Audio Technology

35 posts
Audio Technology

PRS CE24

New guitar.  It’s a Paul Reed Smith CE24, 2022 model in Blue Matteo.

PRS guitars are known for their Gibson-style set necks.  The CE series uses traditional bolt-on construction, which gives it just a bit more snap.  The other difference is the satin finish, as opposed to their usual gloss finish on the back.

The tone is still there:  a warm but bell-like clarity that splits the difference between Fender (whose quality control has been dreadful lately) and Gibson.  The PRS is a much lighter guitar than the Gibson, and it has the option of splitting the humbuckers into pseudo-single coils.  The CE24 uses their unique “pattern thin” profile for the neck, which is flatter than a Strat but wider.  It’s far more comfortable in my bass-player hands.

Now I just have to get better at playing it.

Audio Technology Recordings

Still alive.

Most of my recordings the last few years have been done on fairly limited equipment: a Fender Jazz bass, a few effects pedals, and some processing on the computer. Over the last decade, I’ve compiled a series of sketches, but life and work being what they are, I haven’t had time to do much more.

I recently picked up a Synthstrom Deluge.  It’s a wonderful little blinky box, but I’m still learning all the capabilities.  Workflow is shockingly easy to manage, and considering my last real experience with MIDI was when the Roland Juno and DX-7 were the big things, it’s quite powerful.  I’ll be gaining back some significant free time in the near future, and this should be a great palette to work with.

So far, I’m just poking around the parameters, and everything sounds like 1997 trance.  It’ll be a bit before I can build a sample library and work my voice around this, but for now, enjoy.

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Audio Technology

RMMLite

3 comments

Last night, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu to 11.4.  Long story short, that was a mistake.  An hour of back-tracking later, I had re-installed 10.4.  I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

11.4 is buggy, to put it mildly.  There’s some conflict with the drivers for my Nvidia card, and the system locked hard several times.  I once enjoyed hand-configuring Slackware installations by hand, but my zeal for that faded years ago.

The Unity interface is laggy, cluttered, and counter-intuitive.  While I can understand why some might find the Gnome interface to be bland and utilitarian, the OSX-looking dock on the left side just eats valuable screen real estate.  Frankly, I can’t tell what its exact purpose is.  In some ways, it acts like WindowMaker’s dock, but it also serves as a redundant menu.

Speaking of menus, the original Gnome panel is also there, but most of its functionality has been removed. 

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Audio Technology

You Pay Your Money…

2 comments

With any sort of specialty hobby, you’ve got enthusiasts.  Some of those folks will spend massive amounts of money for the best equipment they can get.  There are more than a few companies who are eager and willing to take advantage of that.

Case in point:  AudioQuest makes a “high end” HDMI cable that runs $1650.99.  I’ve no clue what advantage you get for that kind of scratch.  Neither does anyone else, and the reviews have subsequently taken on a David Hasselhoff vibe.

What’s great about it: Color matched my shag carpet and futon, allowed me to see further past the visible light spectrum.

What’s not so great: Went blind, girlfriend captured by winged livestock, may have unleashed Armageddon.

No, I would not recommend this to a friend.

The truth of the matter is, there’s no reason to buy this instead of an off-the-shelf $30 cable.

Audio Technology Music

You tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is

The Beatles: Revolver

I doubt there’s ever been a piece of music that’s had as much of an effect on my life as Revolver.  Never mind that it was recorded half a decade before I was born.  In fact, I wouldn’t hear it until the early 1980’s, when the survivors of the “psychedelic culture” supposedly inspired by this record had gone on to become corporate raiders and investment bankers.

According to some sources, the Beatles were somewhat influential on musical trends and cultural movements in the late 1960’s.  I wasn’t around for that, and I couldn’t have cared less.  What attracted me to them was the sheer talent they had, and the quality of their output, which has never been matched.

