Category Archives: Audio

The power of selection

Posted on August 12, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

Darwinism is often the subject of disbelief because one of its two important components is overlooked. The essence of Darwinism is evolution through natural selection. This requires variation between organisms, and a method of selecting the most suitable variants from … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, How Things Work, Rant | Leave a comment

Randi gets his teeth into audio mysticism

Posted on March 24, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

I am happy to report that James Randi, best known as the magician/skeptic/author who eviscerates prominent self-proclaimed mystics, also spends the odd moment on audio mystics. For example, here on Peter Belt. Follow some of the links from that post.

Posted in Audio, Cables, Mysticism | Leave a comment

A-Weighting, the saviour of many a poor piece of equipment

Posted on February 21, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

The aim of makers of high fidelity audio equipment is — or at any rate, ought to be — to produce equipment that does not modify the signal, other than convert it (from a digital to analogue representation, or from … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, General Tech, Imperfect perception, Testing | Leave a comment

Minor MP3 player problem

Posted on February 8, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

One problem with hard disk based MP3 players is gaps. You know those CDs where the music is continuous, even across the boundaries between tracks? When you play back an MP3 album in track order on an MP3 player, there … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Compression, Portable | Leave a comment

Apple iPod Arrogance?

Posted on February 6, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

Busy doing reviews of hard disk based portable MP3 players. You know the thing. The Apple iPod and its competition. Except for one small problem. Apple, here in Australia, has a policy of not providing review samples of the iPod … Continue reading →

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Subwoofer or receiver crossover?

Posted on November 15, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

Peter has written with the following question: I bought a Yamaha RX-V450 receiver matched with Polk RM6000 speakers and Polk say to wire the speakers through the subwoofer and not use the subwoofer outlet from the receiver. Encel store say … Continue reading →

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Weird scenes in the musical mind

Posted on October 16, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

One of my favourite LPs, way back when I was at school, was The Doors’ Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine. This was a two LP best-of compilation of previously released tracks, plus one otherwise not-existing track. I recall taking … Continue reading →

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Deep, deep bass from Whise Profunder 319A subwoofer

Posted on August 26, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

My review of the Whise Profunder 319A subwoofer ($6,499) appeared in Wednesday’s ‘Connect’ section in the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper, unfortunately under someone else’s name. No matter. The graph herewith is something I couldn’t put in the article. This shows … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Equipment | 3 Comments

What does that subwoofer ‘phase’ switch do?

Posted on August 16, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

Most subwoofers have a switch on the back that’s labelled ‘Phase’, and has positions of 0 and 180 degrees. What this switch does, electrically, is the second easist thing to understand on a subwoofer’s wiring (the easiest is the ‘on/off’ … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Equipment, How Things Work | 3 Comments

Home theatre receiver power output measurements

Posted on August 10, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

Since I outlined my measurement methodology in the entry below, here are some recent results found using that methodology (1kHz output only reported). Model Specification Power output per channel (1kHz continuous) 7 5 2 1 Denon AVC-11SR 7 x 125 … Continue reading →

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