Computer Listening

A bunch of people were a meet recently and some have sat down and were(hopefully) impressed by the nice music coming out of my computer's X-fi HD DAC and Objective 2 amp. Computer audio has been in the explored if I would say, extensively in the past decade or so. In the past years, many websites are dedicated to music streaming and downloads like Spotify, HDtracks and E Onkyo Music. For those looking for a quick guide on listening to music in a more optimum way, hopefully, this is the guide for you.

Throughout my short journey in the audio landscape, I have discovered a few great music software which does great at what is a deceiving simple task, playing music right. In selecting a player, I look for a couple of things, bit perfect output and effects plugin support. Having bit perfect output ensures that Windows or Mac OS does not do anything that may add distortion in the signal and allows us to be able to add our own desired effects from the plugins. Plugins will be explained below. To me, my player will preferably support Virtual Studio Technology(VST) plugins as there are many available and if you are a pro audio guy, that one set of plugins can be used for many DAWs as well.

To introduce to new users, iTunes, although a rather basic player, has support of bit perfect output on Macs via Audio Midi and on Windows, via Quicktime, one can achieve bit perfect output on your PC. One of the greatest audio player is the opensource foobar, which I personally use for track comparison purposes, it is easy to use and there are plenty of plugins(or "components") to enhance your experience. For my own listening pleasure, I make use of Jriver Media Centre, a paid player along with a set of VST plugins to enhance my experience. Take note that in Windows 7 onwards, WASAPI is my preferred method of getting a bit perfect output. Mac users have alternatives as well, listed here.Now on to the plugins I use. 

Plugins and audio:

Plugins or DSP(digital signal processors) like foobar and VST ones are to me, essential to the computer listening experience, and I always, always recommend getting player that can support . VST's and plugins can add a ton of features to a already great player and really enhancing your audio experience. Some people I know dislike using such equalisers due to reasons like the music would be less "pure" and it would ruin the artist intentions, However, to me at least, this is not so and in my opinion, DSP plugins can get you CLOSER to what the artist/recording engineer hears or wants you to hear, provided you use it correctly. I will be introducing 2 essential types of plugins for basic listening, whether on speakers or headphones.

For speakers and headphones, equalisers are the bread and butter of the audio experience to me. Many say they are a "dirty" way due to the way they distort signal but I beg to differ, to me, they are a way to compensate for your audio gear's weakness and sometimes, emphasize their strengths. To equalise, one should aim for their system to be as neutral sounding as possible and equalise to neutral before adding the desired response you want, there are many ways to go about this but the simplest would be to equalise till all tones sound the same volume. I will be introducing a couple of plugins for both VST and foobar.

The next type would be crossfeed, crossfeed to me is not essential but a real big bonus to have in headphone listening and in many times, can help improve perceived soundstage and imaging of even a headphone that has already great imaging. Crossfeed mixes the right and left channels slightly to give a centre channel that gives the illusion of having speakers. Images of the sound in or behind the head are put in front which makes the music sound more natural on heaphones. 

For 

VST plugins

Basically anything from RS-MET, the site has great great plugins whether you are a basic or professional user. One particular VST anyone, including myself, is the EasyQ plugin, simple and effective, it gets equalisation correct.

Another VST specially tailored for headphone listening which I now feel is unrivalled by almost any plugin in terms of features and effectiveness is the Tonebooster Isone plugin, which while not free, is totally worth your money(bought mine too). The Isone features Head Related Transfer Function(HRTF) which you may see in products like Dolby Headphones(in Astro mixamps) or EAX to emulate the speaker sound and I seriously swear by it. 

Foobar plugins

For Foobar users, my preferred method of getting a bitperfect output is by using WASAPI.

Xnor's 30 band graphic equaliser is a very good 30 band equaliser for those who do not know how to deal with parametric equalisers. Features a eq with no pre-echo due to its minimum phase filters and to me, does the job great.

Xnor's Xfeed is a essential foobar componenet for headphone listening, does not really compare to Isone, but heck, its free and awesome as well.

SoX resampler is a great resampler to have whether you have high res files or not, some audio devices only perform correctly or their best at higher sampling rates than 44.1khz, it is also a very fast and most importantly, most transparent resampler out there.

A little note for those on foobar, VST wrappers or vst to foobar plugins are available for those that miss VSTs just search around ;)

 Of course with all this, it won't hurt to have a good soundcard to pair with the headphone+amp/speakers, it does not have to expensive of course. Just some picks (never heard but they had some good reviews)

UD100 DAC A small nano DAC with a good chip, needs a amp though.

The venerable ODAC Base on his Objective 2 amp which I own, I will say that this is a serious DAC, not expensive but great, can be built into the O2 underneath the board or replacing its batteries.

