What to spend money on? What will make the most difference in my sound quality?

There are no lack of opportunities to spend money on audio gear, and really no limits to how much you can spend on any item. How about $1000/foot wire? How about $60,000 speakers? Ok, that may be a little nuts, but certainly possible to do.

So for those of us here on Earth with limited funds, what should we spend our cash on to make the most difference? Here are some items I came up with, in defending order of “impact”, from the good, to the bad and finally, the ugly.

1. Speakers – the one thing than affects sound more than anything else is the speaker. Sound quality is everything, but it need not be expensive. Turns out, nearly everyone prefers natural sounding speakers. A recent test at Harmon proves this fact. It also proves that speaker cost doesn’t relate to how it sounds. Find natural, and uncolored sounding speakers, buy them, love them, live with them for a very long time. Good value. Impact level: Huge.

2. The Number of speakers and channels. Yes, more is better, but there’s an interesting relationship here. Every time you double the channel count, everyone can hear the improvement. That means going from mono to stereo is huge. Stereo to 5.1 is huge. 5.1 to 7.1…um, not so big a deal. but 5.1 to 11.1 (yes, we can do that!) is huge. In short, there’s not reason to stop at 2 any more. Impact level: Huge.

3. Speaker placement. Here’s a high value item if ever there was one. How about big impact for nothing? Place your speakers properly and win huge sonic benefits. Follow guidelines published by Dolby and THX for 5.1 and 7.1 systems, look to Audyssey for 11.1 layouts. Proper placement costs you nothing but perhaps a bit of decor-strife. Impact level: Significant to Huge.

4. Acoustic Room treatment. No room is right, they are all wrong to some degree. The size and shape of your space hits your sound quality where it hurts. The fix is to add appropriate absorbers, diffusors and traps to mitigate the nasties your room is doing. Absorbing bass in one locations actually can boost bass in another. Room treatment isn’t the cheapest thing to invest in, but it’s not the most expensive either. You’ll knock heads with the decorator, but be creative and you can harmonize in a better acoustic environment. The impact here can be Huge to Significant.

5. Calibration systems (Audyssey, Pioneer MCACC, Yamaha YPAO, etc.) (particularly significant if you can’t optimize the above two. And any cal system beats none, even with treatment.) Some think of auto-cal systems as band-aids to be used in place of acoustic treatment. Others think of them as precision tuning methods. In reality, they are neither, and both. On occasion, auto-cal systems can work wonders, and be an acceptable compromise in light of acoustic treatment. But they aren’t doing the same thing as treatment, and actually the two work best if used together. Auto-cal systems have their limits, but don’t discount them as unnecessary. Even in a good, treated room, calibration is worth the investment…mostly in time…to implement.

6. Audio file formats, bit rates, etc. If you’re building a music library, this might be of concern to you. Yes, we all know/love/hate .mp3 files. They’re universally everywhere. But .mp3 isn’t a single “process”, it’s actually adjustable. The key to better sound quality is a higher bit rate. 320Kbps MP3 files are mostly indistinguishable from the original CD. But then there’s AAC, which is even more efficient. A 320Kbps AAC file sounds identical to the CD, yet takes up much less storage space. Then there are the “lossless” file types, like FLAC and ALAC. They, too, take up less storage space than a conventional WAV or AIF file, but are bit-perfect copies of the original CD. If you’re buying files rather than ripping CDs, look for high quality AAC files from iTunes, or try one of the many new sellers of high-rate lossless files. Starting with good audio files can make a significant difference in your overall sound quality.

7. Play software, amplifiers and AVRs, DACS – Lots to spend on, little to be gained. The benefits of many amplifiers, AVRs and outboard DACs are mostly the realization of expectation bias…you think they will sound better, so they do. But if you had no idea that you were listening to that shiny new platinum-plated, rare-earth extruded DAC, you’d never know the difference. Good amplifiers have no sound of their own. Very little to be gained here, once the basic needs are met for power and performance.

