21st May 2012
Ok so I’m still a generation behind and not got to 3D yet, but a conversation with a customer recently confirmed a suspicion I’d had for some time: Blu-ray discs sound much better than DVDs.
When I got my full HD LCD TV and Blu-ray player connected a while back, I noticed the Blu-ray picture quality was much better. I could see eyes glistening properly, crowd scenes with such detail they gained depth, and far less blocky graphics during large, sudden scene changes. Animations like…
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4th April 2012
Taking my colleague's advice to heart, I went to concerts in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh in January and February, after a long absence since its refurbishment in 2009. I was up in the "nose-bleed" seats, which now have the addition of padding over the wood, but only a very thin layer at this ticket price.
I was sat centrally and listening to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra playing Beethoven and Haydn. The orchestra comprised around fifty players, with the addition of a piano at times. It was good…
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12th January 2012
That 3.5mm phone jack! It’s on just about every mobile phone and is a standard size and pretty rugged, but it’s amazing what accessory you can plug in there and a smartphone will recognise it and adapt accordingly. It’s also a challenge for those like Wolfson on the other side of the socket!
People expect to plug in headphones, which have three terminals, and headsets, which use four terminals (one extra for the microphone). They might plug in a lead to connect to their car audio system or home…
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16th December 2011
Twenty years ago I worked in an office where one desk phone was shared between four engineers and email was sent and received by the server twice a day. Today on my desk are four phones (two desk VoiP phones, mobile phone, PC headset) and email between desktop, phone and the rest of the world that takes seconds.
Each of the four phones sounds different. The worst call quality is international mobile-to-mobile and the best is PC to PC. The desk phones are made by different companies and fall…
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6th December 2011
24-bit 96k FLAC files through a minimum-phase apodising digital filter is what it's all about - apparently.
Today I did some internal training on listening to music and discerning the differences between the different digital filters available in our flagship WM8741 DAC, which is used in high-end CD and media players. One of the available digital filters, named apodising, minimises pre-ringing, where an artificial sound is created just before a transient edge.
We had some active studio monitor…
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