Practical application of the aforementioned Apple Multi-room Audio System

At this point, I rarely listen to music from traditional physical media (e.g. CDs). In the living room, I have the optical output of my Mac mini hooked up to my hi-fi, and an old Airport Express also hooked up via optical to the system. I used to use my laptop to play either my lossy or lossless iTunes library, streamed to the AX; or, alternatively use the remote controlled Front Row interface of the mini, displayed on my TV, to play music directly on that machine (as well as video...).

However, with the new iTunes remote, I just pick my a library, dial up my music on the iPhone, and have it stream to the AX. Easy and efficient.

By contrast, in the bedroom I have a Logitech SlimDevices Squeezebox 3. As I mentioned, it's a nice little unit. I bought it, for more money than I really wanted to pay, because it would pull music from my other computers, and give me an interface (via the built-in display and traditional remote control) to choose the music and control playback over my bedroom stereo, without having to walk to the living room or have a computer around. As a bonus it makes a nice clock and also displays the weather.

With the new Remote app, though, all of the music functionality could be had through my iPhone and an AX. As mentioned, I could obtain a late model AX for $60, and it looks like the Squeezebox 3 would pull $200 or so on eBay, leaving me with a net profit. As an added bonus I can have the same music playing over both the living room and bedroom hi-fis, see album art on the iPhone, etc. Plus, when I eventually end up somewhere else, more AX units make it cheap and easy to wire up more rooms for sound.

Besides losing a clock and weather display, the potential downside is audio quality. As I mentioned, the Squeezebox likely has a better DAC than the AX. I'd consider accepting that because my bedroom stereo is already a compromise from an audio perspective (assembled, as it was, for $400), and because an inexpensive, stand-alone DAC would probably make up the difference at some unspecified point in the future.

But, ostensibly being a man of science, this question of quality demands further investigation. Was there a measurable difference between the two units? An audible one?

Conveniently, the answer to the first question is readily available. Stereophile has reviewed both the Airport Express and the Squeezebox, and, even better, their reviews frequently include a thorough set of measurements.

Out of Stereophile's measurements of the Squeezebox, the first relevant measurement is in Figure 1, the frequency response. There's a pretty striking rolloff of extreme high and low frequencies, particularly the low ones. The high ones are less important since I'll just become progressively more deaf to them as I age anyway.

Figure 2 is interesting too, showing the difference in volume of a low-level (-90 dB) signal and the noise level of the device (relatively steady at -110, but rising at the higher frequencies.

Perhaps most important is the decoding of a -90 dB 1 kHz sine wave (Figure 5). It's not quite as clean as a state of the art component (cf. Figure 4), but it's got three relatively well defined voltage levels, which, as I understand it, is the truly important thing to look for.

Compare to the Airport Express measurements. Frequency response (Figure 1) is quite flat, definitely better than the Squeezebox. Signal to noise (Figure 2) is better at low frequencies, but slightly worse at high frequencies.

Most interestingly, though, look at Figure 5, the sine wave. Visually, it's downright ugly. and not particularly consistent between cycles, either. So based on the graphs, you'd expect, maybe, that the AX would have more energy in the bass and high treble, but that the Squeezebox would be clearer, overall.

I'm not sure I noticed the former, although that could be a function of a 30-year-old receiver and a (relatively) small 8" subwoofer. The latter, though, I think was apparent.

I hooked both devices up in the bedroom, and it was easy to flip between them with a switch on the receiver, if not particularly convenient, requiring me to move from my listening position. I listened to some National, some Joanna Newsom, and some Ben Folds, and didn't really notice much difference. Both seemed reasonably clear.

But turning to Modest Mouse's "Float On" and Okkervil River's "Black", two favorite test tracks of mine... well, first of all, it seemed that the rendering of the Squeezebox somehow "sucked me in" more. I felt a stronger desire to continue listening, and I enjoyed it more. And, focusing in on a cymbal hit at around 20 seconds in "Black", I think I could hear a definite difference between the devices.

But this was largely an academic excercise. I love the Squeezebox and think it's a wonderful gadget, but the interface lacks a bit compared to the elegance of the iPhone's touch screen, it's pricey for a future multi-room expansion, it requires separate software, and it always is pretty much a hack to get it to integrate properly with iTunes. The Airport Express sounds good enough, in the final analysis, that I think I'll buy one and sell the Squeezebox. And maybe there will be an upgrade down the line, a $200 or so external DAC (which still keeps the total price below the retail of the Squeezebox). That's the nice thing about components with digital outputs—the important thing is that they're convenient and flexible. You can always make them sound better with a better DAC.

Anyway, that got pretty technical, but I think it's fascinating comparing measurements to listening. Hell, I find the measurements in general fascinating. Plus, I still think it's amazing how Apple, with a couple of seemingly unrelated hardware releases, and one seemingly tossed-off software release representing the final peace of the puzzle, makes itself a viable competitor in the multi-room digital audio market at a fraction of the price of other solutions. Apple's not even trying to compete in this segment, and yet they have a very competitive product just by virtue of building a few cool pieces of gear.

Putting the pieces together

I had grand plans for this evening; few of them got accomplished. In particular I had planned to finish up my writeup on last year's trip to New York so that I could get back to catching up on the more "normal" blog entries, which don't take as much time, and tear through those.

