A Decade of Tuning Tips (Part Two) – 3

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

Cover: A Decade of Tuning Tips (Part 2)Oh, I’ve been so terrible. I was chatting to someone today and whinging about the British hifi media of the 1980s, only to remember that I had failed to follow up on a series of posts started a couple of years ago. So let’s move onto the very next two paragraphs.

Remember, these words were penned by a respected British hifi writer in an insert for a leading UK magazine. This is his actual proposal to make your hifi system sound better. ‘PWB’ stands for Peter something-or-other Belt, the purveyor of a range of loopy and expensive treatments for audio gear to make stuff sound better. Here is the recommendation:

A similar technique can be used to treat LPs and books. Just take a piece of plain white paper and slip it inside the sleeve of an LP, or between the pages of a book. Use only one piece of paper per LP or book, and treat gatefold albums as single discs despite their holding two LPs: insert just one piece of paper. If you have two or three hundred LPs in your listening room. I promise that a piece of paper in each (except where a wordsheet or poster is provided – here you have to take care) will greatly improve the sound of your system.

Another way of treating books and magazines is to cut off the corner of one page. This is because books and magazines invariably contain an even number of pages. Putting a piece of paper in a book provides an odd number of pages, while nipping off a corner results in an odd number of page corners. You only need snip a tiny section off, incidentally, and do it to one page only. CD booklets should be treated in this fashion. Because of their printing, books and magazines actually present bigger difficulties than snipping corners off can deal with, and ideally a thin strip of PWB grey or silver foil needs to be applied. Even so, the technique works, and will produce worthwhile benefits.

Now, if I were reading this quotation on some random blog, I’d think it either a lie or a parody. Surely no-one would recommend such insanity!

So, to remind you, this was an small booklet called ‘A Decade of Tuning Tips (Part Two)’, authored by Jimmy Hughes, and inserted ‘Free with Hi-Fi Answers’ in the May 1989 issue.

Posted in Audio, Imperfect perception, Mysticism, Rant | 13 Comments

Twinkles in the picture, but from where?

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

If you’ve been reading this Blog lately you will know that I’ve been using some inexpensive HDMI cables lately, marvelling at how well they work (ie. just like expensive ones).

But then, last night, I was watching ABC’s ‘Media Watch‘ just in case, you know. And there on the picture, flashing around Jonathan Holmes’ head, were twinkles: fleeting flashes of light, about a pixel in size.

Now this is a known marker of HDMI cable problems. Because the video is carried uncompressed down HDMI, any lost pixels may end up being filled in by a default white dot.

And there I had been, just going public with how the cheap cables have been working like a dream.

But was it the cables? Check and recheck. I was using a Topfield HD PVR. Maybe it was playing up in decoding the MPEG2 transport stream. I had it plugged into an Onkyo receiver which I’ve only been using for a few days, and was watching on an LG TV, which I’ve only been using about a week. Perhaps one of those was doing something wrong?

So I decided to go back to the source. I transferred Media Watch from the PVR to my computer over the network. As it happens, I also had a Beyonwiz PVR recording the same thing, so I got it to do it as well.

Then I opened both recordings in VideoReDo Plus and examined the video. Here’s one frame:

A twinkle in the background

I’ve downscaled the full frame to my preferred 500 pixel width, while the two details underneath are double sized. Those twinkles are definitely in the source. LG, Onkyo, Topfield and the various cables were all innocent.

Incidentally, I couldn’t recall having copied the same clip from two different PVRs to my computer before, so I did a little test. I grabbed this frame from both video files and saved it in .bmp format to my hard disk. Then I went into a DOS box and performed a fc /b command (binary file compare). A few seconds later the command responded: both files were identical.

Not surprising, I suppose. Digital is digital.

But do you think that if you decoded the same analogue TV signal in two different TV tuners and grabbed the results of both, that they would be absolutely identical within the limits of measurement? I don’t think so.

Posted in Cables, DTV, Testing, Video | 4 Comments

A bigger (longer?) hammer from The Cable Connection

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

The other day I purchased some HDMI cables from The Cable Connection, following up on my previous post about Kogan’s inexpensive HDMI cables.

In a comment to that post alebonau recommended TCC.

HDMI cable from The Cable ConnectionNow I had little doubt that the Kogan cables would work all right. Three metres isn’t a very long run, but it was nonetheless gratifying to see them work fine, especially as they only cost $8 each.

But my experience revealed that cheap cables could run into noticable problems with 1080p60 video at five metre lengths, even though they worked fine with 1080i60. At the end of that 2006 post I said ‘For the moment I’ll be sticking with Kordz cables.’

