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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.

This site has content relevant to audio. But it is much more. I stumbled across it from a link to the page on vacuum tubes. The rather old-school html and simple drawings at first gave the impression of a light-weight site, but the more I read, the more I realized that this was quite a treasure-trove of information. The key thing that fascinated me is that the information is full of actual experiments that are easy to try. Since I am very much an experimentalist, this resonated strongly. As far as teaching goes, “getting your hands dirty” by playing with circuits and understanding what you are seeing is the best way to learn.

Always interested in the context of a web site, I jumped-up one level and found the Electronics Index, links to 60 pages of electronics, each one in the same style as the vacuum tube page. A quick perusal showed the same care to details and experimental aspect. The subheading is “Every circuit has been tested in the laboratory”. Great!

Further intrigued, I jumped up one more level to the Tech Index. In addition to further articles on electrical engineering, there were whole sections on civil, structural, and mechanical engineering as well as a general section with pages on things such as slide rules, canals, kites, and jam nuts. Instead of being a dry textbook of engineering, all the pages showed something interesting, quirky, or unusual. The details, at least in the areas I’m familiar with, are rock-solid.

Who put these pages together? I took the link to the home page and found that these are the creation of
Dr. James B. Calvert, Associate Professor Emeritus of Engineering, University of Denver Registered Professional Engineer, State of Colorado No.12317�. There is a lengthy and thoughtful set of instructions on how to use the site, and link to other whole subsections. To give you the scope of this man’s interests, here they are, listed in their entirety:

• The Telegraph
• Egypt, Greece and Rome
• Railways
• American History
• Physics
• Mathematical Physics
• Engineering and Technology
• Optics and Visual Perception
• Waves, Acoustics and Vibration
• Geology and Scenery
• Meteorology and Weather
• Oil, Economics and Statistics
• Astronomy and Observation
• Humor and Oddities
• Miscellaneous

Each of these links typically contain dozens or more links to individual topics. Of particular interest to students is the last link, which contains a list of 60 recipes “that may be useful to people living alone and to students”. I could have definitely used these when I was in college! However, make sure to check out the bad products, to avoid disgusting situations.

I’ve never met Dr. Calvert, but after perusing his site, realize he is quite the renaissance man, akin to Dr. Richard Feynmann, but with the patience and time to document his interests for others to learn. A highly-recommended site. Oh, and by the way, the Electronics Index is an excellent way to learn about electronics, audio-related or not.