Statistics: Posted by rlfun — January 6th, 2020, 6:56 pm
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Update on the CD rip project:
SUCCESS!
Well over 1,000 CDs were scanned in as FLAC files, with all the track details and album covers, leaving only around 20 CDs which were having issues being correctly read in.
Was able to listen at will to any of the albums using the music player software on laptop, with the WD external drive connected, amplified by the DAC/Amp, on favorite newly-purchased pair of Sennheisers, all from the luxury of the living room.
This project provided a great deal of satisfaction and enjoyment over the past 15 months, as well as something very positive to focus on.
Statistics: Posted by Ron Thorne — January 2nd, 2020, 2:43 pm
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(Prepare yourself for a little bit of a read.)
Although I am pretty happy with the sound quality coming out of my HTC One A9 smartphone (I did a lot of research on its audio capabilities before pulling the trigger), it takes a big bite out of my battery when I am not next to a power outlet. My is still an option for a dedicated portable music rig, but its battery is not what it was when I bought it 10 years ago.
This led me to a search for a new dedicated digital audio player (DAP) to serve in situations when I do not want to sacrifice phone power. As long as I was going to do this, the new DAP should sound at least as good as the HTC One A9 and the old iPod, and not suffer from short battery life. I also decided very quickly that I did not require hi-res audio support. As long as the DAP could handle 44.1/48kHz 16/24 bit, that would be more than enough.
I have grown rather accustomed to the super interface and functionality offered on the Poweramp app for Android, and if possible, really wanted an Android-based player that could make use of that app, or one that offered similar functionality, but soon discovered (the not totally surprising truth) that pretty much all of the Android-based players have short battery lives. More than 6-10 hours was not in the cards for most of them, which left me wanting more.
After a great deal of research into a wide variety of devices (I looked at products from Onkyo, Pioneer, FiiO, iBasso, Sony, TheBit, Astell & Kern, Shanling, Cayin, and others), I finally arrived at a decision to purchase the as my new portable digital audio player. In addition to well-rated audio performance and excellent battery life (up to 50 hours playing back FLAC files, up to 100 hours playing back MP3 files), this device provides support for gapless playback (this is non-negotiable to me), and comes with a microSD slot to supplement its 32GB of internal storage. There was a great deal of debate on the net whether this model will support microSD cards larger than 128GB, so rather the finding out the hard way, I went ahead and got a to bring the storage space up to 160GB total.
This led me to one additional thing I had to just leave until the device arrived: what audio file formats to use. As Cowon had supported Musepack lossy compression (MPC) files in DAPs they released in years past, I was hopeful that its omission from the supported formats list was just an oversight, but alas, MPC was not supported. It was also not made clear in any of the exhaustive information I reviewed before purchasing whether gapless playback was supported across all supported audio file formats, or just FLAC. I went through OGG, MP4/AAC, MP3 and FLAC to see how gapless fared. Unfortunately, it was not supported across the board, but I confirmed that it is supported for both FLAC and MP3 ( only - other MP3 encoders were hit or miss). One additional wrinkle regarding FLAC is that although you can play entire album FLAC files with embedded cuesheets to denote individual tracks (my preferred archiving method), the individual tracks do not get properly indexed in the Cowon D's music database.
With this information in hand, I knew that I would need to perform a great deal of re-encoding of my existing music collection to make it work as intended with the new device, and I would also need to figure out a strategy regarding which files would stay in FLAC, and which would move to MP3, since I would not be able to fit my whole library into 160GB of space without compressing some tracks down.
This was when I recalled that I had played around with lossyFLAC a while back, and thought maybe it could see some use here. LossyFLAC (now called lossyWAV by its developer) is a very interesting pre-processor for PCM streams that is able to reduce the bitrate of audio by reducing the bit depth of the input signal (through a process carefully analyzing and dropping insignificant bits using the wasted bits feature of PCM stream formats such as WAV and FLAC), and returning back an audio file that is considered completely transparent at the standard compression setting, while being reduced in file size by close to 50% (averaging around 450kbps), all while being completely compatible with any device that is capable of playing FLAC files. And all this without any compression artifacts, and any added noise remaining below the noise floor. It's like having FLACs at half their size with no meaningful penalty.
After doing some tests with lossyFLAC, I discovered an issue with a subset of my source FLAC that are backups of Minidisc recordings, which are lossy and will have some minor compression residue. These caused the lossyFLAC pre-processing to result in much larger file sizes than hoped, so I made the call to transcode these (the horror) to v0 LAME MP3 (note: I didn't go with 320kbps CBR because LAME applies a lowpass filter at this setting, but doesn't at v0, so should end up being more transparent) as the optimal balance of sound quality and file size.
With all the ground rules set, I also found a few albums that I don't listen to that often, or which were not very high quality recordings to begin with, and relegated these to the v0 LAME MP3 treatment, too. Then, I proceeded to convert my entire music catalog to their new formats. This took several hours of batch processes in Foobar2000, done over several nights. I also had to run another set of batch processing to add album artwork to the newly created files, since I usually do not add art album artwork to my FLAC archive files.
