By Shawn Perry
One week into 2009, we took one bold step forward, hopped in the car and drove to Las Vegas to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was an eye-popping experience, especially in lieu of the lingering financial crunch just then getting ready to lower the boom on an unsuspecting public. There was a lot of talk about this and that while we tried to figure out how to cover this beast. Once we saw the big Gibson tent in the parking lot, the music angle came into view.
For CES 2010 (January 7-10), we narrowed our focus. We listened intently to Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic and Samsung rant and rave about their “innovative,” green-friendly 3-D TVs, even though we didn’t come to the show to see 3-D TVs. In short, Pansonic’s next generation plasma displays may be the ticket to the ultimate 3-D experience. That’s only if you get to watch it in a totally optimum and immersive environment. And don’t forget to strap on your 3-D specs.
Actually, they need to get rid of those ridiculous anaglyph, red and cyan glasses and polarized Wayfarers. Which ever company figures out a way to display 3-D without them will most certainly take the lead. People don’t want to accessorize during their fleeting TV moments.
Some of the experts I spoke with said it’s physically impossible — something about the way how each eyeball operates independently. Others said companies like Phillips and Intel are all over it. There are other neurological problems with 3-D I couldn’t begin to understand. Maybe I’ll just wait for hologram technology.
It was our ears we came to enrich and feed. The sound, the audio, ultimately the music, in its many electronic forms of delivery — analog, digital, two-channel, surround, HD, 3-D (yes, it’s in audio too) — that’s what brought us to Las Vegas. And none of it was too difficult to find.
3-D was all the rage at CES 2010
Blu-ray has thrown open the doors for digital audio like never before with the studio-quality Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio formats. Paired up with a compatible receiver and tied together by the magic of HDMI, “no future audio format can be better,” according to one manufacturer’s brochure. At last, the Sony 7.1 A/V Control Center in my living room can reach its full potential.
Away from the Las Vegas Convention Center, on the Strip, the high-performance audio players — many embracing digital with open arms, many hard-core analoggers (is that what they’re really called?) would rather listen exclusively to vinyl on obscenely expensive two-channel systems — held court in the Venetian Tower. This was, for us, where the real action was.
At the heart of our story was a single night when we conducted an A/B listening test between two versions of the Beatles’ Abbey Road — the 2009 digital remaster against a 30-year-old Mobile Fidelity vinyl copy. We weren’t really sure where that fit in with CES, except it turned out to be a compelling experiment for reasons that warrant little explanation.
But alas, on with the show…
Music Servers: Game, Set & Match
When the MP3 format made its big presence known in the mid 90s, its lossy data compression fell on mostly deaf ears. Music consumers were suddenly more excited about quantity than quality; the concept of storing thousands of songs on a solitary hard drive was too much to bear. Thrifty, space-conscious visionaries looking to sell off their CD collections on e-bay and make life easier for themselves were in pure ecstasy.
Anyone with time and the desire can convert their PC into a basic music server. Yet a few enterprising souls have gained measurable strides in building standalone music servers that venture way beyond the scope of your garden-variety PC. For one, they don’t automatically strip the bits from your precious WAV files and turn them into barebones MP3s. Instead, premium music servers automatically upscale the WAVs to lossless, 24-bit, 96 kHz FLACs.
You can still fill up your iPhone or iPod with MP3s and maintain the quality of your old CDs on a home system, without having to replicate files. The multi-terabyte hard drives built into music servers have enabled quality to take its rightful place alongside quantity. Of course, in a networked world, a hard drive can only go so far.
Meridian’s Sooloos System We were surprised by the competition in the music server field when we arrived at the Venetian the first official day of CES. We took in demos of Meridian’s Sooloos System and Olive & Thiel’s HD Music System (see Music Servers Overview video). We also checked out the Morpheus music centre from Sonneteer and the Music Server from Cary Audio Design. There were probably others, but these four were the ones we either planned to see or stumbled upon.
The Sooloos greeted us warmly with the glow of its touch-panel interface. It allows you turn your music library into a searchable database of facts, figures, dates, genres, credits and, of course, album art — all while adding some much needed visual luster to an otherwise transparent medium.
“People love covers,” Rob Darling, our Meridian representative, assured us. “There’s a little thing in the world called the juke box that I think we all know.” And indeed, the interface is very similar to juke box.
Darling ran his fingers across the screen. “The next thing is it has to be fast,” he said, and away we went, zooming through a seemingly infinite number of album covers.