Instead, I conducted a bit of an audio experiment, and thought I'd write it up while it's still fresh on my mind. I'll get to that in a minute.

First, a little background on Sonos. Sonos makes several components which comprise a system for wireless playback of music from a computer, distributed to multiple "ZonePlayers", which can act as either a source for an amplifier or powered speakers (ZP 90, $349 each), or a source with a built-in amplifier to drive traditional passive speakers (ZP 120), depending on the model. These units are tied together nicely by a remote control with a color LCD screen and an iPod-ish scroll wheel ($399). I've not used one myself, but apparently they've done a nice job with the interface.

So you take one of the ZP units and wire it up to your home network, and then add additional ZPs to various rooms in your house, and you can have the same thing play in each room, or different music in each room, whatever you like. There's some other cool tricks it can do, like using a subscription to a streaming music service like Rhapsody to play music that's not on your computer. There's some things I consider technical downsides, like the fact that instead of riding your existing wireless network, the units set up their own, but that's just nitpicking.

They seem to be doing a pretty good business, because Logitech's SlimDevices has a new product named SqueezeBox Duet, which comprises a Squeezebox Receiver ($199) analogous to the ZP 90, and a remote control similar to the Sonos unit ($299). If you'll recall, I have one of their $299 Squeezebox 3 units for my bedroom stereo, which similarly plays back music over the network, but includes a rather less advanced (monochrome, relatively low resolution) display on the unit itself, and a regular, screen-less remote. It's a nice little piece of gear, I must admit.

So let's say you wanted to wire up your a existing home theater setup and bedroom stereo for wireless playback from your computer. Going the Sonos route, you'd buy two of their ZP 90s and one remote, for $1100. You could probably bring that down a bit by buying one of their handy bundles.

Alternatively, you could go the SlimDevices route, getting two receivers and one remote for $700, a potentially substantial savings. .

At this point, I'll mention that Apple has a little device called the Airport Express (AX). It's a rather anonymous looking device, not much bigger than most of Apple's laptop power adapters. Its chief function is to act as a wireless router, but it's got two bonus features: it can act as a print server, and, of more interest to me, it can act as a wireless receiver of digital audio transmitted from a copy of iTunes. It retails at $99, or $59 if you grab a clearance last-generation model which lacks 802.11n wireless networking.

So for half the price of the Logitech unit, or just under a third the price of the Sonos, you get fairly similar functionality. You can even have different computers playing over different AX units, or have one computer play over multiple AXes simultaneously. Apple's close to giving you the pieces to make your own Sonos system at a fraction of the price. What you miss out on is the cool remote controls that have nice interfaces and pretty album art. You could use a laptop for this purpose, but it'd be both bulky and expensive.

But with a completely tossed off bit of software for the iPhone/iPod touch, suddenly, Apple has a wireless remote that looks to be the equivalent of the Logitech and Sonos units. It's called, simply, "Remote", and is a free download. The app can browse any iTunes libraries on your network, and play them over the computers themselves or any AXes on the network. So if you already own an iPhone, you get the functionality of the $299 Logitech or $399 Sonos units. If you don't, buy an 8 GB iPod touch for $299 (or $199 refurb if you want to be cheap).

So all of a sudden, Apple offers a system for $500 ($320 if you bargain hunt) that competes with a $700 Logitech setup and a $1100 Sonos setup. Pretty cool for a company that's not really in the hi-fi business.

Speaking of which, there are bound to be some downsides to getting audio out of a device as multipurpose as the AX, and that comes from the fact that it uses a relatively low performance digital-analog converter. But... the AX's analog output doubles as a digital output, letting you take advantage of a better DAC if you have one (and if you have a home theater receiver, you already do).

At this point, you're probably asking, how does this affect you, Ward? Well, I'll get to that in part 2.

Tweets for Today

• 11:45 Bah. Committee meeting tomorrow. Must finish presentation... #
• 12:01 Pitchfork's new fonts: difficult to read at chosen size, exacerbated by using serif for heads and sans for body, rather than vice versa. #
• 12:03 Body text is Calibri; head text is Cambria. I need per-site font settings. #
• 15:51 Made mistake of taking iBuds on the shuttle instead of Ultimate Ears. Regretting. Too many people talking engine noise. #
• 21:37 Somebody thinks they're clever, and they're right: bg5000.tumblr.com/post/31854880 #
• 21:37 Did you know Jack Handey was real? www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/04/15/books.jack.handey.ap/index.html #
• 21:43 Seems like Jack Handey and Douglas Adams had use similar techniques to construct their sentences to comedic effect. #
• 21:49 "Eldest children are punished more". I knew it! tinyurl.com/yvrra8/news/2008/04/16/npunish116.xml #
• 22:52 Dairy Queen ad narrator sounds like Dubya, or at least a Dubya impersonator. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter.