8. Exotic wire types and power conditioning. Got some extra cash? Want some real fun? Spend it on a concert, a vacation, a motorcycle, boat, plane, hang glider, hovercraft, fine diner with your partner, an addition to your house (for that home theater! Call us!), or a summer home at the lake. But DON’T bother with exotic and expensive wire! Power conditioning does have a benefit, if it includes surge suppression and transient control, but power conditioning will have no audible (or visual) benefit other than to protect your investment from power line related damage. Tread lightly, spend carefully, know what and why you buy.

Spending where it counts is always a good idea. If you need specific suggestions, drop us an email or ring us up on the blower. New products are introduced every day, but we filter through all of that and find the ones that are really worth it.

An article released today in hometheatereview.com was rather misleadingly titled “Plasma vs. LCD vs. OLED: Which Is Right for You?” Why misleading? Two significant points.

First, there are no OLED TVs! That’s right, though LG has one listed, it’s a ways from being a real product. The reason is that the technology is difficult to make, and most of the units that come off the line are rejected. Hang in there, we’ll have OLED some day, and it will be expensive at first, then cheaper. But right now we’re at the $2500 for an 11″ display level, so…yes, hang in there.

The second missing point: there are many more people in the world that could benefit from a projection system than realize it. It, and not OLED, is the “Third Technology” to consider.  Today, projectors provide the largest, and most economical picture available by a long way. A decent projector that can fill an 85″ screen is well under $2000. The thing that keeps people away from projectors is the need for a darkened room. But guess what? You need that with the other display technologies too, if you’re going to realize the best possible picture. The HTR article expounds on the differences in black levels between technologies, but to see even part of that, you need to be in the dark.  I’m talking the “developing film” kind of dark.

A bright projector with a moderate gain screen will startle you. It turns out what is most involving in a picture isn’t the blacks at all, it’s the size. Bigger is better and in our seven years of business, nobody has ever come to us and said, “Man, I wish I had a smaller screen!” The next most important image quality is brightness. You can hit that with any of the display types, and yes LCD/LED wins. But an 85″ LCD is a beast, and a burden, both on you and your bank account. Again, just a little light control and a good screen puts both big and bright into your home at a very affordable price.

Black levels do impress, but they are actually third in line behind big and bright. The point to remember is, today’s projectors have contrast ratios that far exceed the average home theater’s ability to display. That 100,000:1 contrast ratio would require walls, ceilings and floors and seating to be covered with black velvet, and the viewers would have to wear black velvet jumpsuits with black velvet ski masks, or the light that reflects of of any part of those things kick the contrast ratio back below 5000:1. A guy with a white t-shirt in the room brings it down to 2000:1.

But, let’s be practical. The same applies to LCDs, though not quite as much. And most importantly, though the numbers may look unimpressive, contrast ratios over 2000:1 are impressive to look at. You really have to watch those numbers, they can confuse you. The difference between 50,000:1 and 100,000:1 is measurable in a lab, never achieved in a home…not ever. Not even close.

Projectors offer many options flat-screen TVs don’t. The size of the screen is the first and foremost. What size would you like? There’s a lot of flexibility here, and a custom size is not really a problem. What shape? How about that CinemaScope 2.40:1 wide screen? You can’t get that with a TV. How about a screen that appears and vanishes at the touch of an iPad control button? How about one that changes its shape to match the image? How about no screen at all, but a wall painted with a special screen paint?

Yes, there will always be more TVs of all types sold than projection systems. But its worth considering a projector, even if the room you have may not be perfect for it. The benefits are…well…HUGE!

Excuse me if I sound slightly sarcastic. I love Sony, their ideas, innovation and at least a few of their products. This announcement showed up in my inbox today: “Sony ES Receiver with built-in full Control4 automation”. Being the control freak that I am, I followed the link to Sony’s site and found out…wow. So, you can control all your A/V devices, lighting, environmentals, and do it from your phone? wow. (Can’t even bother to capitalize that one, and certainly on exclamation point!!!) What’s the big deal?