From the cover U2’s Unforgettable Fire, Darling took us a through a list of credits, and called out the “focus” feature that can dig deeper into any of the facts or figures — in this case, one of the names on the credits. The next thing we knew, we were looking over album covers of records U2’s producer Brian Eno had been part of — just the right sort of oblique strategy the man himself would respond to.
The 2.1 upgrade allows the Sooloos music server to tap into the hefty music reservoir of the Rhapsody music subscription service. For a monthly fee, you access can access and stream thousands of albums beyond what’s on your hard drive.
Because of this, when we asked about storage capacity, Darling boldly reported: “There’s no limit with the new software.” In principal, he was right. It’s a brave new world folks with more content than you can shake a CD at. And, according to Darling, the interface doesn’t suffer an iota of latency no matter how much music you have. The need for speed isn’t lost on the Sooloos.
Charles Wills, a senior design engineer with BICOM Media Systems, showed us how the Olive & Thiel HD Music System operates. It has a two-terabyte hard drive, which stores a ridiculous amount of music, and includes many of the same features of the Sooloos.
Olive & Thiel’s HD Music System
However, Thiel’s amplified SCS4D loudspeakers deliver a little more oomph over Meridian’s DSP Active Loudspeakers in the playback department. According to Wills, much of the improvement in the sound can also be attributed to the system’s IP-based connectivity, based on a high-end digital audio distribution system designed by BICOM Media Systems.
“These speakers are connected through Ethernet,” he said. “What that gives you is lossless audio delivered all the way to the speaker without any heavy gauge wire — no matter how far you are.”
The beauty here is that you can go buy an Ethernet switch, plant speakers all over the house, and never sacrifice a shred of the signal.
The Morpheus from Sonneteer was the sleekest and most discreet. It stores three terabytes of tunes, and like the others, will rip your CDs while you “go make a cup of tea.” You can even control it, like most of the other music servers, with your iPhone.
Sonneteer director Haider Bahrani showed us how the Morpheus, which we imagined would look nice in our living room. He stressed how silent it was. “It’s the quietest server we’ve experienced. I didn’t know it was working until I put a CD in it. We spent a long time in development dampening the hard drive noise.”
Hard drive noise and fans were issues we never considered, but it figures neatly into the occasion, especially when you realize music servers are essentially beefed-up computers designed specifically for processing audio. At two-grand and up and catering to a snobbish audiophile clientele, music servers have to be tricked out with the best and brightest eye-popping and ear-catching features. Otherwise, you might as well as stick to your PC.
Our last music server, the Cary Music Server, holds one terabyte — about 2,800 CDs and can also connect to SHOUTcast Radio, which features 25,000 radio stations around the world. At this point, specifics like storage capacity, connectivity, ergonomics and sound reproduction were what separated the low-lifers from the high-enders of the music server world.
Then we realized we needed to go listen to some of the analog high-performance systems to see if the space-saving convenience and ease of music servers were worth the effort. Digital music can increase its resolution with higher bit rates; analog offers a spectrum of possibilities the amateur listener struggles to discern. Or so we thought.
Speaker Of The House
Before diving into the actual systems, which ranged from practical to obscenely, bodacious, we looked at loudspeakers, which pretty much swim in the same river as systems. It’s commonly known size doesn’t necessarily dictate better sound, but the large towers bordering the Earthquake Sound booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center looked and apparently sounded impressive enough to entice music lovers.
We sized up plenty of towers, bookshelf models and in-the-wall and on-the-wall configurations at the Venetian, but the single driver loudspeaker from Acoustic Technologies LLC struck a deep chord with slices of Steve Ray Vaughn, kd lang and Joni Mitchell. Their lack of a sweet spot means they sound good no matter where you’re standing within a listenable range.
Hans Hidstam showed us the DLS line of Flatbox speakers, framed and mounted on the wall like a picture instead of in the wall. They are, in the words of Hidstam, “made for stereo or a surround set-up with or without subwoofer because that’s not really necessary.” Clearly, these speakers are practical solutions for limited spaces.
And while we agree subwoofers may be a luxury for plain old everyday audio systems, when it comes to high-performance, the line gets fuzzy. There are no hard and fast rules, yet subs seem more integral to digital surround sound than analog stereo. Which isn’t to say stereos can not benefit from the bark of a good sub.
Paradigm’s SUB1
We paid a visit to Paradigm to check out their subwoofers, the SUB1 and SUB 2 (see Paradigm Subwoofers video). We had no idea we were about to get jolted into the immersive trenches of the bottom end. When we asked what the differences are between a cheap $100 “subwoofer” and Paradigm’s line of premium SUBs, the company’s Rob Sample gave us an education.
