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Kamon took me around to visit some high-end audio stores in Bangkok. Our first stop was at the very fashionable Siam Paragon mall. This six-story enclosed mall is very fancy and quite expensive. There was a whole floor of TV, consumer-grade stereo, mobile phones, and an “IT Center”. We finally found, on a different floor, a series of high end audio shops that included shops for Marantz, Bose, as well as “KS Home Entertainment“, which carries premium high-end brands from America and Europe. Some of these can be recognized below:

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I just got back from a two-week trip to Thailand and Vietnam. While in Thailand, I met with my friend, Kamon, who is a fellow audiophile and now a professor of electronics & telecommunications engineering at King Mongkut’s University of Engineering in Bangkok. We spent two days traveling around Bangkok visiting other audiophiles and exploring the electronics district, called Ban Mo.

As mentioned in my article about Vietnam’s electronic district, every big Asian city has a street or district where nearly all the shops sell electronic parts and equipment. In Bangkok, this is Ban Mo street, but actually spreads out for several side streets around Ban Mo. There are a few large stores, including the huge Amorn Electronic store in the nearby Old Siam Plaza, but most of the shops are small, many no more than 4 or 5 feet wide. These small ones typically specialize in a single type of item, such as semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, books, kits, etc. Here is a semi-interior shot of some of these shops:

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Apple recently announced a new music player, the iTouch, which is similar to the iPhone, except without the mobile phone feature. At the same time, it “refreshed” the 5G iPod video player (that I described below), calling it the “iPod Classic”, with storage up to 160GB. The external appearance is quite similar, but internally is quite different. Reports have been cropping up on poor sound quality, glitchy software, and incompatibilities with various programs.

Via reddit comes this analysis by Marc Heijligers at his HiFiVoice site. After noting that the new iPod (called the 6G, for 6th generation) sounded tinny and fatiguing. He then proceeded to run tests, comparing it with the 5G iPod, and basically found the following (quoting Heijligers):

• An uplift in treble (about 0.15dB at 15KHz).
• A strong modulation with 22k, causing a peak in the frequency extreme, and intermodulation distortion.
• A group delay that depends on frequency (i.e. non minimum-phase).

The culprit seems to be a change from the Wolfson D/A converter used in the 5G to a Cirrus converter. Heijligers hints that some corrections might be made by a firmware update, but knowing these kinds of converters, I think the problem is inherent in the Cirrus chip. His site has some interesting links related to the problem, including some to Apple Discussion Groups. It’s interesting to see what I would assume to be non-audiophile listeners (at least to the level often discussed here) complaining about “narrow-ness”, “compressed sound”, “confined … and not as warm”, “one dimensional & not musical at all”, and in summary: “… a less harmonic sound, less spatial (the scene is inside your head instead of around your head), a bit too much emphasis on high treble, and ‘less silence between the notes’. It sounds more technical, and less acoustical/realistic.” And these are all comparisons with earlier iPods!

From the very good MacInTouch site is a user summarizing the operational problems:

• VERY Slow menu switching response
• Display of clock rather than song info when ?Now Playing?
• Inability to use existing AUTHORIZED 3rd party dock products (including Apple-advertised)
• Audio skipping during operation
• Slow connection to Macs and PCs
• Inability to disable ?split-screen? menus
• Lagging and unresponsive Click Wheel
• Camera connector not working
• Inability to use EQ settings without skipping and distortion

Via the fascinating Boing-Boing site comes word that the software incompatibilities are due to a bit of encryption added that only allows Apple’s iTunes to access the iPod’s database. This locks out any 3rd-party software and really leaves the Linux folks out in the cold, since there is no iTunes for Linux. Someone may find a way to crack this, but with the DCMA law around, this is legally risky in the U.S. As Cory Doctorow, who wrote about this, said: “I guess my next player won’t be an iPod after all.”

Update: The folks at ipodminusitunes (I wonder if they got the idea of this name from my post below?) have cracked the encryption and offered a solution to the Linux users. This still doesn’t help the sound problems, though.

