our free "non-DRM" (Digital Rights Management) "unsecure" files work on the MAC platform, but unfortunately, our paid "DRM secure" files do not. Please consult Microsoft for more information. Thank you for your interest."
So I asked them if their demo download could be perceived as deceptive advertising!
So wal-mart are lying when they say that if the demo download works, then the rest of their store will work. Just as I thought. But remember, 88cents is still 88 cents too much.
"Note: Music downloads from Walmart.com will not play on the Apple Macintosh or Linux operating systems." according to the Wal mart notice on their sample download. So I tried it anyway. The wma file downloaded and played straight away in MPlayer. I'm on a mac. Are they lying, or is MPlayer magic or what?
$1 is way too much. Radio is free to the end user. The radio station in a post above pays about $2 for 1 hour of music for 20,000 listeners. Turning that around, it's $2 for 1 hour of music played 20,000 times. I couldn't play a single CD 1000 times in my life, never mind 20,000. That works out to diddly-squat for the price a single song, knowing that you're only going to play it at max a hundred or so times. And looking further, the more music you buy, the less you'll be able to play an individual song because you'll have much less time to play it! Music should be cheaper the more you buy!
That was one of Villa's lines. But I still like his request for "100 virgins in red fur uniforms - I'll call them Villa's Royal Mounties" from the episode Orbit.
Funny, but not all audiophiles are cable buying idiots. Hook your speakers up with decent thick cheap copper wire is what I say! Tubes are great, however. Most music needs a bit of extra euphonic help! (and it's only CD's that you put the green pen on. Not that it works or has any benefit, but it is funny)
But I object to your amusing characterisation of vinyl being hiss, crackle, pop, repeat.
As for "Fidelity be dammed" - there is no fidelity. After recently attending a classical recording session, and hearing the music live, then the playback from pro-tools, then at home on the mastered CD, I can safely say that the fidelity is all lost as the sound travels from the singer's voice to the microphone. Everything after that point is just damage limitation. If vinyl and tubes add colouration and euphonics to the sound, so be it, but if it makes the music more enjoyable or easy to listen to - to account for the losses as it gets recorded, then that's fine with me. There is no fidelity to preserve, and zero distortion isn't going to get back what was lost at the very beginning.
LPs are not always made from the same master as CD. Digital music is also not recorded at 44.1 16bit or mastered in such a format. Mostly a 88.2khz or 96khz (or even higher) is used at 24 bits to give a lot of head room for manipulating the sound before it gets dithered down to 16 bit for a CD. Sample rates are not "bodged" down, and although not trivial, will not produce digital distortion that is worse than analogue distortion - it will be ver small in magnitude if done properly.
However, some modern record cutting lathes include a digital delay line as part of how they work, which does negate any good work in producing a high bit master or analogue master.
Still, if you get hold of old Mobile Fidelity vinyl which was half speed mastered, or some of the DCC (the record company, not the tape format) re-issues that were done on all tube gear, or the recent Dark Side of the Moon re-issue, or anything that Tim de Paravicini's gear is used on, you can definately hear a vinyl superiority.... but those discs are hardly cheap or easy to find.
I didn't say that the radio station doesn't pay - just that the end user - you and I who listen to the radio don't pay!
And of course, as you point out, if I could buy music as cheaply as your radio station can, there'd be no need for downloading music for free! Turning your figures around the other way, if 20,000 people can listen to a CD (lasts about an hour) for $2, could one person listen to a CD 20,000 times for $2? No - a CD costs $10 -$15 - $20 dollars to buy for as many listens as you want, but I bet nobody has ever listened to one CD 20,000 times!!!
What you as a radio station pay is much nearer the "true" cost of music - ie, practically nothing. It would cost me more in ISP fees and bandwidth to download an album than you pay to broadcast it!
But the music is still free to the end user - you and I who listen to the radio. And also, the artists pay to get their music promoted on the radio - perhaps that's where most of the money that goes to Ascap comes from - the artists themselves?
Every time a song gets played on the radio, that's the loss of a potential sale. Why on earth would I buy a popular album when I hear all the best songs from it every morning on the radio on the way into work.
As long as I can listen to the radio for free (cost to end user) I'll just assume that music is free - after all - they give it away over the airwaves!
P2P is the new radio - it's advertising - get used to it! Adapt to it - make money off concerts perhaps, or writing music for films, or TV? Or why not be a true artist and not make a dime off your music, but work for a living to pay for your expensive hobby and idulgence.
There's more than enough recorded music created so that you could listent to new stuff all you life and not hear something repeated. Why should we pay for something "new" which is just old and recycled?