“As you spend more money on a product, you’re going to get more reliability and better quality components inside,” he explained. “Hopefully, what that buys you is more performance. It will go lower in frequency response. Most subwoofers in the $100 category aren’t really subwoofers. They don’t go lower than an average loudspeaker with some bass to the side. These,” he motioned to the sturdy boxes at his feet, “are true subs. They go below 20 Hz. They will shake the house.”
Even at lower volumes, Sample said, the SUBs deliver better sound without distortion. At nearly five-grand (or more), I wasn’t about to second-guess the thunder the Paradigms could unleash. When we went in for a demo, dizziness and disorientation kept us at odds for the rest of the day.
The Abbey Road Listening Test
In preparation for CES 2010, we thought long and hard about how we could experience the best of what is known as “vintage rock” on a high-performance system. We figured, our readers are major consumers of vinyl and optical discs, and are coming up to speed on digital music. But really…how do all these formats size up? Is it even possible for one to sound “better” than the other?
We read up on Music Hall LLC, a company dedicated to manufacturing, importing and distributing high-performance audio components. Roy Hall, the company’s founder and “president for life,” prefers two-channel (stereo), analog audio over digital and multi-channel. Consequently, Music Hall makes a wide array of moderately priced turntables, amplifiers, CD players and tuners.
As a distributor, however, Music Hall is also behind a choice selection of speakers, cables, pre-amps, headphones, tubes, and accessories. With a suite in the Venetian, we figured they’d have a complete system that could play anything — well, at least a system that could endure a little experiment.
The idea was to stage a brief A/B test with two versions of the Beatles’ Abbey Road — a 1980 MFSL (0-23) limited edition original master recording vinyl copy and a 2009 remastered CD. A distinguished panel of invited audiophiles would listen to a few selections off the vinyl record, followed by the CD. It shouldn’t take any more than 30 minutes tops.
Naturally, when we ran it by a few audiophiles, some claimed it wouldn’t work. The variances in CD and vinyl playback can not be accurately matched. Well, maybe so, but we weren’t really looking for a precision test or trying to find out if one was necessarily better than the other. It was the preference factor we were after.
There was also the argument that A/B tests are typically done with equipment not formats. We beg to differ — your average, everyday music lover has more than likely compared a CD to a record or a tape at any given moment for any given reason. Well, at least that’s the way it is in our circle.
Much to our surprise, Music Hall’s VP of Sales and Marketing Leland Leard gave us the thumbs up. So, on the first night of CES, we gathered with a few withered souls in the Music Hall suite, took a few sips of whiskey and plunged ahead with our experiment (see Abbey Road Listening Test video – Part 1 & Part 2).
Music Hall’s high-performance audio system
The system was a rather simple set-up of mostly prototypes Music Hall was testing out for the marketplace. There were still some minor tweaks that needed to be made on the unnamed turntable, which Music Hall hopes to be shipping by summer. Hall estimated the turntable would retail for a little under $3,000, without a cartridge (Music Hall’s mmf-9.1, their current flagship turntable, is roughly $2,000, without a cartridge). The turntable here in the suite was equipped with a $1,200 Legacy moving coil cartridge from Goldring, a company that’s been around for over 100 years. You certainly can’t say that about many businesses these days.
Below the turntable was another prototype from Music Hall — a two-channel integrated amplifier with a CD player, based loosely on the company’s Trio line without the AM/FM tuner. Hall told us it will retail for under $500, and we began to wonder if these components were all that much different from what you could get from Sony or Onkyo. However, when you start to appreciate the engineering, craftsmanship and subtle little extras put into these products, you begin to understand why high-performance audio is an acquired taste for a select, discriminating few.
Hall pointed out the phono amplifier from Whest, which retails for about $4,000. The whole system was pumping through a pair of Epos M22i speakers, which go for around $2,500. As sort of a way to tie it all together, like the rug in Jeff Lebowski’s living room, the signal is fed over cables from, uh, Abbey Road. According to Hall, they’re designed by the studio’s engineers and “expensive as hell.” We couldn’t think of anything more appropriate for our experiment.
A few hours later, we stood to the side while the panel of audiophiles settled in and the needle dropped. A couple of snaps and crackles broke through on “Here Comes The Sun,” but no one seemed to mind. We carried on with the rest of the second side — “Because,” “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Sun King.”
The same selections from the CD were played. Silent reactions registered around the room at the brightness and clarity. When the last note sounded, we opened up a roundtable and sat back to watch the fireworks. From where we were standing, the remastered CD definitely held a crisper sway to our virgin ears, but did that make it better? We were about to find out.