Tweets for Today

• 11:05 ACL '08 lineup: meh. twurl.nl/5br5z6 #
• 12:18 Boss "suggested" I come to the genetics seminar. Hate it when that happens. Better things to do plus bad signal in here. #
• 15:08 Annoyed, for some reason. Construction in adjacent rooms not helping. #
• 15:25 Monster Cable, you just got served: twurl.nl/hnyhrj #
• 15:31 That letter to Monster Cable just brightened my day. I read the whole thing. #
• 15:44 PowerPoint 2008, though less ugly than the previous version, is also less fast. I am undecided which compromise I prefer. #
• 16:15 Oh Excel, why won't you let me make a *series* of pie charts, formatted identically? Sometimes one pie just isn't enough. #
• 16:35 Finding the Raconteurs album aurally fatiguing. They may be professional, but whoever mixed it wasn't. Low dynamic range, I think. #
• 16:46 The last White Stripes album had some bad clipping. Why be all anal about analog recording and then screw it up in mastering? #
• 17:05 Up next, Love As Laughter's vintage "The Greks Bring Gifts" which I finally tracked down. Contains "Singing Sores Make Perfect Swords". #
• 17:06 Which sounds lo-fi in a My Bloody Valentine haze of sound sort of way. #
• 17:09 Maybe also in a Times New Viking way too. There's a line that was crossed, somewhere. #
• 17:47 This LaL album is all over the place. The MBV-ish tracks are good. The more garage-ish tracks are iffy and a bit too demo-ish. #
• 18:04 Mmm... Grado SR60s never fair to satisfy. An amazing pair of headphones. #
• 18:20 Next, Silkworm's "Firewater". Good stuff. Better than "Libertine", close to son-of-Silkworm Bottomless Pit's great "Hammer of the Gods". #
• 19:22 So far, I'm iffy on this Why? album. But it seems that music listened to and work accomplished on any given day are correlated. #
• 19:46 Why's not bad, but I keep feeling like I have more rewarding things to be listening to. I may come around to it, though. #
• 00:48 Ever wonder about the &? www.adobe.com/type/topics/theampersand.html #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter.

Lossy

Absolutely fascinating article in Stereophile on lossy audio compression* (*Actual results may vary. Your definition of "fascinating" may vary from that of Ward). I've seen the subject explored before, but it's nice to see some actual data.

Of course, the flaw here is that it's only pure data, rather than any subjective reports from actual listening. Although I certainly prefer lossless encoding on my music, particularly when I am using my best gear for playback, lossy encoding is a useful tool for things like sampling new music, listening in the car, or loading a portable device of relatively limited memory (i.e. anything but an 80/160 gb iPod classic). I use it in the car and on the iPhone. I tend to think it's not nearly as bad as most of Stereophile's writers do, but when I really, really want to listen to music, give me the caffeinated version.

Real update coming soon* (*Actual results may vary. Your definition of "soon" may differ from that of Ward).

Nobody gets sound

Half of home theater owners never set up rear speakers? No shit! I can't tell you how many systems I've seen where rear speakers were not hooked up, or, worse, hooked up and just stuck on top of the front speakers. Why do people buy things they have no intention of using? Don't waste money and look like an idiot. Bad ideas all the way around.

The Bedroom Stereo

The Receiver

On the several occasions (most of which involved poker), I'd been over at Oliver's, I'd taken notice of the vintage receiver he had. I didn't remember it sounding very good. At first it was hooked up to some Bose speakers; they didn't sound good, which is not surprising since they're Bose. They might have been vintage, though, in which case they were probably pretty decent but maybe just getting old, or it might have been them not being set up properly. Later on he bought some active Sony speakers, which was almost assuredly even more of a step down.

Point being, the old thing had never really impressed me. So when he offered it to me because he was getting some sort of iPod speaker system...

Tangent: iPod speaker systems are rather silly things. Unless you're very space-challenged, or you're buying them to be portable, that is. Generally, they're bad speakers and bad electronics. With a few exceptions, you're better off with an iPod dock and a set of good computer speakers. But hell, people love 'em. Who am I to argue?

...I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with it, but hell, if he was getting rid of it anyway, I'd at least be interested in playing around with. Especially since he said it had vacuum tubes.

Which it really didn't, as I discovered when I got it home and popped the top of the case off. This after lugging the surprisingly heavy thing up the stairs. It looked to be in pretty good shape, actually.

Rather than set it up in my living room with the main system, which would have been difficult for several reasons (tons of gear hooked up to my home theater receiver, wouldn't have worked well with my subwoofer, etc.), I set it up in my bedroom with the speakers that I have in there. Normally, I run them as a "B" set of speakers off of the main amp in the living room, but that leaves me without the ability to do things like choose music and adjust volume, both of which are handy things.

The Speakers

These speakers started out being a pair of big Technics with 8" woofers. They were a fun speaker, but not really an audiophile-quality one, so at some point when someone posted to the NHT message board that he was selling a pair of their classic SuperOne speakers, I offered to buy them. And I was too late. But the seller noted that OneCall, one of NHT's few authorized internet retailers, had SuperZeroes on clearance for $130 per pair.

Sadly, they were the "Xu" version, in plastic cabinets instead of their standard piano black-painted fiberboard. But hey, the sound would still be there. The SuperZero is really a classic loudspeeker, giving unbelievably good sound for their original 1993 retail price of $230 (and Corey Greenberg's review in Stereophile of the SuperZeroes is really a classic bit of audiophile literature). Of course there has to be a catch; with their small 4" woofers and sealed cabinet design (I'll explain that one in another post), they don't put much bass out. Well, really, they don't put any bass out.