Welcome, Sony, to the already pre-existing world of Home Automation. We’re glad you finally made it, now take a seat at the back, sit and learn.

Here’s the link…have a look, and while you do, mentally substitute “Sony” and “Control4″ with “iRule”. http://discover.store.sony.com/ES/home-automation.html

Frankly, this kind of thing anything but new. The first time I turned on a light from a computer was 20 years ago. About an hour later I did it over a dial-up phone line. A couple of years later I did it by voice command.

Today, Platinum Control based on iRule does all of the things Sony and Control4 do and a few things more, like integrate Sonos control, Lutron lighting, Centralite lighting, X-10 and Insteon lighting, thermostat control, video cameras, door access, and basically control anything else that runs on electricity and even some that don’t.

The thing is, Sony provides a control processor built into an AVR. Nice touch, but unnecessary. iRule doesn’t need a control processor at all, just a couple of inexpensive interfaces, or just one if you only are controlling a single room system. When we integrate with Centralite Lighting control, there’s still no need for a lighting control processor, and no expensive repeaters anywhere in the house. Your scenes and presets stay inside the dimmers which talk to each other and create a mesh network. You can even shut down iRule and run your lighting functions and scene presets stand-alone. No special wiring either, it all drops right into existing switch boxes.

Who needs a controller? Oh, and by the way, we NEVER see the blue circle of death.  Sorry, Control4, we don’t have that feature.

Not even going to talk price here, except to say Platinum Control beats them all.

Welcome, Sony, and hello again Control4. Enjoy the empty seats at the back row.

Here’s a quick look at the what’s Hot at CES this year.

All I can say about OLED is “finally”, and not very enthusiastically. OLED was first brought to my attention years ago as the tech that would win for displays. The enthusiast was my friend Craig who told me at the time that OLED panels would one day cover entire walls and display art, take the place of paint, wallpaper, and lighting. I’d be happy with an OLED TV. But no, it took years…and years…and at CES this week…Bang! OLED is huge.

Why should we care? If you’ve followed display tech, you know that Plasma with it’s actual lighted pixels has been hard to beat, specifically by it’s prime competition, LCD. The reason is that while each pixel on a Plasma display emits light, the LCD only passes light through it, and that light comes from some for of back light system, traditionally a fluorescent panel, but now LEDs. Enter the OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display where again each pixel emits light. It’s like Plasma without the heat and power. It’s like LCD but without the difficulties in calibration. It could, in fact, be the winning display tech for flat panels. And it’s out at CES.

All major display manufacturers have shown OLED screens, and from all reports, they look great.

Then there’s Ultra HD, the new moniker for 4K display. Again, why should we care? If you sit at any distance from the screen your mother would approve of, you couldn’t theoretically see any point to 4K. But that’s not the world we live in, and Mom may be watching a CRT, so, well, WE care. More pixels is better, right? I frankly don’t know! I’ve seen 4K, it looked great. I’ve seen the 4K/2K comparison Sony does. I wasn’t blown away. And where do we get 4K stuff to watch? If you think a download takes time now…Hah!

Anyway, my complaining aside, all major display makers are showing Ultra HD screens at CES too. And some are HUGE. Samsung shows a 110″ Ultra HD panel with smaller units too. The also showed their new take on 3D tech…using one TV to show two different programs at once (secret: use the 3D glasses and you only see the one you want, and hear with built-in glasses speakers..wow, bet they sound fan-darn-tastic).

LG has had an 84 incher since last fall, and now added 55″ and 65″ sets to their Ultra HD lineup.

Sony showed their Ultra HD TVs at 55″ and 65″ with a new-fangled OLED 56″ TV.

No need to go on much, you get the idea. Watch for OLED and Ultra HD at…well…Platinum Home Theaters!

