Next month the last remaining areas of Australia with analogue TV will have it switched off. That’s Sydney (3 December)
, Melbourne (10 December) and remote Australia (10 December).
So how much does it cost to get a digital TV receiver?
How about $19? That’s Kogan’s one. Pretty basic
, but it does HDTV apparently, and has HDMI. $19. I’m having trouble getting over that.
Now here’s a useful little thing. Don’t know, as the title puts it, ‘How To Play An Audio CD On A Home Stereo System’? This the video at the link is for you.
Seriously. Or so the maker of the video thinks. He stumbles through 1:14 of it
, and the video ends before we even hear any music.
Meanwhile …
I’ve just been thoroughly berated by the proprietor of a website called ‘The Advanced Audiophile Press‘. He (I assume) did not like my remarks on Peter Belt’s various nostrums for improving the sound of audiophile gear. I have responded to him in comments.
But of course I had a look at his site. It is very interesting. He is admirably up front about what it’s about. As the sticky post at the top says, it is about his:
various thoughts and experiments within the scientific domain of Beltism. Beltism is a relatively new science (discovered by Peter W. Belt), still little known and understood. It deals with energy fields in our environment that affect human senses, by reducing the tension these fields create within us, when around them. This allows us to better perceive sounds, in particular, musical sounds. Among other things, the practice of Beltism can improve our ability to perceive both music and video.
I particularly liked this post: ‘The MP3’s of Morphic Messaging‘. Be prepared, the post might seem like a parody.
Aside from a USB device that Belt sells which improves the sound of — well, anything you plug it into apparently — the post concerns an easy way to improve the sound of your MP3 files
, and indeed the sound of the CDs from which the MP3 files originated.
Here’s the trick. Follow the link to the post, copy the block of 1s and 0s. Open up a song in an MP3 tag editor. Paste in the block of 1s and 0s into the ‘Lyrics’ field.
Voilà! Your song sounds better!
But you have to do it right. You have to copy the block of digits from the last one to the first one, not the other way around. Or do you? The post says to do it both ways. Also
, it should go in the ‘Lyrics’ field ‘to produce a more musical result’ than putting it in the ‘Comments’ field. And if you’re doing groups of songs, make sure you only do odd numbers of them with each selection.
Anyway, if you do that then with each playing the sound will improve. And you know what? ‘By tagging comments on mp3 files with the above message, it is possible to subjectively improve upon the sound of the original CD.’ How’s that!
As he says, ‘This is Beltism, after all.’
—-
Tech note.
Quite aside from how putting anything in particular in a text field in an MP3 file would change the sound of the streaming audio, which comes from a different part of the file, you have to wonder why a sequence of 1s and 0s are used. It suggests to me that whoever came up with the idea felt that putting a bit of binary code into the file might have some effect.
Problem is, whatever 1s and 0s you enter in any of the ID3 text fields ends up as a very different binary sequence. Here is a hexadecimal view of the start of the recommended numbers in the lyrics field of an MP3 track:
The left column is the line number. The middle two blocks are the hexadecimal characters representing the actual binary. The right column is the ASCII representation of the hex characters (the unprintable codes are shown as dots). I have highlighted the section where the text starts. As you can see, each text character is separated by a 00 null character.
You put 1010 into the lyrics field of an MP3 file and it is recorded as: 00011111 00000000 00011110 00000000 00011111 00000000 00011110 00000000.
And somehow that is meant to change how the file sounds.
‘This is Beltism, after all.’
So what you hear can very easily be influenced — no
, that’s not strong enough — determined by what you see:
Weird evening. I want to measure the frequency responses of some sound bars with a focus on the bass end. First problem, my M-Audio Fast Track Pro microphone pre-amp/DAC won’t work. My recording software tells me that there’s an incompatible format. Or something. This is the first time I’ve tried to use it since upgrading the computer to Windows 8.1 from Windows 7. I do the usual rebooting and such all to no avail. I had previously installed the Win 8 drivers (dated middle of this year). I install the drivers on the Win 8.1 notebook and plug in the M-Audio. It works fine. I change the sampling frequency from the default 44.1kHz to 48kHz. Now it won’t work.
I switch the M-Audio back to the main computer, select 44.1 kHz and it works on that. Good enough for bass work.