So after I got them and set them up and realized I couldn't exactly handle that (I like a realistic amount of bass), I posted again on NHT's board looking for an inexpensive (under $300) subwoofer, and, as luck would have it, "Chip" was selling an NHT SW1P and matching amplifier/crossover for $175 or so, which was designed to mate with the SuperZeroes.

So, take the full range speaker signal from the B outputs of my receiver, run it through the crossover and then run the outputs to the sub and the speakers, and I had an amazingly kickass bedroom set of speakers for $300.

Back to the Receiver

So anyway, I switched the speakers from running off the main system to running off the Pioneer receiver. I hooked up my iPod to the inputs on the back of the 30-year-old receiver (hah!) powered it up, and pulled up some Okkervil River (a favorite for audio testing).

Holy shit did it sound good! That old receiver was amazing. Everything was nice. I took a look at the model number on the front panel; it was a Pioneer SX-737. It was rated at 35 watts per channel, which must be a very honest rating because the SuperZeroes are a little power hungry and it drives them nicely.

So I decided to get a little work done on it. It's a beautiful piece of gear. Reminds me very much of a Kenwood that my parents owned when I was a kid, which I really wish they had kept. Anyway, I figured it was worth putting a little money into, and ultimately it was around $100. Couple that with my $300 in speakers and assorted gear, and I had an incredible system for a super cheap $400. There are crappy mini systems that cost that much! And this was something that I wouldn't be embarassed to have as my main stereo.

The Source

I suggested in my "Hi-Fi 101" post that you could toss the CD player, instead using the computer as a "transport" (something to supply the bits encoding the music on the CD) and read the music as files on a hard drive instead of tracks on a CD. There are advantages to this, such as taking multiple shots at getting an error-free stream of data off of the CD once rather than having to do it in real time, every time.

CD audio is large; a CD holds 800 MB. You can compress it to mp3 or another "lossy" format which removes data that you're not likely to hear (extreme frequencies and quiet things that get covered up by louder sounds, for example), but I find that best for non-critical listening, like in a car or in the background at home or work. For use on my hi-fi rig, I go with a lossless format (Apple Lossless), which simply removes redundancies in the music and, when it gets decoded to be played back, you get an exact copy of the original signal. You can cut out about 40% of the data that way, as opposed to 90% for an mp3. Sacrifices must be made.

Now, if you don't have your computer sitting next to your stereo, you can run a long cord (lame!) or, better, you can have something hooked up to your stereo that can wirelessly pull music off of your hard drive, decode any compression you've applied, and send the signal along to a DAC, or run it through its own DAC and send the analog signal on to your pre-amp.

Which is what I have. In the main system, it's accomplished by the Apple Airport Express. Basically, the AX is a wireless router which also acts as a wireless receiver for iTunes. iTunes does the heavy lifting, decoding mp3s and whatnot, but re-encoding in Apple Lossless to transmit over the air to the AX, which decodes this, and then outputs a digital or analog signal. It works well in that setting where I always have my laptop nearby.

I considered that option for my bedroom system. But I'd have to have a computer in my bedroom to choose songs and so forth, or would have to walk into the living room to do it. I could also just use an iPod, but that's lame, if for no other reason than that I have to dig it out of my bag and hook it up at bedtime when I want to listen to music.

Instead, there are things that do heavier lifting, such as the Roku Soundbridge and the Slim Devices Squeezebox. These also pull music over your wireless network, but give you an interface for browsing and choosing songs, and can also decode any compression you may have.

The Roku can act as a client for iTunes' built-in music sharing, which is a nice, simple solution. Plus it could read Apple Lossless natively—when the player can't read a format natively, the computer has to translate it into a format the player can read before sending it over the network, which introduces its own set of problems. Plus, it was $150 (on sale), half the price of the $300 Squeezebox.

So I ordered and bought the Roku, and while I like the product a lot, it relies on the older, slower 802.11b wireless networking. This has a maximum throughput of 12 megabits per second, much higher than the 600 or so kilobits per second that losslessly compressed audio requires, but the Roku just could hack it, and I got very frequent skips in the music when the player couldn't get the data fast enough. This is, frankly, unworkable and inexcusable. So back it went. Plus, Stereophile's review of the Roku found some major design flaws in things from an audio perspective.

And instead, I ponied up for the Squeezebox. The Squeezebox relies on its own server software run on the computer, which is open source and quite flexible. It adds a layer of complexity but also means there are a ton of things that I can configure to my perspective. For example, El Ten Eleven: do they get filed under "El" or under "Ten"? It's my choice.

The Squeezebox doesn't decode Apple Lossless natively, but the transcoding works quite well, only using 5% of my CPU time. Only thing is you can't fastforward and rewind within tracks, just skip from one to the next or previous. The Squeezebox also has a far better DAC built in (so says Stereophile), which is important when you use the analog outputs since your 30-year-old receiver was around before the days of digital audio.

There was one more issue. I can pick music via remote control, but the Pioneer has no remote control, so no volume control... on the receiver. The Squeezebox has a volume control, though. It's not ideal, as it's done digitally, which means that some low level musical detail can be lost, but if I'm in bed going to sleep, I can handle that to have the option of adjusting the volume from the comfort of my pillow.

Conclusion

So there you go. A wonderful stereo at $100 of work on a free receiver, $300 worth of speakers and associated electronics, and then a splurge of a $300 networked music player. I'm super proud of it. Now if only that backlight in the receiver had a dimmer...

