Head In The Clouds

I couldn't help but notice that MP3 player bought for Dad last Christmas is still sat on the shelf in the study.  Generally speaking, when it comes to music consumption, the baby boomer generation lacks the motivation to embrace anything more complicated than putting a piece of physical media into something and pressing play.  Perhaps this is mainly because the dreaded PC is involved, something forced upon them later on in life.  

The preceding generation are really quite different, we'd be virtually unemployable today if we didn't have strong PC skills and just look how close we are with our smartphone for comms and music.  There's a strong emotional motivation ensuring we'll stay a connected online generation for the foreseeable future.

Yet when you take a look a the new young generation coming through, you can see a change in behaviour towards music consumption yet again.  Whilst I've pretty much stopped buying CDs in favour of hi-res downloads and fully embrace iTunes and digital DJ'ing, there's some inherent behaviours not in common with the new millennial generation coming through.

It's easy to forget how much our experiences with physical media still impact on our relationship with music ownership today.  There I already said it, ownership...all that time we spent in record stores flicking through vinyl sleeves or flicking through CD cases in an HMV clearout sale or sat through an entire top 40 countdown chart on the radio pressing record and pause to capture favourite tracks to cassette without the talking...they've not experienced this (perhaps YouTube ad skipping is the closest parallel!)

So now I can see why these guys aren't as bothered about preserving a perfectly organised iTunes library.  Whilst we might get hang ups about loosing our digital files, it's perhaps not surprising that generation Y aren't that fussed about owning their music in the way so ingrained into us.

Today in 2012, every popular track or genre specific radio station is available to stream online right now, either for free or a monthly subscription, and the organisation / categorisation is already done for you.  

The underlying human motivations rarely change over the generations, but the tools to use certainly do.  All the bells and whistles our full spectrum equaliser ghetto blasters in the 80s used to have or the CD, tape, radio, turntable on top combos of the 90s are no longer the order of the day.  There's a lot of choice and a lot of different ways to do it now, but the chances are most of the technology is now on the inside and it comes in white!  Now all you have to do is swipe an iPad and let all the music on earth, come to you.

Just one example is the Sonos home wireless music system.  The iPad runs it's free app to control each Sonos powered speaker you add to your system in each room, the smaller Play 3 is shown here.  Napster, Spotify, your iTunes library, Last FM, TuneIn Internet radio, your iOS device music, you name it...it streams it.  The iPad is held on the cupboard by the Quad Lock mounting system for iPhone or iPad.

http://www.sonos.com

http://www.quadlockcase.com

How To Audition Your Next Hi-Fi Purchase

The industry magazines insist there is more to this Hi-Fi game than simply buying the products they have awarded top honours too and expecting instant results.  I certainly found that to be the case after getting big improvements from their recommended mid-level CD and Amp combo simply by changing where my speakers were positioned in the room at home.  

After digging a bit deeper I have unearthed 3 core considerations before making your next Hi-Fi purchase to ensure the whole system delivers greater than the sum of its parts.

1. Tonal Characteristics

Whilst good tonal balance is what we’re aiming for, every good Hi-Fi product will to varying degrees impart it’s own sonic characteristics affecting the sound.  Certain manufacturers even have reputations for particular desirable (to some) characteristics e.g Cyrus Audio sacrifices easy listening for a highly detailed excitable sound with fast timing.   Marantz has been known to add some warmth to the mid frequencies making it ideal for smooth jazz and sultry vocals.  So the latter would struggle to keep up with a fast attacking Hip Hop track but the former would do it much more justice. 

You have only to read the results of panel tests conducted by eager readers of said magazines where blindfolded participants often have opposing points of view on the same bit of kit to realise sound preference is unique to the individual.  What you can conclude, is that a 5* rating doesn’t equal perfection until you’ve auditioned it with your chosen partnering kit.

I had a great experience buying from Sevenoaks in the UK.  They have good audition room facilities that will help you hear the different sonic characteristics of your shortlisted products. 

Make sure you bring your existing partner kit along to the audition too since your punchy and precise speakers with new warm and rich sounding amp could provoke the top end unfavourably for example.  The ideal amp for you might be a 4 star rated product which becomes 5 star in your overall setup.

Even the choice of cables impact on the tone, a dealer should recommend using smooth sounding cables on an overly bright system or something more excitable on a warm and woolly system.

2. Listening Room - Size, Shape and Contents

Have you ever moved into a new place and setup the Hi-Fi before most of your furniture arrived?  Well I did once and I actually thought the Hi-Fi had broken during the move because it sounded unbelievably bad!  Like it had been punched in the stomach and couldn’t deliver any weight in it’s voice.  Then along came the sofa, a chair and the rug…quite possibly the most noticeable upgrade in sound I ever heard!  I’m sure there are scientific papers on room sound absorbtion coefficients but the point has already been made, when it comes to sound, everything in the room is interacting with each other.  In a domestic sense we simply need to experiment by adding or taking away items in the room and not placing big speakers in a small room etc.  Also ensuring the equipment is isolated from resonance with a dedicated Hi-Fi rack which does bring clear sonic benefits vs. stacking them on top of each other which doesn’t allow for heat dissipation.  The speaker drive units could be loose and require tightening too.