I put my pink noise test CD into the Oppo BDP-103AU player and start it up. No sound. Picture through the Pioneer receiver, but no sound. The sig info indicates no signal being received. Weird. I switch everything off and on again. Same state of affairs. I switch to a commercial CD. No sound. I fiddle with the Oppo settings. Nothing. I try the CD in another player. It works. I switch on a PVR and switch the Pioneer to it. It works. I switch back to the Oppo and pop in a Dolby Digital DVD. It works with nice 5.1 sound. I switch the Oppo over to network mode and have it play back a 44.1kHz FLAC. It works!
I pop the commercial CD back in. Nothing.
I do a factory reset on the Oppo. No sound.
I google for possible answers. Nothing obvious.
I hot swap* the HDMI cable from the PVR to the Oppo and switch the Pioneer over to it. CD sound! Amazing CD sound!
I hot swap the HDMI cables back to where they belong. Switch the Pioneer back to the Oppo’s input. No sound.
I pull the HDMI cable at the Pioneer end. Wait a few seconds. Plug it back in. Wait. A couple of seconds and finally
, at last, sweet, sweet music.
So apparently some fault in the connection allowed PCM audio to flow when it originated from a FLAC file on a networks server. But not when it — the exact same stuff — originated on a shiny optical disc.
Go figure.
—-
* Hot swapping definitely not recommended. But I was getting desperate.
Well, that’s it. I just received a call from Panasonic’s head of marketing. Panasonic is ceasing plasma TV production in December. I imagine all stock will be sold within a few months after that.
[This is a repost of the original item. It’s unchanged, except for this intro. The reason for reposting it (and deleting the original) is that the original has attracted over 20,000 attempted spam comments. I’m hoping this action will stop that.)
I get lots of press releases about home entertainment stuff, much of it relevant to what I do, some of it slightly relevant, and a fair bit that has me scratching my head in puzzlement (last week there was one advertising the merits of a particular type of flavour strip that masks — ‘Masque’ was its name I think — the flavour of the male ejaculate. What the hell?)
In the middle category is stuff about new bands. Apparently there’s an Australian group called ‘Because They Can’ and it has a new single out called ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’
, presumably named after the early 20th Century American criminal. I receive a press release last week which I deleted, and this morning I was sent a download link for the aforementioned song. On a whim I downloaded it, in part because it was in WAV format rather than something compressed, and played it. Seemed pleasant enough. Inoffensive. If I play it a couple more times I think it could be come fairly enjoyable.
But I stumbled across something odd: the bitrate for the song wasn’t the expected 1411kbps for a CD-quality WAV. It was 2116kbps.
I know at a glance what most WAV-type bitrates translate into in terms of PCM resolution. 9,216kbps is 192kHz, 24 bit, for example. But 2116kbps? That was a new one on me. So I dragged the file into CoolEdit 2000 and, blow me down, the format is 44.1kHz, 24 bit. (44,1000 x 2 x 24 = 2,116,800bps).
But there was something else that was … well, not precisely odd because it’s all too common. Here’s the first 1:25 or so of the left channel:
Note: the black space is the full 24 bit recording range available so that looks like some kind of a hard boundary has been placed at … well
, let’s zoom in a bit on the right hand end:
Yep, there you go. The boundary is at -0.6dBFS.
And you know what? Hard boundaries usually mean clipping. So let’s zoom in some more:
Yep. Clipping. Most of those peaks which hit the -0.6dBFS mark are clipped. Relatively gently, and probably inaudibly. But, still, clipping? In 2013? In a 24 bit music file?
Thanks to Panasonic I had a day trip to Sydney today (right now I’m at the airport, waiting to come home). The reason? Panasonic is launching its first 4K TV next month: around the third week of October. This is the 65 inch Viera TX-L65WT600A.
Interesting: this is (it says) the first 4K TV supporting 50p and 60p. It implements HDMI 2.0. HDMI 1.4 is limited to 24p, 25p and 30p at 4K.
Who cares? Well
, you do if you want to watch interlaced SD or HD content at 4K. If this is scaled up to 4K before being passed off down the cable, then it every second frame has to be thrown away. You lose resolution, both in scale and in time.
Panasonic had some real 4K content to demo on the two units they had on display. One lot was on a computer connected using the DisplayPort 2.0 standard (which the TV also implements), while the other was using a USB 3.0 memory stick to display 4K30p content.