Will's birthday; New toy; Seminars, drinking, cigars; Half Nelson

2/27

So. About six months prior Will's green iPod mini got swiped out of his lab (he thinks by a scruffy looking college student that had a temporary position). I decided that nobody who has lived with an iPod should have to go back to living without one, so for his birthday I endeavored to gather a group of people to buy Will a new iPod.

After some exploratory fundraising, aided by Char, I settled on a 4 GB nano, the same size as his previous iPod, again in green. Which is what I was doing at Best Buy the previous saturday.

So I got everyone that contributed and could join us together at Woodrow's, and somebody made sure to get Will there. While we were waiting we let everybody sign a card.

Leroy had picked up a miniature Spider-Man lunch box which we were going to present to Will as his "present" with the iPod hidden inside.

In the end we managed to genuinely surprise him, and he was appropriately thankful. I was glad to have organized such a fun favor for a friend, and was excited about getting back to giving Will good music.

2/28

Will needed to fill up his iPod, so I hitched a ride with him. We decided to make an evening of it and started by hitting the comic store, then grabbing dinner (the traditional Double Dave's), and then back to my place to get that iPod filled up.

3/1

Somebody had been working on putting together a med center-wide happy hour for the students, but whoever planned them must not have been a grad student, because they didn't realize that to get grad students to come to things, you need cheap drinks and free food. The happy hour was held at the overly fancy Trevisio's on the top floor of a med center building, and featured the usual in lame appetizers (crackers, cheese, fruit tray, vegetable tray), and $4 beers. An assortment of people from the lab went, and I decided to go too, using the opportunity to sneak out of lab early to also catch the early bus home so that I could retrieve my new networked digital music player that had been delivered (see previous post about my bedroom system).

I had just enough time to get it up and running before Cindy and I went to meet Shawn and Sabrina at Spaghetti Western, where I'd been once before with Lauren. Three of us started with a round of margaritas (decent, though I might opt for the additional amaretto floater next time), while Shawn had a beer. We ordered some cheese bread for an appetizer, which is hard to mess up, but that's not to say it wasn't enjoyable. For my entree I selected the tombstone chicken, a grilled chicken breast held vertically by being wedged between two pieces of eggplant parmesan, topped with greens and sauced with marinara and their chipotle alfredo. Clever plating, and tasty. I think I talked Cindy into the Italian enchiladas; always good.

3/2

Drunk early, dinner, cigars
Will and I headed over to Rice for a physics talk. It was some interesting culture shock; everything was, dare I say, much more scientific than the usual biology talk. Of course I couldn't really keep up with the theory, but it was still an educational experience.

Afterwards I went to the usual Friday seminar while Will hung out at Valhalla, and then we started drinking the free after-seminar beer and chatted with Jeff and some professors. Will gave me a ride home, but we stopped off at the village for a beer... which became two... which became a trip across the street to Baker Street for more beer. Will went to retrieve his car from the garage while I walked over to the Briar Shoppe to pick up some cigars.

I got home and started sobering up, Cindy came over with some Chinese takeout, and after dinner we met up with Char and Angela for cigars and beer. It was a nice night, and we sat alone out on the other patio whose existence I was completely unaware of. All very pleasant.

3/3

Cindy and I decided to rent (or maybe borrow) a movie to watch, and ended up with Half Nelson. I guess it was competent enough, but it didn't leave much of an impression.

Emotiva, the $1000 Stereo, and the $500 stereo

I stumbled upon this a couple weeks ago, but needed to get my big "Hi-Fi 101" post written first or this wouldn't have made any sense.

So I was following up on a namedrop on one of my most frequent audiophile hangouts about an internet stereo electronics company, Emotiva.

Their stuff seems to be quite good. Quality components, realistic power ratings, nice looking, etc. Although sadly, recently when I was asked to recommend some stereo equipment to somebody looking to put together a $1000 system (a nice sweet spot), they didn't have a ~$400 integrated amplifier or receiver for me to recommend, they did have this neat little thing, the BPA-1.

Although I haven't heard it and can't comment definitively, this seems to be an absolutely wonderful project.

You see, the nice thing about stereo components is that, since they're reasonably modular, you can buy a system in bits and pieces, particularly if you start with used or just plain cheap gear to make your initial system, and then upgrade it a piece at a time.

The problem is that if you buy gear that's, say, cheap enough to put together a $500 system, you end up with crap that you're going to throw out, or if you put together a $1000 system and want to expand, you may end up wasting a decent thing.

Let's look at how this little guy, the BPA-1 (shame they didn't give it a cute little name to go with its appearance), avoids that problem.

You want a cheap system. We'll ignore the question of a source; everybody has an iPod, a DVD player, or a computer. Worst comes to worst, you go buy that $30 portable CD player from Wal-Mart; it'll get the job done. It's the least important part of the chain because it's the easiest to do passably.

You buy a cheap but good set of speakers, say, the PSB Alpha B1, carried by my wonderful dealer and recently glowingly reviewed in Stereophile.

They're $279; we'll round up to $300. That leaves us with $200 left in the budget. To get a decent stereo amp that will last you, you could get, say, an NAD C320BEE ($400) or a Cambridge Audio Azur 540A ($500). Either way you're over budget.