ESI Juli@ A great PCI card featuring 2 sets of audio clocks for low jitter

Essence STX Solid PCI card as well, great lab measurements, I actually heard this one, sounds awesome.

Xonar DG A decent soundcard for those on a budget.

May Life Rant

So, with the new semester in my final year of education, life has gotten very busy lately. Not to mention the numerous number of family birthdays I seem to celebrate over the last few weeks. While I seem to be coping fine with the demands of Aeronautical Engineering, there are indeed a couple of really, really crappy subjects I can barely cope with. One is Aerospace Materials, which on top of being as boring as History class, seems to be heck hard to understand and with very little(or crappy) learning material, it is gonna be very bad news for me. Another would be the Flight Dynamics subject, which is essentially about vibrations and other physics which translates to me as you guess, pure Greek.

Now on to musics, for this season I seem to have very few albums that I really want, save for Kotoko's new single and Kalafina's "To the beginning" (getting it much later though). For me those are probably the most catchy tunes for the season.

"to the beginning" CD cover, Kalafina looking as cool as usual.

Kotoko's "Unfinished" Accel World's ending song

As for anime I enjoyed most lately, I find myself looking forward to each episode of Jormungand lately, is it because such anime are so uncommon? The last one of the type I remembered enjoying was probably Black Lagoon. Jormungand itself really appeals to me with its guns, animation and cast without using any moe factor. If you hadn't watch it yet for whatever reason, I totally recommend this. 

Also, not too long ago, I managed to get more impressions on different headphones from different places,

Stereo ION-Orchard:

First time been there and I found the look of the store a much more welcoming one then the one over at Plaza Singapura. Good customer service makes this experience really wonderful. My friend and I initially wanted to try out the new Sennheiser Amperiors but for some reason the samples have been sent back to Sennheiser, theories anyone?

Denons D2000- wonderful, neutral, they get close to the tonality of my Eq to flat R2000T monitors at home. Bonus is that they are ridiculously easy to drive. Soundstage was incredible as expected to the semi-closed design of these wonderful headphones. They don't have that edgy treble like the Beyer DT880 250ohm but thats just my initial thoughts.

HD600- Wow, a truly neutral headphone indeed, very detailed. Not worth the MSRP when you see the MSRP of the likes of Beyerdynamic's DT880 and AKG's Q/K70X. Its nice to note that my Objective 2 with its low cost had perfectly no problems driving these though.

Sony store:

Went there to take a look at some of Sony's nice goods like cams and other stuff, I do wish they sell more of their AV products in store though. Here the staff left me alone(or everyone else for the matter), which gives me plenty of space for window shopping.

Sony XBA-4

Damn was I in for a disappointment, midrange performance was downright weird, it felt um, cartoony/grainy? It was fairly disappointing for a 4 driver BA, want a 4 driver BA done right? Westone has great examples.

Sony XBA-3 

Ah, here is where the party is at, still a little of that mids problem but it was done a lot better here, I suspect phasing? The IEM overall was detailed but I'm really unsure whether it can best my TF10s(still waiting for my upgrade cable from FiiO). Has nice treble and good sound imaging but again the mids suffer a bit.

Sony XBA-1

Skipped the XBA-2 impressions because I did not have much time with the XBA-2 but i thought the XBA-1s were pretty worth the asking price, fairly detailed with good sound image. As expected of a single Balanced Armature driver, bass performance is pretty much non-existent on these.

Looks like a pretty great headphone concept, from a initial impressions by someone online, they at least managed to make it sound better then Beats. Stylish and totally classy cool, I want.

I will round this off with pictures of last month's loot.

I'm a whole season late but Zettou Amano Habakiri is really a extremely addictive song. As a huge fan of Love Live! I really enjoyed this single like the rest, Mermaid Fiesta vol.2 was a joy to listen. The art book by Fujima-sensei was worth every bit of money I spent on, been trying to resist for quite a while before I bought it but the HNNNG factor was too great. Finally, I found a partner for Haruka on my pencil case....  

Spring Anime 2012

Here in this spring, I felt that there was a couple of older manga was adapter which was reasonably refreshing as manga adaptations these days are getting lesser and lesser. Sankarea, Medaka Box and Mysterious Girlfriend X were some of my favourite reads a few years back when I was really into reading ecchi(oh the hormones). It was nice to relive those memories again a few years later in this season.

Among the 3, Sankarea really gets my recommendation for both reading and watching. The manga really was one of the most engaging back then and still is a good read. How will Rea battle the evils of decay and rigor mortis? Watch/Read to find out :)

Mysterious Girlfriend X is another very nice manga, I found it strangely addictive to say the least when I first started reading it. Urabe is just so entertaining, in various ways....