Both were very hard and harsh, as is usually the case at these things. However Panasonic — unlike most others — gave me access to the TV’s remote control after the main presentation. Two changes: Picture mode from Dynamic to Standard (or was it Normal?); Sharpness from 50 to 0.
Oh. My. Goodness. How beautiful it looked! The detail. The smooth gradients. The sense of reality! Absolutely beautiful!
They’ll be showing these off in the shops
, but they’ll be in shop mode and look pretty nasty. But wait until you get one home and can adjust those settings.
No pricing yet. I’d guess around $7,500, or perhaps a bit less.
I’ve been playing with NAS drives lately, focusing on their abilities as music servers. That prompted me to see if I could get some of my high resolution music into a usable form.
And indeed you can! Some of it, anyway. Apparently there are ways of ripping SACD if you have the right kind of drive. But for high resolution PCM on regular DVDs and for DVD Audio it’s perfectly possible to rip the music and turn it into high res FLAC. Indeed, in the latter case, high res multichannel FLAC.
WARNING: most devices which support FLAC, even in its 192kHz varieties, do not support multichannel FLAC. Fortunately the Oppo BDP-103AU does.
So I’m building a library of more easily accessible high resolution stereo and multichannel music and I start on Telarc’s redone version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. This, says the packaging, is provided at 88.2kHz, 20 bits for the surround version, and 88.2kHz, 24 bits for the stereo version.
It was originally recorded using Sony’s Direct Stream Digital system (it’s also available on SACD), which facilitates porting music out to PCM with sampling in multiples of CD’s 44.1kHz. And what I discover now is that the stereo version is most definitely not 88.2kHz, it is actually 44.1kHz.
This appears to have gone unremarked in the dozen years that this disc has been around. Which isn’t surprising. Back when it came out there simply weren’t the tools available to interrogate the data to find out the real technical specifications.
That could actually make it an interesting test: does 24 bits offer discernible improvements (or even differences) compared to 16 bits? The average level of the 1812 itself is fairly low (to provide headroom for the cannon later on)
, so if anything is going to benefit from increases low level resolution, this would be it.
I’m not exaggerating about the need for headroom for the cannon. Here’s the left channel of the 1812 in this version:
That little bump right in the middle is a smooth lyrical section, rich in sound. But it never manages to hit a peak of more than -19dBFS and averages -35dB. The biggest cannon bang at the right hand side peaks at -0.12dB!
Here’s a closeup of that peak:
In real life, of course, the cannon would be way, way louder. Years ago I went to a performance of the 1812 at Duntroon here in Canberra. They let loose with artillery (blanks) and fireworks. In that section the band may as well not have bothered playing.
UPDATE: Other weirdnesses. The Overture itsef runs for around 15:45, and it’s listed as such on the box. But the on-screen panel says 14:23.
The flip side of the disk is DVD Video format and has the music in DTS and Dolby Digital surround, and stereo PCM. This last is encoded at 16 bits, 48kHz. Why that? DSD isn’t as comfortable downsampling to 48kHz. Won’t 44.1kHz work on DVD Video?
Systems for achieving very high levels of data compression use amazingly inventive techniques. But when they are deployed, you should remain aware that what you’re getting is not identical to the original.
With ‘lossy’ compression techniques such as MP3 and JPEG, ‘loss’ refers to loss of data and loss of accuracy, and that does not necessarily translate to loss of identifiable specifics in the signal. And it is unlikely that amongst the many noise artefacts that they generate would be details that could possibly be confused with the real new details.
But somehow Xerox has managed to pull off this trick. It turns out that thanks to a compression system employed in certain of Xerox’s enterprise level scanners and photocopiers it can change certain digits into other digits
, totally invalidating the documents copied. It turns out in some modes the JBIG2 image compression system is used. This achieves high performance by, in part, identifying standard patterns which can then be tagged for replacement from a saved set of patterns.
Unfortunately, at certain sizes this can result in ‘6’s being replaced by ‘8’s, and ‘4s’ by ‘7’s.
Which might result in anything from court cases over contract breaches all the way to bridges collapsing.
[A bit of my own accidental substitution there: this post was originally entitled ‘Two clever by half’. I could pretend I was being clever, playing ‘two’ against its inverse (1/2, half) but in fact I just wrongly put in the incorrect word.]