I still get a lot of the trade magazines (EE Times, EDN, Electronic Design, etc.) that I used to get while working in industry. These cover the state-of-the-art developments in electronics and computing and are targeted to design engineers. So, I was surprised to find in EE Times issue 1483 (July 9, 2007, the one with the iPhone on the cover) an insert from National Semiconductor, Application Note AN-1651, that described a phono preamp design using their new LME4970/LM4562 audio-grade op-amps. The author was Joe Curcio, a well-known high-end audio designer. What surprised me wasn’t that Joe was working for National or that audio op-amps were deemed worthy of a special insert. It was that an RIAA-equalized phono preamp was used to showcase their new op-amps.

National Semiconductor has had a dedicated group of audio guys for quite a while, and despite the cost pressures from the bean-counters and competitive pressures from overseas semiconductor companies, have managed to keep the audio flame alive, at least in the semiconductor field. But the fact that playing LPs is important enough to have corporate marketing departments spend ad money on phono preamps is good. As you know, I am an LP fan, and really enjoy listening to my motley collection of used and new LPs. As the younger generation who was brought up on CDs and MP3s rediscovers LPs, and finds (as I do) their sonic benefits, there is a continuing demand for what was recently considered an obsolete format.

Note: The complete application note AN-1651 has a lot more details than the EE Times insert. A pdf version is here. Included are both actively- and passively-equalized phono preamps as well as an electrostatic headphone amplifier. Personally, I would rather use tubes for these applications, but these still look like decent designs.

I recently attended the Festival Son & Image, an annual audio and home-theater show that has been held in Montreal, Canada since 1987. This was my first trip there, to accompany Sean Ta, the head of AYDN and Artemis Labs, who builds the the equipment I have been designing recently. Our SP-1 amplifiers were used in the Verity Audio room to power their Lohengrin II speakers.

This was my first trip to Montreal, and, despite the lousy weather, was impressed by the history, the culture and the vibrancy of the city. The show was held in the down-town high-rise Sheraton hotel, which, in addition to the systems in the hotel rooms, had plenty of conference- and ball-rooms to showcase equipment.

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The best musical sound is live music. Despite legendary “world-class” playback systems, the details and nuances are lost in the recording and reproduction process. Sadly, most people hardly, if ever, have heard live music. One of the few ways they can hear it is by the buskers who play in parks or subway stations, looking for a tip. Their performances are usually just adequate, but the novelty of hearing them live does make them interesting.

Gene Weingarten, in the Washington Post, wrote a fascinating article a few days ago that described an experiment sponsored by the Washington Post to see how people would respond, not just to live music, but to great live music. The Post got Joshua Bell, one of the worlds best violinists, to play, on his Stradivarius, some of the best classical solo violin pieces in the lobby of the L’Enfant Metro (subway) station in Washington D.C. He was dressed in casual clothes and a Washington Nationals baseball cap, and had his violin case open to accept tips. He played for 43 minutes during the morning rush hour, recorded by a hidden video camera set up by the Post. 1,097 people walked by. What do think happened?

If you thought that a crowd gathered, people clapped, or the news media called, think again. By far the most people just passed by, simply ignoring him, despite the loudness of his playing in the indoor lobby. It took three and a half minutes before someone made a donation. It took six minutes before someone stopped to listen. Quoting Weingarten:

“Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.”

To be fair, this was at the peak of the rush hour on a Friday morning before a holiday, and virtually all the people were going to government jobs. However, the obliviousness of most of the people was stunning. The race or gender of passers-by didn’t seem to make a difference, except for one thing: “Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.” Ran Prieur comments on this as a kind of training of people for the Matrix (see his comments for April 8 and 10). What happened between the time of the curious kids and the “mature” parents? Maybe we need to go back to out childhood innocence to enjoy the music better?

In any case, this is a great article. It may require a free registration, and if the Washington Post takes it down, I’ve saved a copy.

I’m back in Nevada, fighting off jet-lag, whose main effect now seems to have made my brain slow down. The trip to Vietnam went very well, giving me both a chance to relax and to do some interesting sight-seeing. The highlight was a four-day trip to Cambodia where we visited Phnom Phen and Angkor Wat. However, since this blog’s focus is on sound and audio, I’ll focus my report on that.

Every big city in Asia has a street or district dedicated to electronics. In Saigon (officially called Ho Chi Minh City), that street is Nhat Tao.