3. Music Preference

The other main consideration is choosing equipment that has the right tonal characteristics to match our favourite music.  Of course a more neutral sound is preferred if your taste varies as wildly as Opera on a Tuesday through to Detroit Techno on a Friday!

Taking some of your best-loved tracks to the audition at your local Hi-Fi dealer is of course the way to go. 

Let’s say you are looking for some new floorstanding speakers.  You play some favourite urban tracks off CD and discover a whole new world of  power, scale, bass weight and depth than with your current stand mounting speakers.  Your Hip Hip sounds awesome and you can’t wait to get them home.  But then, next disc, you play some equally favourite Jazz tracks only to find these big speakers tend to colour the tone a bit too much.  Perhaps I better audition some stand mounting speakers after all.  You’ll find less scale and bass weight but a more precise and realistic sound.  Your final decision will be a better one if you bring different types of music with you.

Finally here are some Hi-Fi manufacturers that are known to go well together sonically speaking:

Cyrus Audio

Marantz

Leema

Plinus

Roxan

Loudspeaker Placement Really Does Make All The Difference

Having recently upgraded to the widely acclaimed Audiolab 8200CD Player and Cyrus 6XP Amplifier I had been enjoying a much more excitable and detailed sound than ever before.  What a great combination and very content I’ll be for many years to come I thought.  Well, many years got shortened to about 2 weeks later because along came a very challenging album, bass extension-wise, from Thievery Corporation.  Deep and low bass lines led the way on many of the tracks, and to my ears these were coming across boomy and not defined how the artist surely intended.  Did I need a more powerful amplifier or more capable floorstanding speakers to handle this kind of music and the volumes I wanted?

Well thankfully it turns out no.  All that was needed was a bit more consideration and experimentation with loudspeaker placement.  My speakers were a bit too close to the rear wall and to each other vs. the listening position.  After taking the time to follow some expert steps I not only resolved the bass resolution but the whole system sounded even better than before….for free!

It’s easy to neglect this area in a real world situation where room shape and other furniture requirements offer limited options.  However, if you can, do experiment to ensure you are hearing all you paid for, it’s often really worth it.

4 Steps To Better Loudspeaker Placement

These steps (edited down and simplified from another resource online) are based on a standard 2-channel stereo setup and both your left and right speakers are placed either on stands or floorstanding models…if they are resting on a bookshelf then it’s worth investing in proper support.

1. Nearly all loudspeakers work best positioned away from room boundaries (i.e. further out in the room, not too close to the walls) with the speaker’s tweeter at your listening height.

2. Position the two speakers and your preferred listening position as the apices of an equilateral triangle (so the speakers are toe’d in aiming directly at your main listening position).

3. You do not want an equal distance between your Loudspeaker woofers and nearest boundaries (floor, side and rear wall).  The boosts and dips will occur at the same frequency causing a lumpy ill-defined even balance on low frequencies.  To get the smoothest low-frequency performance, aim for an unequal distance between the speaker’s woofers and nearest boundaries.

There is a ‘golden ratio’ to help you achieve this which is apx. 1.618 : 1

a. Measure the distance from the center of the woofer to the floor. (e.g. 20”) 

b. Multiplying that by the Golden Ratio (1.618) gives a distance of 32" required for your woofer and side wall

c. Multiply that distance again by the Golden Ratio gives a distance of 52" for your woofer and rear wall

Keep distance to the listening position the same as the speakers distance apart.

This is theory so try some light adjustment afterwards e.g. reducing the speaker ‘toe-in’.  In a smaller room you can of course scale the measurements down proportionately.

4. You can use a test CD to aid you with the above setup

Further Adjustments

5. Stereo imaging might improve if you remove furniture in between speakers and listening position e.g. a coffee table

6. Remove the speaker grills

Objects Of Desire

It was the year 2000 on a cold February morning in central London when I first saw what could undeniably be described as a piece of ‘exotic’ Hi-Fi.  Much like an exotic supercar, to fall into this elite category, it seemed that three requirements had to be met.  

Firstly, to push the boundaries of conventional design and engineering constraints known at the time, something to make the rest of the industry stop and take note.  Then since all that extensive R&D investment had to be recouped from somewhere, it must be priced out of the reach of all but society’s most well healed.  Then lastly (and you might sense some bitterness in my tone here), it should fill you with as much desire for its ownership as it does frustration that you probably never will.

A window display of electronics in the form of shiny black boxes with lit displays is often enough to entice a young man on a lunch break from his first decent paying job in out of the cold alone.  But once inside that warm and cosy showroom, one product drew all my attention.