Once all that was done, I copied over somewhere on the order of 900+ albums to the internal memory and the microSD card, and to my joy, everything worked exactly as intended, and full gapless bliss has been achieved. And the sound quality is excellent, so excellent that I decided to treat myself to a new pair of headphones to complement the setup. I did a bit more research and came across an excellent deal on Amazon that I could not pass up: A pair of headphones, MSRP $179, street price $149, going for $29.99 (update: The cable became damaged on the first set I bought, and when I contacted Amazon for support, they were on sale that day for $19.99, so I saved $10 through the return/exchange process). The biggest complaint I read from reviewers regarding this model was regarding the lack of over-emphasized, fat bass, which to me meant to me that they had the sound signature I prefer, and would likely be more readily able to be EQd to match my taste.
This supposition proved completely true. The bass is indeed not pronounced when listening to my new DAP with flat EQ (it isn't missing, either, just a little south of neutral), but when I use the excellent Cowon JetEffect EQ system on the Plenue D, and apply one of their BBE settings for headphones, everything gets richer and broader without sounding overdone at all. The soundstage is very full, stereo separation is excellent, and details are articulated cleanly and accurately. It has been said by many a reviewer reviewing a whole host of different audiophile gear, but I can truly say that I have heard things in recordings that I thought I knew very well with this combination that I have never heard before. By that, I mean subtle textures, noises and sounds that had not been revealed in my previous setups are now present, making each time I pull up an album I haven't heard in a while a fun, new adventure.
Presenting, my new portable audio setup!
Total price: $248 (Cowon Plenue D - $190, Phiaton Fusion MS 430 - $20, Silicon Power 128GB MicroSDXC - $38)
Statistics: Posted by jtx — March 18th, 2018, 12:20 am
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After a couple more months of use, the amp's overheating circuit started firing rather regularly, rendering the system essentially unusable. Worried that I had a defective amp, I sent it to the manufacturer's service center for inspection. They concluded that it was faulty, and sent a replacement (note: this took nearly a month due to it being August in France). I ran the replacement through its paces, and after a few days... overheating again.
At this point, I did not want to sit through another lengthy delay. Plus, it seemed pretty unlikely to me at this point that the amp was at fault. It must be one of the other components, I thought... or, the cables. Either it was the USB cable connecting the amp with the PC that serves as my media host, or the bi-wired speaker cables connecting to the amp. After ruling out the USB cable fairly quickly (overheating continued despite which cable was swapped in), I ran the system with the factory-included brass bridge plate installed on the speakers, and only used the first two of four connectors of the bi-wiring cable attached to each of the speakers, and had no problems over the course of several nights of tests. But of course it looked pretty messy with the extra dangling bits and the now unnecessarily thicker cable housing (attracting my toddler's curious fingers), so I did some research on replacement standard wiring cables that were more compact, and less likely to be capable of flipping the speakers if tugged.
I accidentally stumbled upon an audiophile company in the UK that makes some very interesting cables (and they actually make them in the UK, not China), which start in the reasonable price range and go straight up to astronomical prices. After reading the reviews, I debated getting the "starter" range versus the next model up, but particularly given that I am running short cable lengths, and the next model up costs about double the starter model (and I don't have money to burn), I went with the starter model. Oh, and they are blue.
Tellurium Q Blue
The other piece I wanted was a set of jumper cables to replace the factory brass plates. The Tellurium Q Blue jumper cables were overpriced for what they are, so I stayed in the US for these, going to Anticables in Minnesota (again, made in USA, not China - 2 for 2!), and picked up their solid copper core jumper cables with spade connectors.
Anticables Level 2 Jumper Wires
The Tellurium Q cables were delayed in getting out of the UK by a week (but on the plus side, were assembled and terminated at the factory in UK while I was waiting, and were run through a 24-hour cycle on a Nordost break-in machine), so the jumpers, which had arrived quickly, stayed in their packaging in the meantime. Once both were in hand, I installed and tested the new arrangement over a weekend, and after playing with the speaker wire connection techniques, now I am settled on a diagonal arrangement (red wire from amp into the treble red connector, black wire into the bass black connector, with jumpers connecting the corresponding red/black post, and following the directional indications coming from Anticables, although I think it shouldn't matter), and the result is a stable system with excellent sound (maybe some suggestion bias, but I feel the sound is slightly cleaner now with maybe a hint more bass response), and no overheating, nor any unusually fat or dangling bits to entice my son. It just works.
New speaker wire arrangement
So now, I really have a new, bullet-proof setup that delivers on the sound. And no overheats ever since.
Statistics: Posted by jtx — March 22nd, 2016, 11:05 pm
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Statistics: Posted by bluenoter — August 24th, 2015, 11:25 pm
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Statistics: Posted by jtx — June 30th, 2015, 4:08 pm
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Utilizing your Bluetooth capability for checking out samples via streaming sources seems smart to me.
It's a handsome, superb-sounding little audio system with a remarkably small footprint.
Statistics: Posted by Ron Thorne — June 30th, 2015, 3:55 pm
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Close-up of one of the Wharfedales in their natural habitat...
Statistics: Posted by jtx — June 28th, 2015, 4:19 pm
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Statistics: Posted by Ron Thorne — May 11th, 2015, 5:10 pm
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$29
$30
Deeeeeluxe with MP3 $42
Statistics: Posted by BeBop — February 15th, 2015, 6:30 pm
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