How To Destroy a Record Mastering

With the resurgence of good Hi-Fi, where more and more people buy good headphones and listen to a lot of music thanks to streaming, it’s sad to see the things the mastering engineers (and in the end the artist) do to music. The recordings are getting worse. Even old records that get the “Remastered” or “Expanded” treatment doesn’t sound as good as the original. Why? ...

December 24, 2016

Flac, the best choice

Audio Engineering Pioneer John Meyer: Stop Chasing The Next Big Thing, And Go With Flac Instead — Tech News And Analysis: John Meyer may be making really expensive loudspeakers, but when it comes to high-end audio, the audio engineering pioneer prefers free. FLAC, the open source audio format developed by Grateful Dead fans to trade bootleg recordings, is “the perfect format” for music aficionados looking for higher-resolution audio, Meyer told me during a recent interview. And to him, any company pushing trying to make a buck with selling upsampled music is just out to sell snake oil. “It’s tricking people who don’t know enough about technology,” he said. ...

April 19, 2014

Raspberry Pi Car Computer

Update: You can find my latest update on the progress of my Raspberry Pi Car Audio System here. I’m working on a Raspberry Pi as a music player in my car. I’m putting all my music on a SSD disk in lossless FLAC. I’ve already got hold of a 2x16 character LCD with six button from Adafruit that only uses two pins for communication with I2C. It’s easy to program and it has four different background colors. ...

May 17, 2013

Raspberry Pi as a Squeezebox Logitech Server

I love my music playback setup that consists of a couple of Squeezebox V3 players in different rooms so I can listen to music in lossless format wherever I am in the apartment. With the iPeng HD app on my iPad, I have a nice interface for controlling the players with album art and other nice features. But the best part is that I can playback high resolution audio directly on my iPad using the Camera Kit USB adapter and an HRT HeadStreamer DAC portable USB headphone amplifier. But I wanted a small, cheap and eco-friendly server for hosting my music files and wondered if I could use the Raspberry Pi. And here’s my findings. ...

December 22, 2012

ProAc Response 2.5 clones plays real music

So finally my new ProAc Response 2.5 clone playing music. And how they play! I got myself a new Class-A amplifier to have something nice to drive them with. At first they sounded a bit short on the bass side, but now after about 20 hours of listening, the bass starts to improve. I’ve never believed in the “burn-in” of speakers, but I have to say I’ve been mistaken. ...

May 29, 2007