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Rooms always effect the sound, so you do need to check on headphones. And I'm sure if someone could decide on which monitors are actually the finest, then they'd be bought, but nobody can decide what's best. Although the real bad news is that accuracy and transparency cannot be acheived at any cost - at a recent recording session I attended it was obvious that most of the sound quality didn't make it past the microphones (a pair of the nicest classic tube Neumann's I've seen in a long time).
No - they use the crappiest speakers they can find for that so they know what it will sound like on your "boom box"!
I think doing a mix just listenting to it on headphones is as bad as just listening to it on your monitors - you should hear it on both.
If you don't want to hear the room, use headphones! But seriously, tannoy etc. make nice studio monitors, but the classics are the big B&W 601 and the Quad elelectrostatics for monitoring classical recordings. Out of all of these, the Quads are the only ones that don't use any kind of resonance to produce their bass sound, and IMHO, still sound the best.
Nope - you're removing room resonance, which can be a good thing, but that does nothing for the resonances produced inside the speaker cabinet (or port) that is uses to produce bass. Try a pari of Tannoy westminsters or other large-ish horns and hear the difference.
It's a horn. A horn is an acoustic transformer, which matches the impedence of the cone to the impedence of the air, giving a very effecient energy transfer. That means very, very fast bass, with more attack than any brute force method you describe. Your speakers are the equivalent of hitting a feather (the light air) with a golf club (heavy cone). The feather won't go far as there's a big impedence mis-match. The horn gradually makes the air the cone is trying to move match with the weight of the cone, so to speak, like replacing the feather with a golf ball in the above analogy. When the cone moves the air now, it moves easily because of the matched impedence.
To give you an example, my small horn speakers with a 7.5 watt amp go as loud as my brother's PA speakers on his 750watt amp. Do the logarithms and that means that my speakers are 20db more sensitive than his - because of the horns! (actually about 6db of that is due to bigger magnets, but the rest of the increase is down to the horns)
So, the end result is many, many times superiour, with louder sound, with less distortion than your "box" speakers.
The horn is an acoustic transformer that links the cone to the air in the room very effectively. For good results, a bass horn has to be very large, on the scale of the wavelength of the notes it's reproducing.
The bass you hear on your home hi-fi is most likely produced by resonance, something you should avoid if you really want to hear what those bass notes are sounding like. But resonance is cheap! Large bass horns are neither cheap, nor easy, but they sound so much better...
"The closest thing you can get to a single-driver full-range speaker right now is either an electrostatic, which dosen't go very low. There are many single-driver designs out there, but I haven't seen any that hit the trifecta of high sensitivity (for your 10W Single Ended Triode tube amp, of course :), low distortion, and wide frequency range."
The "classic" single driver is the Lowther, which is extremely efficient, covers the range, and when used with the correct horn, produces beautiful music. I rarely use more than 1 watt with mine, but one I put 10 watts in and got some very clean sounding music at 120db, which is not bad for technology that goes back to the 30s.
"performed the multi-processor "Rate" benchmarks with hyperthreading DISABLED" because the PC ran faster with them disabled. You're just trolling.
Sure, that's bad C style to write that, and I don't think I'm suggesting C is perfect. I'd prefer it mandatory that {} are used in the above situation to make it perfectly clear what's intended.
But I can count { easier than counting white space.
These things are not wrong because they're "morally wrong" but because, for instance, I wouldn't like it if they were done to me! I don't steal because of morals, but because I wouldn't want to be stolen from. These things are laws for practical reasons (they work) not because of any misguided sense of morals - where do you think your sense of morals comes from anyway? You were not born with an in-built sense of morals.
And if one of my programmers wrote C doe like that, they'd be fired. Neat and readable code is a necessity no matter what language you're writing. Good use of { } makes for readable code. White space is too easy to screw up and doesn't print well. I remember the old days of typing in programs from magazines. If languages back then had been the type that uses white space for block structure, then nobody would have gottten a magazine type in program to work (not that they ever used to work anyway, but that's besides the point).
"Well, no offense but you're stupid" Offense taken!
{} for block sructure works very well in paractice. Sure, it's good "style" to tab in your code so to help visualise block structure, but to enforce it's use is harsh in the extreme. And at least I can see a { or } in printed code. Seeing white space is altogether more difficult!
I think it's more than just a case of what you're used to. It's like putting full stops at the end of sentances, and starting them with capital letters. It's a clear, visual sign to structure. White space is unclear unless you turn on "display tabs" or something similar in your text editor.
Using indentation for block structure is the work of a mad-man. I'll never wilingly use such a "programming" language.
Standards are only worth anything if they're open standards. If I can't open an MS Word doc in a foreign application because they keep the "standard" proprietary, then that's not a "standard" at work, but a competition crushing monopoly!