Other tech at CED included more attempts at automated touch-screen remote control…most of Ex-Pen-Sive! And most of them still as lame as ever, like we need more of this: Replication of hand held remotes on your iPad! Oh, come on! If it didn’t work in reality, it won’t work virtually either! But we don’t care, anyway. Our Platinum Control based on iRule still beats everything out there in price, operability, and user experience. Can’t believe it, but you can pay 5 to 10 times as much and not get something as usable. Ok, I’m biased, but I’m also incredibly self-serving and objective. When I find something better, we’ll do that. So far, the gap is widening, not closing. No idea why technology has to complicate life, when iRule can SO simplify it.

There are also a lot of DIY control system projects out there, including a lot of folks doing their own iRule systems. That’s great! It moves the technology forward. But if you want the function and just can’t get your head around a huge DIY project, you don’t have to. Platinum Control is that system…done…right. Give us a call, we’ll bring over the demo and prove it.

Stay tuned from more from CES!

The Skinny: Audyssey amp Media Player app that plays your iTunes library and includes precision EQ curves for many popular headphones and earbuds.  App includes Audyssey’s Dynamic EQ for improved low-volume listening.

Quick Take: Finally! Precision headphone EQ for next to nothing!  Talk about a huge improvement in sound quality.  Don’t walk, run to the App Store and buy this one!

Details:

What’s a review of an IOS headphone app doing in a Home Theater Blog?  Simple: I LOVE headphones!  Been hooked since I was 9 and first listened to a crystal set kit I built on the kitchen table, then I got immersed in headphone stereo in the late 1960s.  They’re the cheapest path to high-end sound, personal, private, portable, and wonderful.   Yet, as inexpensive as they can be, headphones and earphones of all kinds have a sonic signature all their own.

Just like speakers, no two models sound the same.  Perhaps when you get to seriously expensive headphones their sonic signatures may be sort of similar, but even the $1000+ models differ substantially in their frequency response.  This gives rise to the desire some head-phreaks have to equalize their headphones and coax better performance out of them.  The idea is well founded.  An equalizer compensates for frequency response deficiencies, whether peaks or dips, bumps rises or roll-offs.  But the entire EQ problem is fraught with difficulties.

Setting an equalizer “by ear” can be challenging.  Few have the ability to listen so analytically as to detect specific response anomalies while listening to music, then adjust a parametric equalizer to exactly compensate.   Often, all we have to tweak on is bass and treble.  Then there are those annoying presets in the iPod, none of which make any sense.  Limited tools, limited ability, it all adds up to small improvements and big frustration.

What we’d really like to do actually measure the response of our headphones, then adjust our equalizer based on that.  But that’s a task not so easy to accomplish.  The measurement mic would have to be inserted into your ear and park right next to your ear drum.  You need a good test signal source, and a method of measurement that has high resolution, then an equalizer capable of being set in response to all of that data.  If you can’t do all that yourself, and frankly very few could, you can find headphone test data on-line. Several websites test and publish headphone frequency response graphs.  But the published curves are sometimes difficult to read, and what’s worse, creating the exact inverse EQ curve without seeing the actual response of the equalizer is pretty much impossible.  Even if you can see a predicted EQ response, what are you shooting for?  Not flat, certainly, that’s been well established.  So what’s the right “target curve”?  It’s all enough to make you want to give up EQ and just listen to your headphones bareback.  Or, just tweak by ear and do what you can, which until now was the best option.

Enter: Audyssey.  The boffins at Audyssey Labs have baked up another amazing use for their famed “MultEQ” system.  You’ve seen Audyssey MultEQ (in all the flavors) for years now in AVRs.  It shows up in car stereos, computer speakers, iDevice docks, and there was a legendary stand-alone “pro” unit, sadly no longer in production.  You can even buy a relatively inexpensive software plugin for your DAW and EQ your recording studio monitors.  But this latest concoction is by far the most accessible, affordable, influential and just plain cool application for MultEQ yet.  For a buck minus a cent, you can buy the app, and it runs on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, anything running IOS 5 or higher.  The App is called “amp Media Player” (yes amp is stylishly all lower-case).  It works with the iTunes library already present on your device but has a twist.  When you set it up, you tell it what make and model of headphones you’ll be using, and BAM! You’re Equalized!  No fuss, no testing, no guessing, no worry about target curves, Q, gain, F0…nutting’ but the perfect high precision EQ for your specific headphones!  Unplug your cans, and plug in a new pair, and the app asks if you want to change EQ curves, and saves your favorites.  Slick.

