The Computer Audiophile

Jason has always been a very nice guy to me. I won’t comment on his professional practices.

Scorched earth I guess. They all be long retired by the time it really blows up in their faces.

It’s fairly new. I stripped all the ad code from it and enabled Ajax navigation because page views don’t matter when ads aren’t being served. I should strip the google analytics code as well. Give the complete early 90s web experience 😁

I believe I stripped the anti-ad-block code out of the Premium theme available to subscribers only.

Yeah, it sees ublock and most other blockers. Subscribers could turn off ublock and get the same experience but without the anti-ad-block message on the site. No ads are served to them anyway. I’m contemplating disabling all tracking (Google Analytics) for subscribers as well. Edit - If you use the Premium theme you shouldn’t see the anti-ad-block message at all.

It isn’t a problem with the logic. It’s how we serve ads that Ublock doesn’t handle well without manually telling it what to block. Please consider subscribing to the site for a completely ad free experience and supporting us to keep the lights on. https://audiophilestyle.com/subscriptions/

You could still use your ears by saving the difference file and playing it in the player of your choice.

You know you can just put two tracks in Audacity and flip the phase on one to see and hear the differences between the two right?

Only the finest hand-wound unobtainium with unicorn tear terminations.

So cool.

I can only imagine the global outcry if the Louvre housed its collection in a tin shed and it burned down. The UMG fire destroyed several Mona Lisas and virtually "nobody" knows or cares.

Hey @ted_b have you had a chance to listen to this stuff yet?

Good timing! I actually wired money to the manufacturer yesterday! I should receive the speakers between July 1 - July 5. More information to follow.

I wonder if there is a major difference between labels that are / aren't public companies that need to hit quarterly numbers for shareholders.

I can see slimy record labels using this as a marketing tactic in the future. Claiming a “hack” to generate buzz followed by a special release. Maybe I’m a bit cynical.

I believe it can be lossless but the official releases weren’t lossless. Edit: I believe I was thinking of Hi-MD.

Everyone I’ve ever talked to in the music business has said this as well. One recording engineer told me he was handed some tape to record over and found unreleased masters from “Little Stevie Wonder” on that tape. These cultural treasures are treated like easily replaceable commodities. It’s crazy. I also was present when an audiophile record label received the “master” of Getz / Gilberto for a special remaster. It was sent on a burned CD and sounded no different from the last CD rip.

Exactly!

This is a great article about all the masters that were destroyed in the Universal fire. The author really gets it and talks about sound quality and the importance of masters. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html Here's a quote: It is sonic fidelity, first and foremost, that defines the importance of masters. “A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music,” said Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog arm. “Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time. Every copy thereafter is a sonic step away.” This is not an academic point. The recording industry is a business of copies; often as not, it’s a business of copies of copies of copies. A Spotify listener who clicks on a favorite old song may hear a file in a compressed audio format called Ogg Vorbis. That file was probably created by converting an MP3, which may have been ripped years earlier from a CD, which itself may have been created from a suboptimal “safety copy” of the LP master — or even from a dubbed duplicate of that dubbed duplicate. Audiophiles complain that the digital era, with its rampant copy-paste ethos and jumble of old and new formats, is an age of debased sound: lossy audio files created from nth-generation transfers; cheap vinyl reissues, marketed to analog-fetishists but pressed up from sludgy non-analog sources. “It’s the audio equivalent of the game of ‘Telephone,’ ” says Henry Sapoznik, a celebrated producer of historical compilation albums. “Who really would be satisfied with the sixth message in?”

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go to this link - https://audiophilestyle.com/clubs/1-allo/ and select the appropriate tab (probably transport support), then click Start New topic.

I've long thought we as audiophiles obsess over the items that we have some control. We all should understand that recording and mastering are the holy grail to sound quality. However, we can't do much to about those items. We can however seek out different things and one of those is higher sampling rates. The marketing gods have done a fantastic job of selling the stair step graphics to us that show high resolution as a smooth line rather than jagged redbook staircase. So be it. We want better and are willing to do what we can in our attempts to get something better. In my experience the difference between redbook and high resolution recordings are due to the playback software and hardware used in our homes. Redbook is the most difficult to reproduce due to filtering issues. Some companies have great filters and their products reproduce Redbook better than the rest. Other companies use bad Redbook filters. This makes high resolution sound better on their gear. Seeking higher and higher sampling rates and bit depths is a fools errand. If it makes people happy, that's cool with me. However, I think it could actually hurt the sound quality in the long run. If labels churn out DR4 albums at 24/192 and claim this is to satisfy those seeking higher quality sound, then we all lose. If we vote with our dollars and ask for better remasters at whatever sampling rate, then we all win. So far we've been asking for the wrong thing.

I make zero money on the sale of new items. The sale of used items (our 1% commission) benefits AS by paying for writers, which benefits the readers including you. If you see this as a problem, that’s ok. I see it as less of a problem than manufacturers just writing us checks directly for advertising. No worries though.