Like just about everyone else, I’ve heard their early output all my life.  It’s hardwired into our cultural DNA.  I wasn’t as familiar with their middle-period input until a friend gave me a copy of Revolver. 

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Audio Technology Minidisc

MiniDisc: 1992-2007

Well, it’s been a good fifteen years.Sony has officially cut off support for SonicStage. It’s been over a year since the introduction of their flagship (and evidently, last) unit, the MZ-RH1. They’ve also abandoned the ATRAC format in their newer flash units.

Over the last year, most brick-and-mortar retailers have stopped carrying blank media for the format, and companies like TDK and Maxell have stopped making them altogether.

Lower the flags to half-mast, gang: this really is it.

Audio Technology Minidisc

TDK Flower Series

These are 2005 Special Edition MiniDiscs from TDK:

Here they are with my trusty DR7:

They’re a slight variation on the HO series. The bottom two discs are the standard TDK “Fine” series. They’re good workhorse discs as they’re somewhat inexpensive, and I can write directly on the colored surface. The TDK’s are my first choice for field recording since they’re the most durable and least error-prone brand I’ve come across.

The one on the top right is an old HiSpace disc. Pretty as they are, the HiSpace discs (which are generally very cheap) can be hit-or-miss; the good ones last forever, while the bad ones die almost immediately.

Audio Technology Minidisc

TDK わ [WA] Series

The わ series are TDK’s flagship minidisc blanks for 2006. The word “sublime” comes to mind…

(Bottom two rows. From top left, L-R: 2003 HO series yellow, 2004 XS-iV 80, 2002 Bit Club, XS-iV “Ministry of Sound” Series, わ in various colors.)

They’re only available in Japan, and at the moment, it appears that none of the usual importers plan on carrying them. I got my set from a friend at T-Board who lives there. Let me know if you need a set, and I can get ahold of him.

There seems to be a sad trend forming in this. TDK and Maxell appear to be the only companies making any sort of custom discs. Sony’s still churning out the generic Color series as well as the plain-blue Hi-MD blanks, which are the only ones in production. No local retailers carry blanks of any stripe anymore, and the number of online sources is dwindling.

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Audio Technology Minidisc

Sony MZ-RH1: Field Recording

2 comments

On to the torture test: the local shooting range. I’ve found that this is the absolute worst acoustic environment I’ve ever run across. The average gunshot is ~155db at ten feet. You’ve got a situation where the ambient sound level goes from 10db to 155db and back in less than a second, and since you’re in a concrete building, there are echoes and splashes everywhere.

I set up with an AT9841 single-point and started recording. The automatic level control obviously struggled with the dynamic changes, but still did much better than expected. I made a second recording by attenutating to a specific source and lowering the level manually.

One thing Sony finally fixed was the ability to adjust recording-levels on the fly, something only the Sharps could do previously. I can’t really think of any features they’ve omitted on this unit.

Both recordings surprised me. The first seemed to fluctuate a bit, meaning the reports were a bit garbled and intervening sounds like feet shuffling and people talking were muffled, but the soundstage was well-preserved, and everything was right where it was supposed to be.

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Audio Technology Minidisc

Sony MZ-RH1: Initial Impressions

2 comments

I’ve been a fan of MiniDisc for awhile. My primary recording unit is my DR7, bought back in 2003, and as is typical, it still serves me fine to this day.

I had a Nomad Jukebox 3 that worked well as a recorder, but it didn’t have the onboard editing features of MiniDisc, and let’s face it, plastic HDD-based players just don’t stand up to abuse. Aluminum and magnesium MiniDiscs do, and it’s not uncommon to see people using 10-year-old units at shows.

The only real hassle with MD has been the issue of how to get the recordings onto a computer from the disc. Traditionally, MD units have no sort of computer connectivity, so the only way to upload recordings was to do so in real-time through a line-out/line-in recording, therefore losing one of the most important aspects: the fact that the MD original was a digital recording.