Now we’re cookin’ with GAS!

The Audyssey Labsters have done all the heavy lifting for us…taking high resolution MultEQ-based measurements of a selection of popular headphones, creating the ideal correction curves, and letting us mortals download the curves into the player.  Now, that would be cool enough, but no…they just couldn’t quit.  Audyssey has had Dynamic EQ for a few years now.  It’s a dynamic correction system that makes changes to the overall EQ of a signal passing through it based on the exact SPL presented to the listener at any moment in time, making up for our human low-volume bass insensitivity.  It makes low volume listening fun, filled with bass that would normally be missing, and makes everything far more audible.  They went and put that into the app too.

The very second the app came to my attention, I bought it.  But I had questions of my own, so I contacted Audyssey boss Chris Kyriakakis and we did a little Q/A:

Jim:  Every EQ system needs a target curve, a goal to shoot at. How did you pick the target curve in amp?

Chris: That’s a bit of a secret, but it involved measuring inside ears of people and mannequins in calibrated studios

Jim: Do I assume correctly that there are different eq targets for IEM vs on ear vs circumnaural?

Chris: Yes

Jim: How did you measure headphones for the in-app curves?

Chris: We developed an automated system based on… MultEQ!!

Jim: If I were to use an external headphone amp connected to the dock, line out, will the app still work?  In most cases dock line outs bypass the volume adjustment.

Chris: If you control the volume from the app then it will work just fine

Jim: Do you base the dynamic EQ on volume attenuator setting, or are you sampling actual audio out levels?

Chris: Dynamic EQ monitors volume setting and real time estimation of content loudness

(Thanks Chris!)

With those questions answered, I moved on for some listening tests.  I installed the amp app on my iPad 2 and launched it.  The app immediately asked me what headphones I use, so I selected the Grado SR-80i.  Then it brought up my iTunes library.  I started with Audyssey off, and launched my Headphone Test Playlist, a rather eclectic collection of recordings I know very well.  The list doesn’t represent my preferences in music so much as material that I find useful for evaluation.  First on the list are two older Rebecca Pidgeon recordings, Kilerka and Spanish Harlem.  I find the human voice very revealing of audio quality and have been using this CD since I first heard it used in several demo rooms at a CES years ago.  I immediately hear the characteristic Grado upper-mid peak and smooth but not terribly deep bass, familiar anomalies I’ve come to know for the past 16 years that I’ve owned my Grados.  Then I switched on Audyssey’s custom Grado SR-80i EQ.  It was as if somebody slapped a completely different set of cans on my head!  And darn good ones at that!  The upper mid peak was completely gone, the bass smoothed out even more and got deeper.  In short, all my Grado complaints disappeared with the flick of a switch.  In disbelief, I moved on to more material.

I worked my way through the list that included John Williams solo classical guitar, classical recordings that included Leos Janacek’s Symphonietta, a bit of Tchaicovsky, then Besame Mucho by Diana Kral, even a high resolution analog transfer of a Sheffield Labs Direct to Disc record (Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues) that was recorded in one complete take per side, direct to a Scully lathe.  Each time I turned off Audyssey it was like someone taking my candy away. Like someone removing my plate in the middle of a meal.  Like pulling the plug on some of the best headphones I’ve ever heard, and placing back on my head…well, the Grados.  I was hooked, and now couldn’t live without Audyssey.  I listened to all the demo material as if through new ears with new headphones.