So I was predisposed to accept that you had to be very careful with long HDMI cable runs. Especially, for example, the ten metre runs I use in my office to a projector. I still figured the hundreds of dollars charged by most brand names for a ten metre ‘High Speed with Ethernet’ HDMI cable was way too high, but what could you do?

Well, check out those available from The Cable Connection. So I bought one. TCC branded and advertised as ‘High Speed with Ethernet’, ten metres, ribbon style, with a nice woven insulation, it arrived on Friday. I ran it over the weekend from home theatre receiver to HD TV. No problems with any signal, including 3D. This morning I put it between the Blu-ray player and the receiver. It set the Blu-ray player to 1080p60 output, and internal decoding of the audio to PCM, and played back a Blu-ray test track with 96kHz, 24 bit 7.1 channel audio.

Performance: perfect.

Cost of the cable? $49.95.

Looks like high quality HDMI cables don’t need to cost anything like what’s presently being charged by many.

Meanwhile, if you’re after HDMI (or other) cables. Check out TCC’s selection. I also purchased a couple of 1.5 metre ones, which sell for a very reasonable $14.95 each, or about a third of the price you’d pay for a 1.5 metre cable at a department store.

Posted in Cables, HDMI | 1 Comment

A little IMDB treasure

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

The movie review section of the Internet Movie Database is often quite interesting. One of the reviews seems to be picked up randomly for the main page of a movie. Some of these seem to be from people spruiking the wonders of the movie in question. Often, if you click on the author link, you will find this the only review ever written by that person.

‘lazarillo’, though, is the opposite. I’ve never seen anything like it. His list of reviews is over 900 long and mostly concerns B and C grade exploitation films of one kind or another, with a big emphasis on the 1970s. Read a few and you’ll see that this guy can write quite well, and is a master of the genre. And he has done all these reviews since March 2004. In some periods there were reviews every day for lengthy periods.

Where did he get the time?

Posted in Cinema, Misc | 1 Comment

Who needs the NBN?

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

Well, here I am in suburban Canberra on a modestly effective ADSL2+ connection with Bigpond. I’m reviewing a nice new LG TV which can, amongst other things, connect to Bigpond Movies. Here’s what it has to say about my Internet connection:

Bigpond Movie Speed meter on LG TV

Yes, apparently it is quite good enough for high definition movies (where high definition is loosely defined, I wouldn’t be expecting Blu-ray quality!) Like a few million other Australians. There are those outside the reach of ADSL2+, for sure, but I don’t quite understand why it is necessary to rip out a working system, rather than simply extending its reach.

I know Senator Conroy reckons we’ll all be able to perform surgery upon each other thanks to the miracle of high speed IP video feeds over the NBN, but somehow I just don’t quite see it.

Update (a couple of minutes later): According to this site, my connection speed is about 5,300kps (kbps?), or a bit below the average for Australians who have tried the meter.

Posted in Online media | 7 Comments

Kogan provides hammer

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

A couple of weeks ago I was wandering around Myers here in Canberra, keeping a handle on what is presently on the market, and marvelling at the low sale prices of various products, compared to their RRPs/SRPs. And, of course, my eye fell upon the cables.

Likewise, a few days before while waiting to pick up some photos being printed at Harvey Norman, I inspected the cables — specifically HDMI ones — available.

It was horrible. At both places the cheapest HDMI cable you can buy, typically for 1.5 metres, was about $45. Say, about a quarter of the price of a budget Blu-ray player.

Now I don’t have any problem with high priced connection cables. Perhaps there is some amazing subtlety in conveying sound and picture that can be better delivered with one cable than another, although I don’t believe it. Equally, I do believe that even though I think they’re likely wrong in fact, people should be entirely free to spend up big on cables if they think or hope they may improve their system’s performance.

So what irritates me isn’t that there are expensive HDMI cables carried by these stores, but that there are no inexpensive ones.

So I emailed the PR for Kogan. What I wanted, I said, was a hammer. A hammer I could use on silly HDMI cable prices. I would like, I explained, to say that there’s no reason to spend these prices, unless you have contrary beliefs regarding cable quality. Instead you can buy a perfectly serviceable 3 metre HDMI cable for just $8. That’s what Kogan sells.

Kogan says of them: ‘HDMI High Speed Cable – Supports Ethernet and 3D!’

But I could not use these low cost cables to hammer high-priced cables unless I was satisfied that they would do the job. So I asked if Kogan could send me a couple to test out. It sent me three.