Last on the read list of course, is Medaka Box, I have been reading it since it was serialise but I can't really recommend reading it because I felt it was really your typical shounen battle manga unless you are into Medaka or the whole "mutant/abnormal/plus/minus/not equal" ability thing. The starting feels mixed up as you get many genres going together at once, not in a good way of course.

Loots and my room

So...... I was in China for a while for attachment, shall write more about that later. Here last month's loots :)

Found a small but great CD stall(push cart kind) selling all manner of anime cds. Managed to get, which shocked me, what seems to be a first print edition of lovelive's first single! Eli Ayase card score! Also bought off Museum 2 blu ray edition, a album which I wanted for a really long time but have been held off due to other singles getting greater priority. 

Also managed to get a pair of SRH840s for real cheap(1300 rmb) over there. It seems that the chinese really love AKGs and Shures over there. German brand Sennheiser is popular but much more expensive than Singapore while Beyers are not getting much love there save for clones from chinese audio brands iSK and Takstar.

Talking about the 840's, these would pretty much be my "checking phones" and somewhat a neutral reference when paired with my O2 amp. 

Spent my sunday setting up this fine NAD system in my bedroom so as not to bother my brother's. I can't let the speakers breath but they shine with some EQ and what nots. Thick bass and mids with rolled off treble are the perfect description for this system. Sounds great with my shure 840's too. I need a EQ board for it...

Stuffs I have been doing lately

So got my lovelive goods of the late, I sent my disc for the lovelive! memorial box to a friend of mine since i would not be able to receive mine anytime soon. 

This was meant to me my valentine, oh HNNNNNNG

Got some Niconiconi, I would have preferred one of the other girls like Eri but she is fine too.

On other news I have been playing Monster Girl Quest lately, which I started the day before my exams started, not a very good move but a very fine one. The game was very fun to play and is pretty much my first time playing a visual novel dungeon quest type. I was introduced when some ronery guys like myself were playing vanilla game Hatsuyuki till a guy posted screenshots of MGQ 2 which lead me to play. 

Also for the last week I have been watching +Tic Nee-San which is very very fun to watch. 

The episodes themselves can be found on lantis's channel. Also I have been looking forward to this particular character song from Kyoukaisen-jou no Horizon, might be getting it from a friend or *cough*dl*cough since its only available in blu-ray.

Lastly objective Electrical engineer Nwavguy has recently updated his blog about the ODAC. For you guys out there wanting to buy a soundcard, you should wait for it. When it comes out, the design would no doubt be something like the Centrance DACport LX or HRT MusicStreamer series, both designs being exclusively USB bus powered and emphasising power filtering and DAC implementation more than anything else. Price for the board itselt should be roughly 100 USD and is the size of 2 9V batteries.

Ultimate Ears Triple fi 10 review

Basically a copy from my Head fi review:

Pros: Clear mids, bass reproduction, good separation, neutral, build quality, Changeable cable, reshell worthy
Cons: Treble extension, Stock cable,more dependent than ER-4S on amp type.

Introduction and initial impressions:

Bought them over a month or 2 back for the lols and now they are my regular for my daily commute. I have used them with a fairly wide variety of audio devices, Iphone 3g(Objective 2,FiiO E6 and E11), Ipod touch 4g, Sony BDP-S380(w O2), Creative X-Fi HD(O2). Initially, I thought the TF10s were terrible, sound felt unnatural straight from the Idevices and it was too noisy with the E11. Hence, this review will discuss the TF10s mainly with the O2, Fiio E6.

Accessories:

The TF10s from Amazon comes in a super nice packaging and a fair bit of accessories. Flight attenuator for reducing audio system noise, wax cleaner, a nice gold 1/4" jack and extension cord. To boot, it also comes with a pair of comply tips.

Comfort:

Fit is hard to find but if you get it, it is ridiculously comfortable and reassuring fit. The stock silicone medium tips are my main tips now.

Cable:

I have to mention this, the cable sucks with memory behavior, so just get a Fiio UE cable replacement if you want something cheap. For others there is also Null audio cables which are very nice too. At this point I'm still waiting for my cable(on preorder)

Sound:

Separation: Very good instrumental separation which is on the ER-4S level. Only issue is the it seems very dependent on amp. The E6 and O2 are some of the cheapest options which provide this for me.

Isolation: If I'm not wrong the it is rated 26 SNR for isolation and I used the TF10s as ear protection in noisy situations and work. It works very well at blocking out noise, while looking cool during repairs ;)

Soundstage: I see no point in this but for a IEM, the TF10s have a wide soundstage.

Bass: Good bass reproduction with a lot less bloat than my previous M50s while being having a good quantity compare with the lack of bass of the ER-4S.

Mids: Good smooth and coherent mids, great for female vocals. I found the mids very slightly recessed

but its a non issue for the smooth smooth vocals.