About halfway through I decided to try something more radical.  I also own an even older set of Sony MDR-7506 Pro headphones that I bought in the early 1990s when I was doing live sound for broadcast.  They are not pleasant to listen to headphones at all, but they cover the ear, provide modest isolation, and their forward presentation makes it easy to hear problems in a live mix.  I dialed up the Audyssey curve for them too, and slapped them on.  With Audyssey turned off, again the familiar edgy, in-your-face sound of the Sonys.  I turned on Audyssey, and it was like someone poured a long cool stream of clear water over these normally sizzling phones.  They were tamed, and much more mellow.  Now the mid to top range was silky smooth but I still found them a tad bright, though.  I popped into the manual adjustments and tried the unique “tilt” control.  Pushing the slider one way tilts the overall response up at the low end and down at the high end, reverse for the other control direction.  A slight downward tilt put the Sony’s now into the world class.  Yikes, this is scary stuff! I actually enjoyed the Sony headphones for the first time ever.  They were no longer fatiguing, and if you’ve owned 7506s, you know that’s a big deal.  Still different from the Grados, but the differences post Audyssey magic were far less than without it.  Where they were radically different before, then now sounded like brothers, cut from the same cloth.

I haven’t had the chance to try a lot of other headphones yet, but I look forward to doing so.   I would assume some limits to the amount of correction, like Audyssey in an AVR where there’s a 9dB maximum gain.  But I’m also expecting that the worse the ‘phones, the more dramatic the difference, just like Audyssey and speakers.  And if you don’t find your headphones in their library, the app lets you send a request in, and they’ll let you know when the curve for your ‘phones is available.

Perfect…well, as you know, all apps are works-in-progress.  There’s a small issue with noise around extremely low-level sounds.  It’s relatively minor, and most listeners may never notice it.   Audyssey confirmed there’s already an update in the works that will improve noise performance during low-level audio.  Grab this release now, and you’ll get the update when it’s ready.

The magic of good headphone equalization is now available to anyone with an IOS device (IOS 5 and up) for $1.  It’s precision, custom EQ developed for your specific headphones using lab facilities and the measurement wizardry of Audyssy MultEQ.  Worth a buck?  No, it’s worth more like $250, but since it’s only a buck, don’t wait, go buy it now.  Hear what your headphones can sound like.  Hear what you’ve been missing.

Be forewarned: It’s addictive.

Addenda:  Audyssey’s headphone EQ is also available in the Songza app.  While Songza gets you the Audyssye EQ for free, the limitations in Songza’s library and method of selecting music for you prevents it from being a hands-down win, unless you’re squarely in the 18-35 age bracket.  I’m not, sorry Songza, you missed me.

Just a brief blog post…if you have ANY interest in Jethro Tull, 70′s epic rock, 5.1 surround music, high resolution audio…Any of that…grab yourself a copy of the 40th Anniversary package.  It’s a CD and DVD-audio in a nice commemorative package.  There’s the original stereo mix captured in high-res, a new stereo mix (also high-res), a new 5.1 Dolby Digital mix, and a high-rate DTS 5.1 mix.  The menu has the famous newspaper, slowly flipping pages as the audio plays.

The surround mixes are a revelation!  The new stereo mix is darn good too.  Overall, lots of fun, and a fine tribute to one of the most significant albums in rock history.

Thick As A Brick 40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition

Sometimes a look back is what we need to go forward.  3D films have come cyclicly over the years, starting with the first major cycle in the early 1950s.  But that cycle ended, as have all others between then and now, with public disinterest.

I recently posted that 3D TV watching had an audience so tiny as to not show up in the ratings at all.  We may be on the cusp of another end-of-cycle.

So, let’s take a look back to what killed 3D in the 1950s.  The article linked below is a pretty complete analysis of the first 3D cycle, and the technology of the time.  We’ve long surpassed those technical limitations, but our 3D today is once again in trouble.  Have a read-through…see if you see any parallels worth noting.

What Killed 3D?

It’s interesting what you trip over as you walk around CEDIA. I’m not talking about a hump in the carpet with cables under it, though that does happen. I’m talking about the surprising, odd and unique products that you never would have known about otherwise.

