Digital shock - this is GOOD!!!!

[maxg]

Is this going to be long? I guess it will be....

Now you guys know me - vinyl man through and through right? Well, yes - tis true, it is all I listen to, but, I am also a technofile and vinyl really does not fit my profile as far as the rest of my life is concerned.

The net result of this apparent conflict is that I listen to vinyl - but still play incessantly with technology and digtial in all its forms including video and audio.

Sometime ago I refered to the fact that I have a phone that plays video, audio, contains pocket office, browses the web, makes tea and god only knows what else...

As a result of this capability I play with the thing incessantly. I have become a master at producing videos that can be played on the phone (handy for my daughter when on long trips in the car). I am not sure on the legality of it - but I can copy a DVD into WMV format and squeeze the file into under 200 Mb per hour of video - with outstanding quality (on the phone's screen - 320 * 240).

I would be lying if I said all the movies were just for her - I did a test with Pulp Fiction and ended up watching the whole thing on my phone using the earphones. 2 and a half hours of a film - in 430 Mb - not bad (WMV format - 100-768 Kb/s variable - 32 Kb audio stream, 320 *240 resolution @ 25 fps).

Anyway - I currently have a 2 Gb SD card in the phone and it is full - 7 videos of varying lengths and 9 complete albums of music with about one more's worth of assorted songs.

The quality of the sound has never been very good - its ok for a portable device, but never a replacement for a real source (even a cheap CD player).

I had the feeling that this was largely a result of the headphones. They are the ones that came bundled with the phone and are really designed for voice calls rather than sonic bliss. The problem is that the phone itself has a peculiar audio adapter (2.5 mm) as opposed to the more normal 3.5 mm plug found on most audio devices - and I could never find an adapter.

Tony to the rescue. He found one - a little plug in unit with male 2.5 mm and female 3.5 mm at the other end.

He came round yesterday and delivered to me said adapter. We needed a test.

As luck would have it I happened to have a 3.5 mm to 2 * RCA cable (a good one) from some earlier audio experiment. I plugged this cable into the adapter, the adapter into the phone and the RCA's into my pre-amp and we fired her up.

I was half expecting not to be able to hear anything. I had no idea if the phone would output sufficient power to even drive the normal input on the pre-amp but I was lucky and it worked.

Worked is an understatement - it does play slightly lower volume than my normal Marantz CD - but nothing that a slight twist of the dual volume controls can't fix. It sounded good - really good - almost a match for the Marantz itself.

That got me thinking. Right now I was playing 256 Kb/s MP3. Does the device play WAV files I wondered? What would happen if I just recorded a straight 16/44.1 WAV file and played it though the system?

Thus enthused I set about ripping a CD to WAV - or rather I didn't. I was going to (using Microsoft's media player V11 beta) when something else caught my eye - WMA Lossless format - hmmmm.

Would the phone support that? Only one way to find out.

Ripped the CD (Famous sound of the Three Blind Mice - Sampler disk - XRCD) and copied it to the phone. Resultant files are about half the size of normal CD tracks - but loseless apparently.

Re-connected to the stereo (Tony had left by now - just when I needed a second opinion!!) and played.

Good God!!!

Sound is simply amazing. Shocked enough that the phone even supports loseless compression but the sound quality just went ballistic!!

Better than the Marantz (playing original CD) - by a distance according to these ears.

Better than the computer playing via the same cable through the Soundblaster Audigy 2 USB soundcard.

Soundfiles report from 750 to 930 Kb/s. I can fit about 6 or 7 on a 2 Gb card, but....

The phone supports an SDIO wireless network card (with 256 Mb RAM on board to boot if I want).....

Suppose I got one of those cards - filled my 300 Gb disk with loseless music files - would the media player on the phone be able to see them and play them? I wonder....

In the meantime I got to the office this morning and decided the try the player and adapter with a pair of ear phones I had connected to my PC there. These phones came with a Sony Diskman from years ago. Difficult to read the model number but I think these are Sony E806 headphones.

Now I am sure these are not the last word in audiophilia - but by God they sound good compared to the supplied units.

Lots of playing ahead methinks - I am now wondering about ripping (?) a vinyl disk to loseless and seeing how good it sounds.....

[colterphoto1]

That is some fantastic Mr Science work there Max! I don't know if we have phones with those features and quality here in the States. Myself I don't even have Ipod, choosing to have a few breaths on the planet sans music. (gotta take a break once in a while).

But I do support your experiments, particularly the recording of vinyl to CD. Where I know this is possible and I suspect many people are enjoying remixing their fave tunes, reducing pops and ticks, etc, no one has yet been able to explain to me exactly what is necessary.

I have iMac at home with iTunes and have many of my CD's on it at a pretty good MP3 bit rate (I think 192 is pretty good, I understand there is a lossless compression avail on itunes ver 5). So would like to hookup my backup Technics TT to office stereo and input music from vinyl.