Treble: Having heard so much hype on Head-fi and my friend who uses it with his Ipod. I was unimpressed with the mid- high treble on the TF10 with the E6 and E11(with attenuator). Its just barely there. Some songs as a result, seem to lack the high end for me. Its like the polar opposite with the ER-4S. Only with the O2 I managed to achieve a sufficiently good high end from the TF10s. The E6 does well if not stellar performance in treble.

Tonal balance; Overall neutral but with slight recess in the mids(which is really really small) and virtually no treble unless you have a good amp to pair with it. A Pico Slim would be a good too.

Verdict: Would I recommend this to someone new to audio? Maybe not without a fairly decent amp at least. Its highly recommended if you seek a more neutral sound(based on my Edifier R2000T, ER-4S and DT880) but still keep that bass. It's totally value for the price compared to ER-4S and is a keeper. I'm suprised that it did as well as it did on HF(price?) as I found it pretty source picky with lack of treble on a improperly matched amp(and straight out of the every popular Idevices).

Amplifiers, more than just amplification(an overview on output impedance)

A lot of my friends ask me why do amplify something as easy to drive, at one time the M50s and now, even more ridiculous, the Objective 2 with the Triple-fi 10s. There are a few reasons. I will go through them to tell you why as simply as I can.

In general:

1.To increase sound quality by increasing control over the audio signal to the headphones/ earpiece.

2.Bypass Ipod/Iphone internal volume control which alters tonal balance and adds distortion to the music(because of lack of control over audio signal.)

Short overview:

A audio signal is in the form of AC current which is highly dependent on many factors, of which I will talk about only 1 for this article, output impedance.

Output impedance in an AC circuit determines how linearly the the circuit will deliver power no matter the load.

This is true with most power regulation circuits where capacitors are added to reduce output impedance, giving more linear power. This also applies in audio signals, since they are also AC currents. Generally 0 ohm output impedance is highly desirable in audio.

To audio 0 ohm output impedance provides the following benefits.

Reduced distortion no matter the load(ear bud/headphone).

Flat frequency response no matter the load.(no emphasis on bass or treble)

Uniform power delivery into different loads so that the right amount of power can fulfill the music's frequency requirement.

Of course, this a extremely short explanation of the benefits of a low output impedance. Couple that with the overall better performance of the external amplifier, this forms my reason why amplifiers are more than just amplification.

Some reference material I used:

Power supplys

The advantages of the "0 ohm" headphone amplifier.

Great article by Nwavguy about output impedance.

Wiki article on impedance.

Student-Fi

As in my profile, I'm pretty big on audio and now, I'm trying to get some pro-level gear and hopefully some knowledge on room acoustics to get more out of my listening experience. For my room, I use the pretty venerable Edifier R2000t. Edifier is a consumer audio brand, which last year caused a uproar last year after its acquisition of popular high end audio.manufacturer Stax(fancy a 5000usd headphone?).

Despite being a consumer brand, I felt its studio line is one of the best in the sub $200 category competing with manufacturers like M-audio and Audioengine. I had good imaging in my hotel room given the space but not as good in my own room due to my printer squeezing the desk. I badly need a rack. The bass goes down to 50hz before rolling of and and the tweeters go up to 20khz. Its a wonderful piece of work with the wood finishing which mind you, is the exact same wood finish as my old vintage NAD 801 and 808CC speakers. Its overall pretty neutral and somewhat revealing with its good resolution.

The soundcard I'm using is the good old Soundblaster USB Premium, which despite is modest price tag, has beaten the heck out of newer dacs from the Fiio range, at least the E10 and E7, only the big brother E17 finally manages to outclass it which is to be expected with its 180sgd price tag. It retailed for $120 when I got it direct from Creative store.

Now to continue,

My disc area, as you can see its pretty small now since I have only started collecting recently. I listen to Suara a lot these days on SACD. The BDP-S380 is a fantastic piece of work, gonna get one for the living room too one of these days.

My "portable" rig that I have been bringing around with me lately. I don't think transportable audio gets much better than this, seeing how the Hifiman HM801 performs worse than the 3g. I do wish I have a Ipod touch or Sansa Zip/Clip+ for more memory though. I have nicely filled up the 16gb inside.

Just curious to ask(if there are any of you) if you were/are a student, what was/is your student-fi rig?

A couple of photos of Alter Mio

Recently I broke my crappy micro tough camera by Olympus(its supposedly drop proof) So I decided to snap photos with it and make them somewhat nice. I absolutely suck with photography but I with great effort, I managed to get in some decent shots with F4.3/4.1 whatever that means at ISO 64/100.

For lols

Here is my blog. Hopefully it will give me some of that much needed breathing space I need.

A photo of Sizuru puchi which I took, I received it from a good friend(Checkmate).