Sony came out with a stopgap solution called NetMD, which appeared to create more problems than it solved.

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Audio Technology Minidisc

Minidisc: perhaps not dead, after all

Not many folks noticed Sony’s announcement earlier this year that they’d be phasing out the Minidisc format. In fact, most people were unaware that it was even still alive in the 21st century.

As it turns out, Sony was still churning out models in the new Hi-Md format, and they continue to do so.

In the era of high-capacity mp3 players, Minidisc seems something of a throwback. Originally designed as a replacement for CDs, the format was soundly rejected by a public already feeling burned by the forced obsolesence of vinyl. It gained a second life (and a fervent cult following) as a recording medium, and as a replacement for analog tape.

The discs were rugged and the units made pristine digital recordings with no audible artifacts. The format quietly improved to the point that the ATRAC3 recordings were virtually indistinguishable from CDs in terms of sound quality. Pre-recorded discs met with apathy in the American market, but in Japan they were plentiful and could even be purchased at convenience stores.

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Audio Technology Music

Resonance and Diffraction

3 comments

Sound waves are delicate and fragile things. They need a medium simply to exist at all, and any variations or interference in the ether can change their whole character.

Ever since 33.3 LPs started coming out in stereo, we’ve had an obsession with recording accurate sound. You can spend anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of million dollars setting up just the right acoustic space, you can position the baffles and mics just so, isolate and eliminate residual hum…you name it, just to get the exact right sound on tape (or these days, disk).

Some folks are just obsessive, and they don’t realize one simple truth: real life is noisy, hissy and generally out-of-tune. You can get it all perfect, down to the last detail, but know what? 99.98794% of the general population is going to listen to it on sub-par equipment anyhow.

Picture your masterwork being dumped to a TDK AD60 and crammed in the tape-deck of an ’85 Fiero with a 10-watt system as the owner barrels down a gravel road.

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Audio Technology Minidisc

Sony MZ-EH930

This is the second-generation Hi-MD playback unit. Notice the similarities to last year’s MZ-E630 MDLP player. This unit has the HD amp as well as a connexion for an external battery pack. The internal battery is still the old NiMH one they’ve been using for the last few generations, but I’m not complaining as it’s interchangeable with all the old ones I have floating around.

As you can see, it’s only slightly larger than the discs themselves, but it’s still a bit thicker than the EH1.

I haven’t had a chance to compare battery life between the NH-14WM and the newer LIP-4WM, but the newer ones do appear to last a bit longer.

Like most MD players, this unit is meant to be used with a remote. As such, the button layout on the unit itself is somewhat sparse, and not quite as intuitive as the EH1.

Still, quite a nice unit, and one I was able to get very cheaply second-hand.

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Audio Technology

Rumors of Rio’s demise possibly premature.

A bit back I posted that Rio had gone belly-up. All assets had been sold to Sigmatel, and hope for anything developed by their team looked lost.

Looks like I jumped the gun.

Turns out, Sigmatel has kept Rio’s development team, along with everything they’d been working on when Rio closed up shop. According to a thread on Riovolution, the whole STMP3600 reference design that was planned for the Chroma is still alive and well, and will likely be used as the foundation for other players soon. That includes the best features of the Karma (gapless playback, wide format compatibility, parametric EQ), plus MSC compliance and several others.

How long before we see it in a consumer-level product is anyone’s guess. Austin Vaughan was at CES a few days back, and Ralph Fiennes (Rio’s primary Karma developer) gave an interview, in which we get this:

We got a product demonstation of Sigmatel’s reference design for a player that’s just like the Rio Avalon – an 8gb MicroDrive based player which has the same body style as the Rio Carbon but has a color screen and all the features of the Rio Karma.

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Audio Technology Minidisc

On forced migration and format changes.

Sony is finally phasing out the DAT medium (Babelfish translation and community reaction). To be honest, I thought this happened years ago. There are no plans to cease production on the blank tapes themselves, but recording/playback equipment will no longer be made.

