digital audio

For well-heeled fans of British hi-fi brand Meridian, the limited-edition 40th Anniversary System could be a dream. With a unique ruby-red finish, the company's latest hi-fi system consists of a tweaked 808.3 Signature Reference CD Player and a pair of DSP8000 Digital Active Loudspeakers.

Both the speakers and CD player are the company's flagship models. While there are analog purists who prefer a full-analog hi-fi setup, Meridian caters to fans of pure digital. This set keeps your music in the digital format right up to the moment it reaches the speaker drivers.… Read more

Thanks to streaming services and file sharing, there's little incentive to purchase music anymore. Everybody knows CD sales have been falling for years, but as soon as the record labels stop making CDs, their value will skyrocket.

Sure, there's still a sizable market for CDs, but if sales continue to decline I think the labels should offer a very limited run of each CD title on its original release, say a few thousand discs, with beautifully printed booklets and packaging, and auction them on eBay. When they're gone, they're gone. Prices would go through the roof, … Read more

A couple of weeks ago, "k_hettich" posted a question in CNET's How-To forum asking about converting vinyl LPs to CDs. A couple of people recommended USB turntables that automate the process and cost from $70 to more than $230.

Over the last couple of years I've converted a couple hundred audio cassettes and dozens of LPs to MP3s and WMAs, many of which were ultimately burned onto CDs. The only expense required was a $5 connector between my stereo amplifier and PC sound card. The real work was done by the free Audacity audio-conversion software.

Back … Read more

Ben Meadors and Owen McCafferty are in their early twenties; both are really into LPs, and they are trying to raise $6,500 on Kickstarter to publish a book, "The New Face of Vinyl: Youth's Digital Devolution." The guys will travel to Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York City to photograph and interview young record collectors, record store owners, and the occasional young vinyl buyer to ask them why they love records. McCafferty is a writer and will document their journey in a 180-page, full-color photo book.

Some new vinyl buyers really care about sound … Read more

After the WD Caviar Green, Western Digital announced today a new green hard drive that also offers up to 3TB of storage, the WD AV-GP.

The company says that the new drive is designed specifically for audio and video applications, such as DVRs, Media Center PCs, and surveillance systems; will deliver 24-7 reliability; and uses less power thanks to WD's GreenPower Technology. According to WD, the AV-GP drives have been field-tested to have a rated 1-million-hour mean time between failures.

The new WD AV-GP drive has a SATA interface and comes in 2.5TB and 3TB capacities. Note that … Read more

Steve "The Gut Man" Guttenberg's age remains a mystery in today's 404 Podcast preshow, but he's definitely younger than Wilson, who will celebrate his 39th birthday this year. Steve heads up the Audiophiliac blog on CNET and today he's making sure that younger generations, specifically teenagers, know the importance of actually listening to music, instead of just letting it play in the background of a million other digital activities.

A big part of Steve's life is reviewing headphones and home theater technology, but before we get to all that, Steve is curious about something else: women's obsession with shoes.… Read more

Digital audio won the popularity contest years ago, and nowadays almost every sound you hear coming out of a speaker is digitally encoded. Sound is always digital, whether it's on your phone, computer, radio, TV, home theater, or in a concert hall. I'd go so far as to say most people never hear analog recordings anymore. Unless you're a musician, or live with one, virtually all the music you hear live or recorded is digital.

Digital audio eliminated all of analog audio's distortions and noise-related problems. In that sense digital is "perfect." When analog … Read more

Pre-teen girls think pop singer Justin Bieber is a musical sensation. The rest of the world basically considers him to be one chipmunk-cheeked, tow-headed Internet meme. The latest: somebody found that if you slow down Bieber's song "U Smile" to an eighth of its original speed, it sounds awfully trippy. And more than a little bit mesmerizing.

More specifically, the stretched-out song, clocking in at 35 minutes and 29 seconds, sounds like the ambient soundtrack to an edgy indie film set either in outer space or underwater and helmed by a director who's high on magic … Read more

Dave McNair has been playing, recording, mixing, producing, and mastering music for more than 30 years and has worked with a wide range of artists including Los Lobos, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Patti Smith, Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, Angelique Kidjo, and John Mayall. He now works for New York City's top mastering house, Sterling Sound.

I interviewed McNair for Tone Audio magazine, this is just a small part of it.

Q: How has the mastering engineer's work changed from the days when analog audio ruled the roost?

When they were cutting records from analog masters, mastering engineers were caretakers of rather fragile analog signals. It wasn't an easy thing, trying to get it from Point A to Point B without losing the music. Back then the mastering engineer didn't compress or limit the signal all that much, you wanted the end user to hear all of the punch and leading edge dynamics. But now that things are so clean on the recording end mastering is a bridge from mixing to the duplication process. You might be adding the color that might have once been added by analog processors or mixing consoles.

Q: 'Color,' is that the same thing as sweetening?

Right, I'm chasing this idea, I want to make CDs sound like LPs.

Q: By adding complementary distortions?

Not always, but sometimes. I want to get more of the effortless sound of vinyl on CDs.

Q: It's pretty complex, but I agree, analog distortions can sound more musical than digital, even high-resolution digital.

Right, they add flavor, texture, and harmonics, but I'm not speaking for all mastering engineers; many still use a very simple path and stay away from enhancements.

Q: Like compression, you guys love compression. But the music was already compressed during tracking and mixing, why compress it again?

 Not always, maybe 20 percent of the time I get stuff that's not compressed enough. That's only because there's so many more new-to-the-game, semiamateur engineers making records these days. They're recording some really great, artistically valid bands, but it winds up sounding like a documentary style of recording. They leave it to the mastering guy to make it work, so I need to make the sound more dense, gluing the elements together. … Read more