It was from a manufacturer called Pink Triangle who specialised hi-end vinyl turntables and had caused a stir by using inverted sapphire bearings in their design.  Way before giving products their own personality with emotive names caught on, this visually striking deck was labelled the Tarantella with a separate motor part named The Hornet for it’s oval shaped body and supporting spike tail no doubt.

What made it stand out the most was a clear triangular shaped base that was backlit with red LEDs.  Like a child in the 70s who had just seen their first jukebox light up, I simply wanted to stop and stair for a while before the sales assistant could size me up for credit worthiness.

To the present day and audio products to match this criteria are thankfully still being made to fill the Hi-Fi racks in Robbie Williams' penthouse and generate desire and ambition for the rest of us seeking exciting new audio experiences.

I’ll leave you with some modern equivalents from Bang & Olufsen, Chord Electronics and the now discontinued (but loving the retro digital VU meters) Logitech Transporter.

All Eyes On Cyrus Audio

Let’s jump in with some state-of-the-art high end kit that attracted a lot of attention at the recent Bristol Sound & Vision Show (UK) held each year at the Marriot City Centre Hotel.  

As CD sales continue to decline, the race is on with true Hi-Fi manufacturers to develop products not only capable of streaming our ever growing digital music collections around the home, but to quality levels that can at least match or out-perform the faithful spinning disc.

We’ve all grown accustomed to the new conveniences digital music can bring.  Can you imagine playing just one or two albums from the same artist all night to your guests at a dinner party now?  Excusing ones self to change the disc every hour, squinting up and down your disc rack after a few large glasses of red for the new Groove Armada album which turns out is in the car glove box anyway.  The market expectation and technology has clearly moved on. 

However, just like vinyl purists, those of us who have sampled what true Hi-Fi audio can do with a well recorded compact disc, aren’t ready to let go as easily as the mainstream consumer.  We have a few conditions to met first. Whilst making iTunes playlists and hitting shuffle works fine in the gym, when it comes to relaxing in the calm and quiet of our own home (it can happen!) we don’t want to put compressed digital music files through our system either.  To us, this is going backwards.  We would like uncompressed full quality digital music as the minimum, with the potential to go beyond CD resolution and still retain those iPod generation conveiniences.

And so too have Cyrus Audio it seems who have been busy investing no less than 118,000 hours of R&D over the past 5 years coming up with 3 new digital music network streaming products that can live up to everyone’s high expectations.

Cyrus Audio are based near Cambridge in the UK and have been having a stellar run of late, catering nicely to the mid to high end markets and collecting a huge number of awards from the trade press along the way.  Known for using a somewhat understated compact chassis across the entire range of products, it could be argued you tend to buy Cyrus for performance over looks.  They also offer a ‘return to base’ product upgrade path so you can move up the range without actually changing anything other than the inside electronics.  At this point you’ll surely be raising a scheming eyebrow if you’re thinking what I’m thinking?..

Here’s a very fast paced video from the guys at What Hi-Fi? Magazine explaining the forthcoming offering…just make sure you know your feature acronyms (I'm sure you know NAS & DAC's aren't stock markets..) before pressing play.  

Remote Control

The second post and still not onto "proper Hi-Fi" yet, but you'll have to forgive me since I have just come back from a remote island in Thailand which had time limited electricity from a generator!

I had to pack light and decided to go for this battery powered travel speaker by Altec Lansing.  It made the trip being able to put our own sun filled soundtrack to those plentiful downtime moments.  So much more convenient to pack vs. a traditional dock with it's separate power transformer, yet a perfectly acceptable sound when used outside.  The 3 AAA batteries didn't run out once during our 10 day holiday either...but it didn't come snorkelling with us or trekking through a pre-historic rain forest, just when reading back at base.

Another small life enhancing bargain then...the next time you're abroad somewhere sunny and need a change from those noisy cicadas, you now have a simple solution.

A Cheap Gift To Awaken Your Recipients' Sense Of Hi-Fi

There are vast numbers of people going around missing out on a high fidelity sound experience from their music.  It's not for lack of money, these people are often flashy iPhone and iPod users, yet still using the supplied white Apple headphones widely known in our circles for letting down the great source they output from.

For just £22 / 25 euros, they could change to the Sennheiser CX-300-II and be left staggered by how these tiny in ear headphones deliver bigger bass, soundstage / general life and excitement into the music.  A 2010 'best buy' from What Hi-Fi? Magazine too.

You know this of course, being a Hi-Fi fan and could probably recommend many other great options to your less Hi-Fi enthusiastic friends...but it's the sound per pound value for money you get from these, along with the eco packaging feel good factor as well as not advertising your valuable player to thieves with that unsubtle white cable that makes this product so commendable.  Perhaps more importantly this a product to get your friends onto your way of thinking...to not always except what's first presented to you and that pursuing great sound is for everyone.