ZZ Top's was hard to beat
Posted on 11/02/2014 10:46:45 PM PST by Olog-hai
I’ve lost track of how many Schitt headphone amplifiers and digital converters I’ve reviewed, but their all-new Mani phono stage is a very different kind of product. Mani amplifies the minuscule voltages generated by a turntable phono cartridge, so your LPs can be played over AV receivers, desktop powered speakers, boom boxes, etc. The little Mani’s all-metal chassis measures a scant 5 × 3.5 × 1.25 inches (127 × 89 × 32 mm).
It works with moving-magnet (MM) or moving-coil (MC) phono cartridges. Mani has four user-selectable “gain” modes (30-, 42-, 47-, and 59-dB), so it’ll sound great with any cartridge you pair with it. Cartridge impedance loading can be set to 47 Ohms for moving-coil cartridges or 47,000 Ohms for moving-magnet cartridges. If you’re using an AV receiver or a turntable with a built-in phono preamp, the Mani would be a logical upgrade. …
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
to just jump in here...., What about degradation of CD media over time that i use to hear about ?
Are you kidding? That's the best Schitt!
Nothing will ever match the sound of vinyl.
The cut in/cut out of CDs is jarring... I’ve mostly gotten used to it (since music on vinyl is almost unavailable), but it is not the fade in/fade out of vinyl. And music served in digital slices loses something. Your ears aren’t digital; music should not be digital either.
ZZ Top's was hard to beat
Audio Ping.
I am with you on this... Nicely said. You are not alone.
CDs accurately reproduce sounds up to 22KHz which is good enough for mere mortals. I suspect an audiophile’s hearing goes a bit beyond that frequency.
I just plug a $13.00 Scosche FM transmitter into my receiver’s headphone jack and transmit the playing record anywhere within 75 feet.Works great!
Sure, and static or any other kind of EM field has absolutely no effect on FLAC, never mind the integrity of the playback software. Right?
“I just plug a $13.00 Scosche FM transmitter into my receiver’s headphone jack and transmit the playing record anywhere within 75 feet.Works great!”
FM seriously degrades the quality of the sound.
That said, try a REAL FM transmitter - 0.5 watts (just DO NOT leave it on all the time nor transmit over any existing FM channel in your area):
ping
Digital is for people that can’t handle reality. :-)
” OCD, which is a necessary side-effect of trying to be an audiophile while listening to music embedded on vinyl”
Based on the “audiophiles” I know, OCD is not a vinyl-media-limited condition.
Thanks to this little gizmo, LPs sound better than CDs or FLAC files (phonograph pre-amp)
...
Bull. Audiophiles are nuts when it comes to music.
A scratched CD is far less forgiving than a scratched record.
Even a dust speck or fingerprint causes more chaos.
I think that CDs have a 50,000 sample per second rate, which give a Nyquist frequency of 25,000 Hz. The trouble is that any signal content at frequencies above the Nyquist rate are “aliased” - after sampling, a 26,000 Hz frequency component is indistinguishable from a 24,000 Hz frequency. And if you had significant signal level at 49,000 Hz, after sampling it would sound like a 1,000 Hz signal after sampling. I don’t know the technology being used to address that issue; in the old days an analog filter was the best that was practical, but today it should be easy to sample initially at 100,000 per second - or even double that, I suspect - and use digital processing to kill the frequency content above 25,000 Hz - finally reducing the sample rate down to the target 50,000 per second with essentially no aliasing, and no attenuation below the 22 kHz frequency you cite. If, indeed, not flat all the way up to 25 kHz.The other issue is the reconstruction of the waveform in you CD player. The trivial approach to the D-A process is to always output a voltage proportional to the last sample, thus producing a step waveform - and assuming that the ear can’t tell the difference. If you wanted to go full-on purist, you would create a digital “filter” with a sin(x)/x impulse response function, where x is the time after - or before the nominal time you assign to each sample as you are playing it back. When x is zero, sin(x)/x is unity, and when x is an integer multiple of pi, sin(x)/x is zero. Thus, each “dog has his day” when its value is the only thing that matters to the output - but at other values of x (which imply a higher sample rate than the 50,000 per second on the CD), theoretically all past and future samples have a more or less meaningful, positive or negative, effect on the output of the “filter.”
There is of course a practical limit to how many samples you could give influence on the filter’s output, so you couldn’t implement sin(x)/x perfectly, and there is a limit to how high an output sample rate it would be considered “worthwhile" to generate. But subject to those limitations you can theoretically reproduce the original waveform that you digitized. It would seem improbable that anyone could hear any difference between 100,000 samples per second and any higher rate, so it would seem that such a filter if implemented would be used to only double the sample rate. But in a world of gigahertz graphics chips . . .
As CD’s are digital, the content will be perfect up to a point, then extra bits in headers and so on will correct errors so it will still sound perfect, then it will simply fail completely.
Here’s an article that suggest “centuries”, plural. Maybe, maybe not. At any point before complete failure, a re-copy to a new CD will give you new perfect content with its own new lifetime.
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