Now Playing…The HagClock


I’m an audiophile…but as with everything else I do, my audiophilia is of the hands-on, DIY-type.

Other than my phono cartridge, every piece of gear in my home audio rig is modified. I’m particularly fond of budget Chinese gear as a platform for mods–China is like the US in the 1950s, cranking out, among the sweatshop junk, are excellent, well-built consumer products at extremely low prices, that today can be directly imported by consumers in the US.

My CD player is a cheap Shanling in which the signal caps, output stage op amps, and most especially the power supply diodes have been changed (I put Cree silicon carbide Schottkey diodes in everything. No switching noise. Incredible increases in transparency and high frequency smoothness.) Last week I replaced the player’s stock clock with an after-market, low jitter, premium clock module. At $100 assembled, the HagClock, designed and built by Jim Hagerman, is the least expensive, high-quality aftermarket product of its type.

Like installing SiC diodes, installing a clock that reduces jitter–digital noise that colors sound–provides dramatic increases in what audiophiles call transparency (the ability to hear more detail, to hear more deeply into the soundstage) and a dramatic reduction in high frequency noise (cymbals sound less hashy, more airy, more like real cymbals, and their decay lasts and lasts without noise to mask it).

When I make system changes my listening turns to recordings that sound great and whose sound I know well. Because I’ve been listening for low level resolution, microdynamics, and changes in high frequency timbre I’ve been listening to some of my favorite, quiet, well-recorded, small group jazz: Guitarist Bill Frisell’s Go West: Music for the Films of Buster Keaton, for example, and Sarah Vaughn’s After Hours. The latter, a 1961 session in which the singer is accompanied by only guitar and bass, is great for testing low level detail–despite the close recording a high rez system will resolve the airy, studio decay around the bass and will present, clearly, the sound of Vaughn, snapping her fingers all the way through Cole Porter’s Easy to Love.

The music is great. The excellent sound is icing on the cake. But I wonder how much sound matters to listeners.

Audiophiles have always been in the minority among music fans, although they are usually early adopters of technology that eventually migrates into the mass market. But pop music has almost never sounded worse that it does today. In a quest to make music sound explosive on radio and TV, pop records are mastered with levels of compression that are beyond belief. It’s ironic that as digital technology has allowed enormous improvements in the achievable dynamic range of recorded music, the industry has chosen to squash everything into 3 dbs of range.

The result is music where the “quiet” parts are as loud as the “loud” parts and in which the waveform is distorted nearly into a squarewave–something you’d hear as noise. Listening to modern pop for any length of time, at any volume, is likely to be an ear-fatiguing experience. Add to that the sheer loss of detail and dynamics from highly compressed MP3 files, and the phase incoherencies of low-sampling rate, home burned MP3s and you have a recipe for sonic disaster.

Does anyone care? Are lossy, phasey files played back from low end computer soundcards through self powered micro speakers or cheap earbuds the inevitable future of music? Will consumers pay the premium price for higher rez, DRM-free files (low compression files in a lossless format like .flac, sound much better than the MP3s you’d download from eMusic)? (And just why do tubes sound more lifelike than transistor’s anyway?)

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June 13th, 2007
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Viewing 11 Comments

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    My only comment is that I want Jason to move in with me right now. With his gear and with his music collection.

    Damn, Jason, I have trouble just switching my stereo from CD to phonograph mode for when I want to listen to my scratchy old copy of the first Paul Butterfield album!
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    I still remember the past wherein we use such big cd's just to play your favorite singer's album now a days there are some gadgets like iPods and Mp3's to do the trick for you everywhere you want
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    My only comment is that I want Jason to move in with me right now.

    How come Natalie Portman never says that?
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    That's a pretty fascinating hobby, and it does indeed lead to good questions about what constitute listener standards these days. It made me think of an email I got some months ago from a record producer friend of mine that resonated. I actually can't find the "letter" the email referred to, but I can find plenty of references to it. It's all about compression and *loudness* in production today. But more importantly, it's about how an industry is losing its grip on its most basic foundations of quality. This article we the best I could find on it, but it's worth the read:

    http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/st...
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    Yeah, all I need is one more obsession.

    I really think you're in that grey area of "just noticeable difference". I'd wager 95% of the populace can't detect the nuances you hear in a medium-grade system, much less with the FrogStrangler3000â„¢ you've got.

    I've been slowly gathering all our music over the past month and importing it into iTunes. It's a chore, but it's really got me tweaked about music again. Plus, the Mrs. is a former jazz trumpet and she had a CD stash I didn't know about. So life is good.

    Also, please be kind to eMusic. I am a newly devout apostle of that place. Just tonight, I've listened to a live Eartha Kitt concert and "6- And 12-String Guitar", both of which I doubt I'd have found on my own...
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    The paradox of AV: as the image becomes more and more high-definition, with excesses of resolution beyond anything that is available to display; sound is going into the garbage bin.