Or you could buy the Emotiva, for $180. It's a stereo integrated amp. So that plus speakers plus a source, and you have a system for $460. You're $40 underbudget, which is enough to cover tax, shipping, cables, something along that line.

Now you sacrifice a few things. There's no remote control. It only takes one source. In this age of mp3 players, for a stereo that exists purely to play music, you only need one source. And get up off the couch to change the volume; it'll do you good not to be so lazy. Or get a source with volume control (again, mp3 player, with a really long set of interconnects or a remote control).

Maybe you want more power. You can buy a new integrated amp or receiver, and this little amp could find a nice home in a second system, or biamp your speakers (sepparate amplifier channels for low and high frequency drivers). Or add a passive subwoofer and use this to drive it; it has a built-in low pass filter!

Or just buy a preamp, and use two of these things to drive your speakers. You can run them as monoblock amps (two mono amps), or use four channels of amplification to biamp your speakers.

So in summary, one tremendously flexible piece of gear that is a:

• Stereo integrated amp
• Stereo power amp (with adjustable gain)
• Monoblock power amp
• Subwoofer amp

So nifty. I want one and I don't have a use for it yet. It'd be perfect for my bedroom system, if I didn't already have the vintage receiver. Or it'd be great for an office system. Or a new subwoofer amp if my sub ever goes out. Or if I ever get around to getting a starter system for Cindy.

So. Cool.

Lab meeting and new toy; BBQ; Vinyl Edge and Jana Hunter

2/5

Did the lab meeting thing. I had new data which covered up any inadequacies in my presentation quite nicely.

Took off early to get home and grab my new toy, a Roku Soundbridge M1001. Of course, it ended up not really working. But more on that later.

Later: Cindy, TV, and Dan DJs at the Prole.

2/8

Once I had, new toy in hand, listened for a while to the receiver that Oliver had given to me, I noticed the right channel going in and out, and after confirming that the problem did not lie with my speakers or my subwoofer crossover/amp, I decided that I liked the receiver well enough to see about getting it cleaned, etc. At least I thought that was what it needed. Some of the switches made some noise when they were flipped, so I figured that was what it needed. And the backlighting seemed to be dim in one place.

So I first called up the one stereo store in town that I had any amount of faith in, Audio Concepts, who had previously been very nice about showing me some Magnepans and some Vandersteens (speakers). I asked if they did service or could refer me to someone. After telling them about the vintage Pioneer receiver, they referred me to somebody that did warranty work for Pioneer gear.

They were assholes. "Well, we don't have time to be wasting on old gear, so we'll do it when we can get to it, and it'll probabaly cost $400." Fuck you, you pretentious dicks.

So, on to polling through the "TV and radio repair" (how quaint!) section of Citysearch. I made about 20 calls. There was "no, we don't do that". There was "yes, we can do that; is it under warranty"—I said it was from 1974; your asking if it's under warranty clearly shows that you were not listening, or that you're an idiot, neither of which results in you getting my business. There was "yes, we can probably do that". And finally, there were two "Don't those old Pioneers sound great? We'll go over it with a fine tooth comb. All we do is service, so we want to earn your business." Bingo. One was west of the loop and the other was in Clearlake; and so I went with the one that was closer, Houston Audio Video.

Anyway, once I had found a place, I took Thursday morning and drove out and dropped it off to be, hopefully, well cared for.

Over Christmas, Dad, Becca and I had smoked some more ribs. We backed off on the rub too much, and they weren't quite as good, but that's nothing that heating them up slow in the oven drenched in BBQ sauce wouldn't fixed.

So to enjoy that, Cindy came over and she made potato salad and I made baked beans, and we had a nice little BBQ dinner together.

After that, a little trip up to Woodrow's to meet some people for some beer.

2/9

Got a ride with Char to seminar. At Rice, all visitor parking is paid, and fairly steep at that. However, there seems to be some sort of understanding that you can park along the interior streets, if you leave your emergency flashers on. I'd certainly done it before, and Char was in the habit of doing it for Keck.

Except he forgot to turn his flashers on. So when we got out, he had a ticket. Under the comments section, "no flashers". That's right. Flashers equals no ticket; no flashers equals ticket. There's some kind of internal logic there, but nothing that can really be considered logic in the strict sense of the word.

2/10

Detour to Vinyl Edge; Jana @ Rudz

Despite the fact that Susan and Jerry had warned me against going there after dark, I took the jaunt from their place over to Vinyl Edge not too far east of them, which Cindy insisted was perfectly safe. And, well, it was.

Anyway, the point to this excercise was to buy a few concert tickets without the service fee. But I checked out the shop while I was there. Small place, lots and lots of records, a lot of which weren't really... organized. If I was a real record collector, I could imagine the place being very exciting. Still, interesting to check out, and mission accomplished.

Afterwards, Cindy and I went up to Rudyard's to see Jana Hunter play. She seemed glad to see us there, but quite nervous: when onstage, "I like it when you guys are quiet. It makes it feel like I'm not performing for an audience". Anyway, good show.

New Toy; Shopping; Dan, Wii, TV; Lamb Stew; Dacia's Birthday; School

1/29

Got a cool vintage receiver that Oliver was getting rid of. I'll talk more about it in an upcoming post.