Abbey Road: Vinyl & CD
Leif Jacobson, one of our audiophile panelists, said it isn’t about being better or worse. “It’s just nice to see the Beatles on a digital format that can work. On the vinyl, it sort of comes all together, and it creates warmth. On the digital, they’ve chopped it up and put it back together rather beautifully. One thing that did strike me was that the vinyl sounded so familiar.”
Echoing Jacobson’s sentiments, John Dark of Dark Energy Marketing, an audio marketing firm, added: “The vinyl does feel like home. There are certainly things about it that are familiar and warm. Pieces of it sound better. With the digital, you get much more clarity and it sounds very fresh and very much like you’re in the room with them. At the same time, there are portions that jump out that make you wish the acoustics of that room were a little better. Overall, this was an incredible comparison between the vinyl and the digital.”
Steve Condor, who works in the audio industry, made it unanimous. “The vinyl did appear to a little warmer. It seems like the CD, when they enhanced it, they might have put a dynamic range expander on it, which is kind of fun. It made it a little punchier. But for listening fatigue, when we were listening to the record, everyone in the room said, ‘Let it roll, let’s listen to the next song.’ People don’t listen to records now like they used to because of the incredibly high listening fatigue that comes with stereos and CDs. So I like the vinyl.”
Connon Price, who runs Hi -Fi for Humans, an audio boutique in Seattle, expressed a special connection to Abbey Road: “I grew up with the Beatles’ Abbey Road on my turntable. That is like a quintessential experience of my childhood. Of course, the vinyl makes more sense. In terms of the actual of musicality, the turntable is distinct — there’s harmonics, there’s joy. The CD, as ever, analytical, great detail, wonderful resolution, but it’s not vinyl now is it?”
Josh Bizar, Director of Sales and Marketing at Musicdirect.com, offered a more oblique perspective. “I can say with a hundred percent certainty that that record smoked that CD. I love the CDs. I find that the new remasters are tremendous. I’ve spent the last few months listening to them constantly, the mono versions especially. The stereos are great too. The new CDs are certainly more dynamic and they have better frequency extension. When you listen to the bass lines, I think the vinyl is a more accurate representation of what it sounds like. There’s a continuousness of music that you get in an analog signal that you can’t get when you turn music into zeros and ones and turn it back into music. As far as digital technology has come in the 25 years it’s existed, there’s no way it can touch a good piece of vinyl.”
Music Hall’s Leland Leard didn’t mince his words or choose sides. “They were both enjoyable. I love both of them in different ways. I was able to equally get into them on different levels. Clearly, they were entirely different sounding.”
Finally, Roy Hall himself threw in his two-cents.“You’re all wrong. I don’t agree really with what Leland said. There is no question that on the remaster the engineers have done wonderful things, and have brought up all the things they were missing on the original recordings. They’ve brought up the bass; they’ve brought the voices much more forward. But…” he said with emphasis before going further. “Even though I think it’s a lousy recording (the 1980 MFSL vinyl copy), I have to admit there’s something about it that turns me on, that makes it more involving and more enjoyable. I have all the remasters. I listen to them. I even put them on my iPod and they’re very good. I don’t know, there’s just something about vinyl that draws you in.”
In the end, it was clear our panel of audiophiles had unanimously favored the vinyl over the CD for many of the same reasons. After listening to the remaster over and over since the day it dropped, we weren’t so sure. Then again, we’re not audiophiles. Still, how could we not appreciate the sentiment and the occasion that brought it out? It’s such a rare thing these days to sit around and listen to records with other likeminded souls. But at CES for one night, that’s exactly what happened. And for that reason alone, the Abbey Road listening test was a resounding success.
Formats For Higher Intelligence
Lossless audio: Dolby TrueHD & DTS-HD Master Audio
The last segment of audio we decided to explore was what is currently being touted as the very best — 7.1 digital surround, studio-quality playback (see High-Definition Audio Overview video). It simply cannot get any better. We’d figured everything we’d heard in the Venetian Tower suites was pure heaven. We were about to get our senses pummeled.
Blu-ray is not only at the top of the heap for high-definition video; now, it’s equally impressive because of high-definition, uncompressed lossless 96 kHz / 24-bit digital audio formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.
The so-called demise of high-resolution audio vehicles like DVD-A and SACD (editor’s note: there are still some great DVD-A and SACD titles being released) has opened the door for more audio-only Blu-ray releases. Neil Young and Tom Petty are two notable adopters. With Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio in place, it’s likely more big names will release Blu-ray titles.
The great thing about being at CES is that we were able to go directly to the source — in this case, Dolby, DTS and HDMI, the licensing agency behind the High-Definition Multimedia Interface that has essentially united all parties together on one standard for HD video and audio.