    I'm not all pessimistic, though. There's been a movement towards better resolution playback, and there are things one can do to really improve playback quality without spending tens of thousands of dollars. I have a lot of fun telling friends to bring their favorite CD over to my house. We play it through a Mac, wireless to an Airport Express, but use the optical digital out from the AE to a stand-alone DAC (LAVRY DA10), which then feeds a pair of compact but good speakers through a forty year old amplifier I have(speakers: Dynaudio Focus 140).
    They can't believe their ears - and they've never heard anything like it at home.

    Most people only need the good DAC, which will run you from USD 600 and up. Most have an old but good amp in the garage (replaced with a lousy all-in-one unit, or Tivoli Radio, some years ago). Drag the amp back, get out those old speakers you stacked in the back of the garage (or buy some new ones) and rediscover your music.
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    EGlenn, I'm not sure about the 95% proposition. I am sure that most music listeners don't have even a medium resolution system and most home systems are set up so abysmally--w/ speaker behind furniture or facing each other, etc. that the differences are not worth caring about. But the compression you can hear instantly in even the crappiest of circumstances--say comparing a CHR station w/ a classical FM station in a moving car (where half the audio is masked by the car noise). That said, everyone has difference sensory sensitivities. My wife can smell things I can't, for example.

    And btw, I love some things about eMusic--no DRM for example. Hate other things--like the navigation which makes it all but impossible to browse for something instead of searching for something you know you are looking for. The audio quality is ok for a lot of the music from the 1920s and 1930s that I like to listen to, but not for any kind of meaningful listening. I wish they'd use .flac w/ level 5 compression or less. For my own purposes I don't rip MP3 at sampling rates less than 320kps if I care about sound. Too lossy otherwise.

    SteinL, great point about the DAC. I've been building a db on my laptop of all of Sun Ra's music in session order, but I can only drive audio through the headphone jack of my laptop which sounds like crap. I've been thinking about going to an airport or squeezebox plus DAC (I have an old CAL tube DAC with antiquated digital tech but a nice direct coupled tube output that might press into near term service). What 40 year old amp are you using? I've got a highly modified Dynaco ST-70 that still sounds great!
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    This seems like an ideal place to get a geeky answer to a question I've had for a while; does compression do what it says, compress, or does it eliminate data? If there is information that is somehow skipped over for space sake, does any of it uncompress when burned to cd?

    I'm willing to compromise on mp3s down to 192 in my everyday listening. It's most important for me to hear all the instruments distinctly (if that's the artist's intent) so that I can appreciate what is going on in the music. If I really like something, I buy the cd.

    I love eMusic and Napster-to-go, even though there is sound compromise to make. The range of my listening can be fully satisfied, as well as my curiousity, relatively inexpensively with those two services. That's an important expedient for me at this point in technological development.

    Much of this discussion should become moot when bandwith and storage space become even more expansive.
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    Well, we're talking here about two different kinds of compression. Remember, I'm an amateur audio engineer--I'm sure we'll have some readers who are better able to explain this, but I'll try.

    The compression being done at the mastering level, which is turning music into noise, is an effect in the signal chain that provides a given output level for a given change in input level. So, if you're using a 4:1 compression ratio, a 4 db gain in input level would result in only a 1 db gain in output level (you can also use this effect in reverse, as an expander, and for a variety of special effects). This can be done either in the analog realm--w/ a transistor, tube or optical compressor circuit--or it can be done in the digital realm w/ software.

    The compression being done when you turn a redbook CD file into an MP3 is all software file manipulation according to some kind of algorithm. From Wikipedia:

    ...both lossy and lossless compression algorithms are used in audio compression, lossy being the most practical for everyday use. In both lossy and lossless compression, information redundancy is reduced, using methods such as coding, pattern recognition and linear prediction to reduce the amount of information used to describe the data.

    So there is some data removal. For a decent explanation of the differences between lossy and lossless data compression schemes, and an explanation of why standard algorithms don't behave so well in compressing music files, see wikipedia's entry.

    I believe the bottom line on reconverting to redbook is that once you compress to a lossy format (MP3, etc) is that you can't really reconvert, you've already lost data, all you can do is create some new, inaccurate representation of the original file. W/ a lossless format like .flac, data should be preserved so that you could expand back to redbook w/o loss.
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    Is "CHR" the streaming technology that the robot radio stations use? Dear sweet mother of chickens, I HATE that (the kids used to listen to Disney Radio in the car before I had "the incident"). It's like the forced oversampling used in that horrid 90s Cher song.

    Henry Rollins - "If you have to fix it with a computer: quantized, pitch corrected, and overly inspected, then you can't do it, and I can't get behind that!"
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    test
 

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