The final reply from Wal-Mart is "The free songs do not need Digital Rights Management or they wouldn't be free. "
Which is the funnies thing I've heard so far.
The reply from Wal-Mart is:
"Our free "non-DRM" (Digital Rights Management) "unsecure" files work on the MAC platform, but unfortunately, our paid "DRM secure" files do not. Please consult Microsoft for more information. Thank you for your interest."
So I asked them if their demo download could be perceived as deceptive advertising!
So wal-mart are lying when they say that if the demo download works, then the rest of their store will work. Just as I thought. But remember, 88cents is still 88 cents too much.
"Note: Music downloads from Walmart.com will not play on the Apple Macintosh or Linux operating systems." according to the Wal mart notice on their sample download. So I tried it anyway. The wma file downloaded and played straight away in MPlayer. I'm on a mac. Are they lying, or is MPlayer magic or what?
$1 is way too much. Radio is free to the end user. The radio station in a post above pays about $2 for 1 hour of music for 20,000 listeners. Turning that around, it's $2 for 1 hour of music played 20,000 times. I couldn't play a single CD 1000 times in my life, never mind 20,000. That works out to diddly-squat for the price a single song, knowing that you're only going to play it at max a hundred or so times. And looking further, the more music you buy, the less you'll be able to play an individual song because you'll have much less time to play it! Music should be cheaper the more you buy!
That was one of Villa's lines. But I still like his request for "100 virgins in red fur uniforms - I'll call them Villa's Royal Mounties" from the episode Orbit.
Funny, but not all audiophiles are cable buying idiots. Hook your speakers up with decent thick cheap copper wire is what I say! Tubes are great, however. Most music needs a bit of extra euphonic help! (and it's only CD's that you put the green pen on. Not that it works or has any benefit, but it is funny)
But I object to your amusing characterisation of vinyl being hiss, crackle, pop, repeat.
As for "Fidelity be dammed" - there is no fidelity. After recently attending a classical recording session, and hearing the music live, then the playback from pro-tools, then at home on the mastered CD, I can safely say that the fidelity is all lost as the sound travels from the singer's voice to the microphone. Everything after that point is just damage limitation. If vinyl and tubes add colouration and euphonics to the sound, so be it, but if it makes the music more enjoyable or easy to listen to - to account for the losses as it gets recorded, then that's fine with me. There is no fidelity to preserve, and zero distortion isn't going to get back what was lost at the very beginning.
LPs are not always made from the same master as CD. Digital music is also not recorded at 44.1 16bit or mastered in such a format. Mostly a 88.2khz or 96khz (or even higher) is used at 24 bits to give a lot of head room for manipulating the sound before it gets dithered down to 16 bit for a CD. Sample rates are not "bodged" down, and although not trivial, will not produce digital distortion that is worse than analogue distortion - it will be ver small in magnitude if done properly.
However, some modern record cutting lathes include a digital delay line as part of how they work, which does negate any good work in producing a high bit master or analogue master.
Still, if you get hold of old Mobile Fidelity vinyl which was half speed mastered, or some of the DCC (the record company, not the tape format) re-issues that were done on all tube gear, or the recent Dark Side of the Moon re-issue, or anything that Tim de Paravicini's gear is used on, you can definately hear a vinyl superiority.... but those discs are hardly cheap or easy to find.
I didn't say that the radio station doesn't pay - just that the end user - you and I who listen to the radio don't pay!
And of course, as you point out, if I could buy music as cheaply as your radio station can, there'd be no need for downloading music for free! Turning your figures around the other way, if 20,000 people can listen to a CD (lasts about an hour) for $2, could one person listen to a CD 20,000 times for $2? No - a CD costs $10 -$15 - $20 dollars to buy for as many listens as you want, but I bet nobody has ever listened to one CD 20,000 times!!!
What you as a radio station pay is much nearer the "true" cost of music - ie, practically nothing. It would cost me more in ISP fees and bandwidth to download an album than you pay to broadcast it!
But the music is still free to the end user - you and I who listen to the radio. And also, the artists pay to get their music promoted on the radio - perhaps that's where most of the money that goes to Ascap comes from - the artists themselves?
Every time a song gets played on the radio, that's the loss of a potential sale. Why on earth would I buy a popular album when I hear all the best songs from it every morning on the radio on the way into work.
As long as I can listen to the radio for free (cost to end user) I'll just assume that music is free - after all - they give it away over the airwaves!
P2P is the new radio - it's advertising - get used to it! Adapt to it - make money off concerts perhaps, or writing music for films, or TV? Or why not be a true artist and not make a dime off your music, but work for a living to pay for your expensive hobby and idulgence.
There's more than enough recorded music created so that you could listent to new stuff all you life and not hear something repeated. Why should we pay for something "new" which is just old and recycled?