Craig Eggers at Dolby Labs filled us in Dolby TrueHD. “I’m a musician and I love Dolby TrueHD and what it means for musicians. I can now sit in my home theater and hear a concert event or a recording in a recording studio exactly as it was captured.”
We wondered what the reaction was to lossless audio from the music community at large. “Here’s why lossless audio is so important,” Eggers said. “One of the premiere audio concerts out there was with Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds in high-definition on Sony Blu-ray. Sony wanted to have the highest quality video and the highest quality audio. They couldn’t put uncompressed PCM on that disc because it if they did, it would have compromised the bits that they wanted for video. Or it would have required them to have a two-disc selection, and nobody wants to get up when listening to a concert and change a disc. Dolby TrueHD enabled them to have 24-bit/96 kHz, 5.1 audio plus that high-definition video they demanded because they wanted you to be there. Total immersion, not just visually but sonically on one disc.”
Eggers recommended we check out the Chris Botti In Boston Blu-ray disc, which was recorded in 7.1, 24/96 and features Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Sting. “You can hear the brassiness of the trumpet,” he called out. “It’s absolutely incredible.”
Over at DTS, we chatted it up with Fred Maher, who produced Lou Reed’s New York and Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend albums. He said DTS-HD Master Audio is a new, lossless codec developed for Blu-ray that is “bit for bit identical to what you put in is what you get out.”
“If I were mixing or going back to an archive of an old half-inch master of something and I wanted to sample it at 192 K /24-bit stereo, I could do that using a DTS-HD Master Audio encoder to put that on a Blu-ray disc, and you would get 192 K /24-bit for-real audio. That’s exciting for music.”
Does lossless audio even matter to the average neophyte. “I hope people still care about the sound quality of music,” Maher said. “Some artists are taking the initiative, such as Neil Young and Tom Petty with some notable Blu-ray disc releases.”
Sounding the death knell of DVD-A and SACD, Maher said Blu-ray offers a “confusion-free” format, a single high-resolution format available in either surround or stereo. He thinks it might take vanguard artists like Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones to release their catalogs on Blu-ray to bring the masses around to the benefits of high-definition audio.
“I hope the record companies realize it,” he said, “because this time they got it right.” After we experienced the DTS demo (and received a free disc to boot), there was little doubt — they got it right.
Monster leads the pack with a wide selection of HDMI cables
With Dolby and DTS somewhat demystified, we decided to wrap up our quest into HD lossless audio by talking with the folks at HDMI. Obviously busy walking the 3-D tightrope, Steve Venuti, the president of HDMI, was kind enough to address the spec that supports the new digital lossless audio formats.
“A lot of people think of HDMI as video. It goes to your screen and you have your high-definition picture. We have the equivalent in audio going over that cable too. DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD are now passed over HDMI. In terms of audio, there’s not much better you can get.”
The audiophiles at the Abbey Road listening test were undivided on the virtues of vinyl, but this was something else altogether. From a technical point of view, the lossless formats Dolby and DTS devised for Blu-ray have hit the ceiling. You can go with analog warmth or digital perfection, launch a million arguments about which one is better, and still…never quite be sure. We knew the lossless audio of Blu-ray was as potent in movies as it was in music. But where the surround soundtrack of an action movie will a dramatic impact, could the same be said about music? We’ll leave that one for another discussion.
The Sounds Of Silence
Our coverage complete, we passed by the ear bud ornaments and car audio booths in the North Hall, saving those for another day. As it was, the most important part of the audio equation — optimum sound reproduction — had filled our dance card. We looked at music servers as the high-performance bridge for the iPod generation.
Then we jumped in the middle of a high-performance audio shark tank, becoming virtual chum to the audiophiles. Actually, they were more baffled as to why a rock and roll publication like ours was even in their midst. Once we explained ourselves, they seemed to warm up. We broke bread, copped to our aural shortcomings, and discovered that the “sales” and “marketing” people among us were there for the music as much as we were.
We also learned that high-definition audio is a more exact science, defined in terms beyond simple enjoyment as being the best it can be. Of course, you never know what’s around the corner in this industry. Formats come and go, while delivery platforms become more diverse and sophisticated. At CES, it was easy to see the home theater market is ripe for innovation. They seem to be staking the farm on 3-D, which was rather surprising given the state of the union. Fortunately, sound reproduction is pretty much a done deal.
Bound for L.A. on the 15, we sat back, flicked on cruise control and breezed through a few CDs on the factory-installed player. A few years from now, Blu-ray audio may be blaring from every new vehicle on the road. Perhaps that’s something we’ll look into next year.