1/30

My hi-fi habit necessitated some new furniture. In the living room, I'd long had the crossover and amp for my subwoofer leaned up against my TV stand, the Mac mini and Wii hiding to the left and right of the TV, and the record player that Cindy had bought me was sitting on my floor in front of a plant.

In the bedroom, the subwoofer amp/crossover was also on its side up against furniture, and now that I had a new receiver I didn't have a place for. Ideally these things would go on an audio-grade stand (spiked feet, high mass, stable), but the rest of my gear isn't, and honestly there are probably better things to put money into.

So, off to IKEA for cheap furniture. I ended up with something that was either a very small TV stand or a minimalist night stand. Either way, it had two shelves appropriately sized for audio components and looked sturdier than some of their other options. They only had a light-colored finish, which wasn't ideal, but I was eager to get something accomplished, so I went for it and grabbed two.

After that, on to the grocery store, then home to assemble and set up the new furniture.

1/31

After a trip to Whole Foods, I dropped by Dan's place. Dan had managed to break his mp3 player, so I loaned him my old 4th generation iPod until he could buy a new one. Cindy was picking up sandwiches for dinner so we invited Dan to join us.

Back at my place, we indulged in some wonderful sandwiches from Jimmy John's, newly opened in Houston, and played some Wii. Dan took off and Cindy and I watched some TV.

2/1

I had, for some time, been wanting to check out Alton's recipe for lamb and barley stew. Check out the link for more, but it turned out well, and it was only a pain to clean the fat off the roast and cut it into chunks. Next time I'd just buy lamb stew meat and save myself the trouble.

2/2

Dacia's birthday @ the Mink, Dan DJs, we eat

Handily, Dacia decided to have her birthday party at the mink, and Dan happened to be DJing upstairs. I got him to guest list us so that we could move between the two. Caught a "band"/DJs who did video game remixes called Extra Man; they were awesome and I bought their CD. Dacia's girlfriend made some surprisingly good vegan cupcakes.

Dacia and co. eventually left for lesbian bar Chance's, and, curious as I was, I was also tired and hungry, so instead Cindy and I walked a couple doors down to Tacos A Go Go. It's a charming little place: appropriate decor, high ceilings, only slightly expensive, simple menu, taco-focused dining experience, appropriate late-night ambiance. Go with the corn tortillas if that's your thing; it's that kind of place.

Afterwards, we went back to the Mink and bid Dan adieu. I spared Cindy the experience of listening to my brand new Extra Man CD.

2/4

It was Super Bowl Sunday, and though there weren't any big parties in the picture, I had many things I would have rather been doing, some of which actually involved watching the game, than preparing a lab meeting presentation. Yet there I was.

Hi-Fi 101

If I'm going to follow up on my promise to start posting more stuff about my interests, you're all going to have to learn a bit about hi-fi. I'll try to make this as painless as possible.

Source

Let's start with a CD. You all know CDs, right? Shiny little things that used to be all the rage ten years ago? So CDs store a bunch of songs in digital form. Let's go through the process of turning those bits on the CD into music, and in doing so take a tour of hi-fi equipment.

So, the CD has to go into something, right? You think immediately of a CD player, of course, but a CD player actually consists of a couple parts that can be purchased sepparately.

The first is the transport. It's the mechanical part, including the motor and the laser, that pulls the data from the CD.

A transport can output the digital signal straight to a digital to analog converter (DAC), which produces the corresponding analog signal.

This is electrical current that rises and falls with the peaks and dips of the sound wave it represents. Actually, you have two signals, one for the left channel and one for the right channel. They go out over interconnects, often called RCA cables because of the most popular type of connector, those round thingies with a little metal tip sticking out that are usually color coded red and white, with red representing the right channel and white representing the left.

Amplification

The interconnects carry this line-level signal to a pre-amp. A pre-amp usually has a bunch of sources besides a CD player hooked up to it, and allows you to pick which one you want to listen to without haveing to unplug and replug the interconnects for different sources when you want to listen to a different piece of equipment.

The pre-amp takes the analog signal from the selected source (still the DAC of the CD player), and does something else useful, which is to allow you to change the volume of the signal, by amplifying or reducing the volume of the signal.

But the electrical signal at this point is still very low power. It takes quite a bit of energy to make enough sound to fill up a room, so the pre-amp outputs this volume adjusted signal, using another set of our old friend, the interconnect, to send the signal on to a power amplifier.

The power amplifier ups the energy of the signal significantly. Exactly how much depends on the particular amp you're using, but we'll assume here it's, well, enough.

Speakers

Enough for what? Follow the electrical signal along 2 wires (speaker cables) to a pair of loudspeakers. The electrical signal hits a magnet, which makes the speaker cone vibrate at the frequency and amplitude (pitch and volume) conveyed by the signal.

Now the tricky thing with speakers is that small speakers don't handle bass well, and large speakers don't handle treble well. So what you see most of the time (unless your speakers are cheap or you're into the really weird shit) is a speaker incorporating multiple drivers of varying sizes that cover different frequency ranges. To make sure each one only produces the frequencies in the appropriate range, you use a crossover to apply a high pass filter (high frequencies "pass" through) to the smaller speaker and a low pass filter (you can figure that one out) to the larger speaker.