Let me know what you get working.

Michael

[Marvel]

Max,

Is that a Treo 750?

Just curious. Sounds pretty neat.

Bruce

[maxg]

Marvel,

Its an iMate iJam over there I think - now there is a new model with built in 801.11B networking to boot.

Michael,

Just did my first "rip" of vinyl to 16/44.1 wav files as a test case - will be playing with those on and off over the coming days to see if they sound any good.

[johnyholiday]

Johny is so far behind, still using SAE Impulse 5000,press

invert, slide the slider dial until pops an clicks are audible,back the

slider off a little ,an press invert ,an watch ,round an round, the

situation heats up, it goes round an

round,an....round...................get em Max ,the fire, an the flame

[leok]

Max,

Digital can be very good. It seems particularly susceptible to line and rf interference. I suspect your digital player has taken care of some of the worst noise issues. Recently I was having trouble with some glare throught the Philips 963 / SET / RF-7 system and was blaming the RF-7s or amp until I realized I'd left the video circuitry on (it can be turned off) on the Philips. Turned it off an the glare is gone. It doesn't take much to trash good digital sound.

Leo

[maxg]

Things are never as straightforward as they should be. I managed to record a double album to WAV files but then discovered, to my amazement, that none of the software I have is capable of converting that to loseless WMA.

In the end I recorded the WAV files to a CD as an audio CD and than re-ripped the CD using the media player to WMA loseless. That took some figuring out I can tell you!!!

Anyway - it all worked up to a point and I now have the music from the album on my phone - about 250 Mb worth for the album.

Thing is - the quality is fine (very good actually) but at some points in the middle of the first track it seems to go into some kind of fast forward mode for a few seconds and then plays normally. I now have to trace back the whole route to find out where the hell that happened. It is not on the vinyl. Could be in the recording to WAV format, the copying to the CD or the ripping to WMA loseless.

I might be able to do the orginial recording of the record to WMA loseless direct - depends on what the Creative software supports. If so - great, if not - we have a problem Houston!!

[Def Leper]

There you go, you've discovered another amazing device that liberates all that hidden detail on those CD's. The Bedini Clarifier customers will go nuts.

Now buy a quantity, package them up with the nifty little secret cable, and sell for an amazing low price of $19,999.99. (or whatever that translates to in Drachmas or whatever is the Greek currency.)

Every audiopile whill be dying to have a set to compare against their $30,000 turntables, $10,000 phono carts and $15,000 cables. Can you come up with a set of ear buds with "special" ultra-audiopile cables (the size of welding cables) for a few thousand more?

If anything, this just shows the danger of being a vinyl junkie-- virtually any form of modern technology will appear to be magic.

(all posted in a spirit of good clean fun with tongue in cheek.)

[maxg]

"There you go, you've discovered another amazing device that liberates all that hidden detail on those CD's. The Bedini Clarifier customers will go nuts."

Well I am not sure as yet - still testing, but.....

I can't help wondering if the fact that there are no moving parts in this device helps with the ultimate sound quality.

In theory - the less moving parts, the less source of noise and as an add on benefit - the less chance of error / hardware issue.

I hesitate to proclaim zero jitter or anything so rash as a possible benefit - mainly due to the simple fact that I have NEVER understood exactly what jitter is other than some form of timing issue (and others have attempted repeatedly to explain it to me).

Another thought that flitted through my dim brain is that possibly the absence of moving parts reduces the amount of error correction in the chain. In other words if I am reading pits on a digital disk and interpreting those as 0's and 1's that might be a major source of error potential as opposed to reading from a solid state device.

Just guessing of course.

The good thing is that there is plenty of audiophile tomfoolery potential here. Fancy cables, connectors, stands, isolators and so on and so forth - so we might have a marketable device here for a nice little vertical market.

As it happens there are a number of tricks you can do off the bat that do seem to have an effect on the quality of the audio stream. 2 things I have noticed thus far:

1. Run off the batteries and not whilst charging. It is not a huge difference but there is definitely something there. Heavens knows why.

2. Big difference - put the phone in "flight mode". This disconnects from the GSM network and the phone acts purely as an organiser - or in this case a music server. I think that every so often when in normal mode the phone re-estabilishes itself on the network and this creates noise audible through the speakers.

I am still evaluating the sound - it certainly impresses in terms of "and this is from a phone!!" but in real terms all I can say right now is that it sounds mellower than the Marantz CD6000 that I am using as a reference. Well, actually, I can go a bit beyond that - I prefer its sound over the Marantz.

Next up - comparison with the vinyl original - once I sort out a more direct and less error prone means of copying the vinyl.

[fini]

Whew! I thought this one might have been about high tech cattle prods...