Why is this important? Well, it goes a long way towards showing that “obsolete” formats still have some life left as long as a) there’s a dedicated user-base, and b) blank media are still available. Take Minidisc, for example: the format was written off as a failure outside of Japan back around 1998, but Sharp and Sony still make recorders for it, and you can still get media at the local Megalomart.

Minidisc still has a fervent following as a reliable and worthy medium for portable recording. It “failed” because Sony hyped it (along with Phillips’ lamented DCC) as a “replacement” for pre-recorded commercial CDs. This was 1994-1995, when the cassette was being (thank God) phased out of production.

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Audio Technology

Rockbox: new life for the iRiver ihp-120

I’ve talked about my experiences with the ihp-120 previously. It’s a great piece of hardware, but iRiver really fumbled the software, and though they promised updates to rectify some of the more glaring omissions, nothing was ever released, and the product line has since been eclipsed by newer models. This left many users (myself included) feeling burned.

I ended up returning mine for a Rio Karma, which is a wonderful player, but Rio’s closed up shop, and their promised next-generation players have gone from vaporware to ghostware.

A few months ago, a friend of mine decided to ditch his ihp-120 for one of the new Iaudio players, so I bought it off him for $40. At the very least, it comes in handy as a 20GB portable drive. I never expected to use it as a music player.

Enter Rockbox, the folks who wrote a wonderful open-source firmware for the old Archos series.

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Audio Technology

Rio is dead. Long live Rio.

I absolutely love my Rio Karma. It’s the best portable audio unit I’ve ever owned. Rio chose to make a pure audio (as opposed to a half-baked PDA or video player or personal storage or whatever…) player and to do it right. I have music pretty much everywhere I go, and the Karma’s pretty much the perfect gadget for me.

About a year back, Rio announced that they were doing R&D on the Karma’s successor, tenatively called the Chroma. Details were sketchy, but the few things that had been left out of the Karma, like Audible support and MSC compliance, would be part of the Chroma, as well as a larger hard-drive and a color interface. Basically, it was to be the Holy Grail for audiophiles, and the community waited with bated breath for details.

Well, it turns out that’s not gonna happen, pilgrims. Rio has closed their doors and sold assets off to Sigmatel.

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Audio Technology Minidisc

Sony MZ-EH1

Here’s the 2005 flagship playback unit. The NH1 is the recorder, and the NH3D (which is very rare) is the downloader. Still waiting for word on the next-gen units, which should have full mp3 compatibility as well as uploading capacity.

The new Hi-MD units do support uncompressed PCM, as well as the new 256 and 352kb/s bitrates. The Hi-MD amp sounds clean and clear, though I can’t distinguish any difference between the Class D amps they were using in the last series.

With Sony’s newer EX90 headphones. These are getting warmer as they break in, and I’m enjoying them greatly. Far more emphatic and less “shrouded” in terms of sound quality than the Shure E3’s, which I’ve always thought of as expensive and over-rated.

With my old fallbacks, the Grado SR60. If you don’t have a set, you don’t know what you’re missing. Some criticize them for being a bit “shouty,” but they’re fun and vibrant, and very faithful to source material.

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Audio Technology

Rio Karma Review, Addendum: Underground Lair of the Karma

Talked to one of the Rio engineers and got a few corrections and additions to the technical data.

– The CPU is the 5003, not the 5002. The 5003 has a better cache architecture and some other improvements (and an ethernet MAC onboard).

– USB onboard the 5003 is not used, as this is USB1, 12MBit. There’s a Cypress controller doing the USB2 480Mbit.

– The RAM usage is actually more buffer than workspace/code/fonts/etc. We don’t use the Hitachi’s APM features, we just turn it off – the APM stuff isn’t low power enough. I’m not aware of any HDD jukebox which relies on the HDD sleep modes, as they’re not (yet) zero power on any HDD. The RAM is low power Micron mobile SDRAM.