They came neatly enough coiled in their plastic bags, and were a thicker gauge than I was expecting. Indeed, thicker than the first HDMI cable I purchased, which cost about $50 for a metre cable back in I think 2004 (I was desperate, and it was the only one I could find in Canberra). Here’s the Kogan:

Kogan HDMI cable

Closer inspection revealed a basic, functional cables with gold-plated plugs and without obvious physical flaws. Like a Model T Ford, they come in any colour that you want so long as it’s black. If you want pretty cables behind your gear, look elsewhere:

Kogan HDMI cable plug

Now to the important stuff: do they work?

I used two of them over the weekend, one from the home theatre receiver to the new 55 inch Samsung TV I’m reviewing, and one from a Blu-ray 3D player to the same TV. Performance — including with Blu-ray 3D content — indistinguishable from my regular Kordz cables. Right now I have one of them connecting my Blu-ray player and home theatre receiver. I have set the Blu-ray to output the video at 1080p60 and use the higher data component video 4:4:4 output. I have also set it to convert the multichannel audio to PCM format. With the 96kHz, 24 bit, 7.1 channel signal on the test content I am playing, the audio alone adds up to more than 18Mbps.

Performance? Fine. Not a problem at all.

No idea if it supports Ethernet since I don’t know of any implementations of this yet. But for everyday use, these cables are fine.

And only cost $8 each.

So why don’t the retailers carry reasonably priced HDMI cables? Kogan shows it can be done.

Posted in Cables, HDMI | 14 Comments

Just when you think they must be out of ideas

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

With its move from the main Channel 10/Southern Cross channel to Eleven, ‘The Simpsons’ is now being shown almost as soon as it appears in the US. For example, the most recent episode — ‘The Ned-liest Catch’ — premiered in the US on 22 May, and here on 25 May. There used to be a gap of many months.

This episode concludes with a cliff-hanger — will Ned Flanders and Edna Krabappel stay together? You get to vote, and apparently the result will be revealed in the first episode of Season 23 in September.

Vote here.

As for me, what can I say but that I’m a sentimentalist:

I'm Pro Nedna logo

Posted in DTV, Misc | 1 Comment

Less olden days Blu-ray reviews

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

After.Life Blu-ray coverWell, in addition to updating my DVD reviews, I’ve been doing my Blu-ray ones. Now you can find the following reviews here: 2012, After.Life, the Blu-ray 3D version of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Forrest Gump, Gamer, In the Loop, Law Abiding Citizen, Monsters, Inc. and Shutter Island.

I’ve still got quite a few to go, including the Besson collection and, of course, Psycho.

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details | Leave a comment

Olden days DVD reviews

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

Chinatown coverYears ago I started putting up my DVD reviews from Australian HI-FI. And then I stopped at the reviews published in 2004. Well, I’ve just brought it up to the start of 2005, with reviews of The Birds, Chinatown, Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, I, Robot and Rosemary’s Baby.

I’ve still got another 45 to go to get it complete. So I don’t expect it will be finished immediately.

Posted in Disc details, DVD | Leave a comment

Thank goodness for early adopters

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Stephen Dawson

Matt Ridley has an interesting article up on his site in which he extols the virtues of the cost cutters. His point is that while the inventor of something or other usually gets the credit, its the business people who drag down its price to affordable levels that really benefit people.

I suspect his argument is just a little too strong. Without the inventors, then there’d be nothing to drag down the price of. The claim that inventions are going to happen anyway, whereas the cost cutting may not, is not correct in my view. In some cases inventions are more or less inevitable, because they are logical thoughts from what has come before. But some times they are completely out of the blue.

Cost cutting, though, is pretty much inevitable in a capitalist system. That’s one of the great virtues of the system.

Another important participant is the early adopter. Their importance is particularly obvious when it comes to home entertainment equipment, but somehow no-one ever notices.

Consider, back in 1998 I reviewed a Pioneer plasma display. This was a 640 x 480 pixel unit in 4:3 aspect ratio. It weighed 32 kilograms and had five cooling fans to keep heat under control.

And it cost $17,000!

Consider, also, what early adopters did. They purchased these, and competing products, at their ridiculously high prices (while people of greater refinement sneered quietly, when they heard of such things, about their ‘materialism’). They took the chance on the inevitable bugs in a new technology. If they thought about it, they would know that the next generation would be much cheaper. Yet in purchasing now, rather than ‘sensibly’ waiting, they funded the development, and encouraged the production of the next generation of lower cost models.

Now, of course, you can buy a bigger, better plasma for just 5% of the nominal cost of that early Pioneer, using dollars that are less valuable. Thanks in large part to early adopters.

PS: For any readers who are interested, I’ve put my short newspaper version of the review over the fold. Obviously less technical than the 1,400 word main one. But I am pleased, glancing over it now, with the tack that I took. It was a rare instance of prescience on my part. It begins, ‘I have seen the future.’
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Posted in How Things Work, Misc | Leave a comment