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From a recent posting at Boing-Boing, I found out about a public-domain repository of music: Musopen. They accept all kinds of music, but most on their site is classical. The files I checked were MP3 encoded.  The only constraint is that it be in the public domain (i.e. not covered by copyright). Since in the USA only pieces copyrighted before 1923 are totally in the clear, either the piece must be placed in the public domain by the owner or, for works before 1964, had never been copyrighted or the 28 year renewal was never done. Interestingly, the Musopen site doesn’t mention the latter occurrence, but there are plenty of books and movies that never renewed their copyrights, so undoubtedly there are recordings made before 1964 that are in the public domain. The problem is that it takes checking on the Library of Congress database, or for the really old stuff, literally looking through the copyright card catalog in Washington D.C. I’ve done that several times for technical books and magazines.

In any case, its good that something like this exists. I hope enough people support this and contribute to make it worthwhile.

As a way of archiving research reports done by ClariSonus authors and contributors, a new part has been added to the ClariSonus site: Research Reports. These are technical reports too long for a blog posting. Contributions are welcome, as long as they meet the following criteria:

• They are original works written by the author (no plagarism).
• The report and supporting files reside in the www.clarisonus.com/Research Reports directory.
• The subject matter be relevant to the ClariSonus website.
• The author is willing to handle all comments and criticism on the ClariSonus blog.

The degree of copyright coverage is up to the authors; some form of Creative Commons license is recommended.

By the way, the picture above is from the Sept. 1940 issue of Service magazine. It is the test station of Olympic Radio & Television Corp, 2001 Market St, Seattle, Washington. Kind of optimistic - the first TV station in Seattle didn’t come on the air until 1949.

I just got back from the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver, my third time there. Attendance was up from last year and the emphasis of the show is decisively two-channel - there were few “home theatre” set-ups. There were good talks on turntable set-up, room tuning, and record mastering. As with my write-up on the AES convention, the comments here reflect my audio interests and the limited time to see everything, so don’t be disappointed if your favorite vendor isn’t mentioned.

My view of the show is skewed by the fact that I know a lot of the Denver high-end audio crowd, and they were well represented at the show. Throw in other friends, such as Frank Schröder and Dave Slagle and the show became more of a place to schmooze than anything else. Still, I tried to at least stick my head into every room. Here are the highlights of some of the outstanding rooms:

Just to start out, here is a nice display of the technology that excites me (in Jeffrey Jackson’s Experience Music room):

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I just spent a day on the exhibit hall floor of the Moscone Center in San Francisco at the 121st Audio Engineering Society Convention. These are held twice a year, usually once in the United States and once elsewhere. The US conventions usually alternate between New York and Los Angeles, so it was a treat to have it be in San Francisco. I only had an exhibit hall pass, but my friends who are AES members report good papers and technical presentations.

The Audio Engineering Society was formed around 1949 as “the only professional society devoted exclusively to audio technology”. While this encompasses the entire field of audio, the convention exhibits are nearly entirely “pro-audio”, i.e. recording, post-production, sound reinforcement, etc. The other branches of audio technology are served by other shows or conventions: consumer audio by the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), radio audio by the NAB convention, and musical audio by the NAMM show. Although based in New York, the AES is truly international, and this was evident both in the nationalities of the attendees and the vendors. As with all large floor shows such as this, with hundreds of exhibitors, it is hard to give detailed summaries of everything, thus I’ll just give my overall impression, filtered through my own audio interests.

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I’m sorry for the lack of posting recently, but I’ve been working a lot as well as having bit of a writer’s block. I’ll soon be posting the first of what I hope will be an extended series on amplifier design topics. Here are a few things I’ve collected over the last few weeks:

The Lossless Audio Blog has switched from blogger to WordPress (the same software used here). Their new URL is http://www.losslessaudioblog.com/

Speaking of lossless compression, the Philadelphia Orchestra is offering performance recordings for sale online in both MP3 and FLAC format. The prices for most works are $4.99 for MP3 and $5.99 for FLAC, although Beethoven’s Symphony #9 goes for $9.99/$11.99. These prices are for the entire piece, so range from $0.37/minute for Britten’s Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes to $.11/minute for Schubert’s Ninth Symphony for the FLAC version (these were two I bought). Not really cheap but not bad for 16-bit 44.1KHz lossless files.

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