– The onboard database isn’t much like the empeg-car’s one, nor like the Rio Central database that came after it. It’s a DB specially optimised for the Karma’s needs.

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Audio Technology

Rio Karma Review, Pt IV: Secret Order of the Karma

Rio hasn’t published any detailed specs for the Karma beyond the usual product-sheet stuff, so I’ve gathered what backend information I could find about its inner workings. A big thanks to Dave Marsh and everyone over at Riovolution for digging this stuff up.

The CPU is from a company called PortalPlayer. It’s a neat jack-of-all trades chip specifically designed for portable media devices, series PP5002. It’s got two 90Mhz ARM7 RISC processors running symmetrically in 32-bit. One controls the decoding and signal output, while the other handles the interface (buttons, LCD) and hard-drive. It also provides the UltraDMA66 bus and ethernet/USB functions.

The actual buffer memory is only 16MB. It’s been stated that most of that is taken up by fonts and firmware, so the Karma must be making good use of the Hitachi’s APM capabilities to buffer so well and still preserve battery life.

The onboard OS is ECOS, which is a *nix-ish (POSIX-compliant) system for embedded devices.

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Audio Technology

Rio Karma Review, Pt III: Night of the Living Karma

As far as navigation, this thing is in a class of its own. All files transferred to the Karma need to have tidy ID3 tags, because that’s how everything’s organized. The onboard database allows for browsing and selection by Artist, Genre, Year, and Album, and there’s a neat feature called ‘Rio DJ’, which allows the user to specify certain paramaters, such as most-frequently played tracks or oldest tracks, then creates a dynamic playlist from them. Playlists can be created and edited on the fly, and files can be deleted directly from the player. It’s a credit to the efficiency of the programming that all this can be done while a song is playing, and the player won’t hitch for a second.

In fact, everything from the software perspective is seamless. Once you get used to using the joystick and scrollwheel, they become second nature. The controls are solid, and they respond more quickly than any player I’ve ever used.

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Audio Technology

Rio Karma Review, Pt. II: Son of Karma

The menu and database systems are excellent, and as I’d later learn, they’re a product of engineers who really seem to be proud of their work. It shows. Unlike the iRiver, the Karma doesn’t show up as an MSC device. It has to be accessed through an intermediary software layer, much like Creative players. I used to deplore this approach, but after seeing the alternative, I’ve got to say that this is better. However, where Creative drops the ball with horrendous (read: MusicMatch) software, and Windows-only compatibility, the folks at Rio have thought this one through a little better.

The Karma ships with a Windows-only software suite called Rio Music Manager (RMM). I booted into Windows to give it a spin, and it’s actually a pretty good setup. However, one of my conditions for buying a player is that I not have to do that, and that’s where RMMLite comes in.

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Audio Technology

iRiver is dead, long live the Karma

When my old NJB3 died, I realized just what a gap I had in my life without one of these little gizmos. If you’ve read anything on this site, you know what a geek I am for music. I ran a record store for several years, and I’ve been in and around the industry for about 15 years. I’ve been exposed to so much over that time, that I’ve got the Alexandrian Library of Pop music in my head, and almost as much in my closet.

When I was a kid, the Walkman was the greatest invention since movable type. The idea of being able to carry around music and shut out the outside world for it was something immensely gratifying and liberating. There’s been much said lately about the “iPod effect,” but really, it’s just a successor to a mentality fostered by the old handheld tape deck. It’s nice that the iPod’s popularity makes me look like a little less of a dork walking down the street with a pair of headphones over my ears, but hey, I’ve been doing that for years.

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Audio Technology

iRiver updates

It’s been almost three months without a firmware update, with no new one in sight. The only update since January has been a Korean firmware update (1.40 K), which doesn’t add anything useful, though some users claim a slight improvement in sound quality.iRiver has responded to email from a forum user stating that the recording features were only ever intended for voice and casual recording uses, and that they are unlikely to improve. Add this to the fact that iRiver is now introducing subsequent models, it seems unlikely that ihp-120 and 140 owners will see any real improvement in functionality.

Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Recant and Retreat

I’ve been using the ihp-120 for a month now, and enough is enough.For such a great piece of hardware, the firmware is just abysmal. I’d stick with it if I thought that some of its issues would be fixed, but in the last six months, iRiver has issued one major firmware fix, and that was only to add one insignificant feature (study mode) and slightly improve another (shuffle play). The major problems still persist, and no end seems to be in sight.

The excessive gaps in playback have become very distracting, and their root cause, constant hard-drive spin-up, continues to eat battery life. As I’ve found, this renders live recording on the unit virtually useless. As the hard drive caches to memory, it causes audible pops and “hitches” in the signal. What’s more, the microphone input is woefully under-powered, and without on-the-fly recording level adjustments, you’re stuck with distortion during sudden dynamic changes.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: A wishlist of features

As much as I love the ihp-120, it’s not without fault. On the hardware front, I’ve certainly got no complaints, but the firmware certainly needs work. The following is a list of fixable features that I’d petition iRiver to add to their product.

1) On-the-fly playlists. I’ll get alot of “amens” on this one. iPod does them. Creative’s players do them. Even Samsung’s Yepp flash players do them. So why is the ihp, which is the most advanced player on the market, the only one that doesn’t? The player already has a “track reserve” feature, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal. Even the ability to cue up and save a single “Now Playing” list would be welcome.

2) Better navigation. I currently have 323 albums on my player, totaling some 2800 songs. It’s a pain to have to navigate through all that using an alphabetical drill-down method. The DB should have some sort of “jump-to-letter” function at the very least.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Linux Usage and Notes

This player runs easily enough with no software. Provided you’re running a somewhat recent kernel with USB support compiled in, the device should be recognized as soon as you plug it in.The first step is to find out where your system thinks it is. Right after plugging in the unit, open a terminal and type dmesg. The output should say something like this:

hub.c: new USB device 00:0b.2-5, assigned address 2
usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x1006/0x3002) is not claimed by any active driver.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: TOSHIBA   Model: MK2004GAL         Rev: JA02
Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 39063024 512-byte hdwr sectors (20000 MB)
sdb: sdb1

This tells you that the device lives at /dev/sdb1. Next step is to give it a mount point.

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Audio Technology

iRiver ihp-120: Initial Impressions

After my many tribulations with the Nomad Jukebox 3, I’ve thrown in the towel. The new firmware allows the player to boot, however the volume has the annoying tendency to jump to 17 every time the player changes tracks. In a player like the NJB3, that’s alot of sound, and it’s quite jarring. On top of that, the player seems to be over-heating on me, which is certainly not an encouraging sign. Sending it back to Creative to wait three months and pay $200US for an unguaranteed repair just isn’t an option, so come New Year, I decided to jump ship to the competition.After doing alot of research, I narrowed my choices down to two players: the Rio Karma and the iRiver ihp-120. Both support Ogg Vorbis, which is a big plus, and the Karma has the nifty capability to function as a network device, but it doesn’t have any recording capability and lacks a remote.

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Audio Technology

Creative 1.40.06 firmware released.

Creative has finally released a firmware update for the Nomad series.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I pulled out my recently deceased NJB3, loaded the firmware, and surprise–it now boots! It would appear that something in the 1.40.06 version fixes the underlying cause of the mysterious EAX freeze. Nice.

There are some welcome interface tweaks, including a clock/screensaver and a second skin for the “Now Playing” screen with artist and title on separate lines. Track-seek and skipping have been sped up to the point that they’re almost instantaneous, and I could swear that some of the midrange frequencies have been smoothed out, but maybe that’s just me.

If you’ve got a dead Nomad on your hands, this may be the fix. You can find it at Nomadness or the Creative site.