Generally the smaller speaker is called a "tweeter" and the larger speaker is a "woofer", a perhaps overly clever bit of onomatopoeia . A speaker with one tweeter (.75-1" in diameter is pretty normal) and one woofer (4-6.5" diameter) is called a 2-way speaker, one with a tweeter, a "mid woofer", and a subwoofer (8, 10, or 12", commonly) is a 3-way speaker, as is a design that uses a tweeter, a "mid-treble driver", and a woofer. If you have one tweeter and two woofers of the same size, it's called a 2.5-way speaker, and so forth.

Combinations

So we've covered the following parts so far:

• CD transport
• DAC
• Pre-amp
• Power amp
• Crossover
• Loudspeaker

But we can combine some of these pieces into the same component.

For example, it's almost univeral, particularly in what you'd find at, say, Best Buy to see the CD transport and the DAC in one box, and the whole thing is your typical CD player. Actually, it's even more unviersal to just see a DVD player instead of a CD player, but the principle is the same.

It's also quite common to combine the pre-amp and the power amp into one box, which is called an integrated amp or integrated. Add a radio tuner to an integrated amp and you get a receiver, which is the most common for of amplification you'll see.

If a receiver can do more than 2 channels of amplification, and has a DAC which can decode surround sound, it's a home theater receiver. It's also common for an HTR to be able to switch video sources in addition to audio sources and pass the video on to a TV or monitor, so you don't have to change inputs on both the TV and the receiver.

Amplifiers that only amplify one channel of audio and are designed to be used in pairs (or more for a home theater system) are called monoblock amps. If two of these go in the same box, it's called a "dual-mono" design. If a stereo amplifier can be used as a monoblock amp, it's "bridgeable".

It's also pretty common to see CD players with digital audio outputs that let you bypass the built-in DAC and use a standalone one or one built into an HTR. This is because the DAC is usually the most expensive element in a nice CD player.

Some high-end CD players also acept digital inputs so that you can use their DACs for other sources. Some even have volume control so you don't need a pre-amp and can hook straight into a power amp.

If the amplifier is built into the speaker, the speaker is an active loudspeaker. Sometimes these even have their own source switching and volume control, as is common with computer speakers.

Another possibility is that you want to add a sepparate subwoofer to take over the bass duties normally handled by your main speakers. In this case you have an additional crossover which sends the very lowest frequencies to the amplifier that powers the subwoofer, and the higher frequencies to the speaker's own crossover. Subwoofer crossovers can be built in to an HTR (often referred to as bass management), an external box, or part of the subwoofer itself. Same for the amplifier, although you see it in the receiver only in cheap home-theater-in-a-box setups, and usually see it bolted to the back of the sub (a plate amp), or, occasionally, in its own box.

Now, imagine that instead of pulling bits off a CD using a transport, you pull them off a hard drive, and then send them on to a DAC. What you have is a digital music player that plays CD audio that just so happens to not be stored on CD. Essentially, you can do this running iTunes (or whatever software it is the infidels are using these days). Or instead of pulling the bits directly off a hard drive, the music player could even grab them off the network. Maybe you could even compress the CD audio using mp3 or something even better so it takes up less space on a hard drive. Wouldn't that be fancy...

So that gives you an overview of the basic parts of a stereo system, so the terminology won't be completely alien to you when I start throwing it around in future blog entries. Next time I'll talk about the equipment I have, and where my system stuff fits in to the schema described above, why I chose the gear I did, and what gear I ultimately aspire to own.

Buy Other Sound Equipment

No highs? No lows? Must be...

Randa asks the following:

Queston: is it all Bose speakers that are the devil or just the cube-y ones?

First off, these links (1, 2, 3) answer the question better than I could.

To answer your question before I start ranting, mostly it's the cubes. The speaker drivers in the cubes cost under a dollar; the drivers in even a modest bookshelf speaker will be at least $10. The sound is pleasant if you don't have any basis of comparison. Considering their price, though? Not good at all. They sell for two reasons. The first is fashion. The size sells because it makes them unobtrusive, or because it makes them seem high tech. The second is marketing. "Better sound through research." I have heard people argue the quality of Bose on that basis alone, despite the fact that here's nothing really to back it up.

Their headphone line is overpriced but not bad (see headphones from Shure/Etymotics/Ultimate Ears for better noise reduction and sound at similar prices). Ditto for their boomboxes/table top radios/iPod systems (a comparably priced pair of computer speakers will sound better, or bookshelf speakers and an inexpensive stereo receiver, or Apple's iPod Hi-Fi). And ditto for their bookshelf/tower speakers.

The problem is that you can't cheat phsyics in audio. You need a big speaker to reproduce long wavelenth sounds (bass). Their bass module uses probably aroud a 5" or 6" woofer which doesn't get you very deep in frequencies (probably couldn't play the lowest note on a bass guitar). Then you need a decently-sized midrange driver (approximately half the width of the woofer); theirs is too small at 2" or so across to integrate well with the woofer. Then you need a small tweeter; they count again on their midrange in the cube to reproduce the high frequency sounds, and it's just too big for the job.

I could go on. What it comes down to is that there is usually a similar product for less money or a better product for the same amount for any Bose product you could put in front of me. And instead of buying speakers to hide them, buy speakers that look nice (wood veneer is very common, as are attractive high-gloss finishes) and complement your decor if the look of the system is something that's important to you.

I gladly make recommendations for any budget!