Late in the day, nearing exhaustion, we came across a booth with a set of really interesting looking headphones. I noticed right away there was no wire. Expecting the usually wireless headphone concept taken to a stylish extreme, I picked them up to look them over and asked the rep about what made them unique. In a fetching French accent, she described the Parrot Zik headphones as Bluetooth, noise canceling, and with full remote control of your IOS device, including a tap-touch interface on the headpiece. That’s the short list… so I tried them on.

If the French company Parrot sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because you’ve seen their IOS wireless controlled Quad-Rotor helicopter, you know, the one with the video cameras built in. Why, exactly, Parrot chose to enter the mid-range headphone market is a bit of a disconnect, but I assume it was their wireless experience with the Quad-Rotor that pushed it along.

The Parrot Zik concept differs from the mainstream market significantly. It’s not unusual to find bluetooth stereo headphones, but unusual that they are large over-the-ear type phones. Remote control is common, but full tap-touch-swipe? And yes, you can use the mic to make a phone call. Now, all of this would be excellent even if they didn’t sound all that good, but they did the sound design with finesse as well.

I’m a rabid headphone user with 45 years of practice. It all started with my mother, who’s radar-like ears would object to my private music played well below conversation level in my room. Headphones back then, at least the decent ones, were all full-ear, hot and heavy contraptions. Mine were darn uncomfortable, but had little knobs on the earpieces for local volume control. Of course, they became crackly and scratchy fairly early in life. But I used them and listened almost every night. Fast-forward to my professional usage of headphones, my early Walkman and Sony headphones that cost more than the Walkman itself, my brush with Stax electrostatics, my love for Grado SR-80s, my love/hate with Sony MDR-7506, all the stinkin’ ear-buds, sports headsets, over the head, under the chin, ’round the back, fold-up, roll-up, break-apart, etc. Then there’s the headphone amps I’ve built and bought. Yes, I’m in deep. Point is, for me, headphones are a tough sell.

I’ve now had a chance to live with our first “demo” pair of Parrot Zik headphones, and both me and my in-house testing staff (my son) have put them through their paces. Here’s my review:

Sound: There’s nothing more important in a pair of cans. They could actually be uncomfortable, but if they sound good, I’ll use them. Any coloration at all, and I’m marking them down. The Parrot Zik’s sound quality actually surprised me in several ways. First, the overall color is quite neutral, matching what I’m used to expecting from my headphones. But of course, if you don’t like the basic character of you hear, there’s an App that lets you access an equalizer! Go nuts. I made sure the EQ was off for my evaluation, though. The bass is quite extended, actually surprisingly so. Kick drums and bass synths are subwoofer-grade deep and tight. I have no way to measure headphone response, but huge 20Hz pipe organ pedal notes are there in all their glory, so these babies go LOW. And powerfully low, not wimpy, wheezing or that strained stretched bass you get when things are trying a bit too hard. I actually experimented with a tiny bit of bass roll-off in the EQ app, but ultimately left the EQ off. The midrange is smooth, the high end clean. But there’s a caution: Bluetooth stereo…hmm. My first experience with it. It’s really very good, but Bluetooth stereo audio makes use of bit-rate reduction (usually miss-termed “compression”), which in and of itself isn’t bad at all. But, when playing a file that is already bit-rate reduced, such as an .mp3 or AAC file, what’s actually happening is the audio passes through two different CODECs in series, a situation with unpredictable and inconsistent results. Sometimes the high end becomes harsh and brittle, other times it’s nearly transparent. I proved this to myself by playing a series of tracks in uncompressed formats like Apple Lossless and FLAC. Uncompressed files always sound good through Bluetooth, and the greater number of compressed files do to, but theres the occasional clinker. The Parrot Zik headphones have the ability to connect to any source with a cable (supplied) and bypass Bluetooth completely, and that did improve things. But realistically, I’m very picky and your basic quality snob, which means most people won’t hear what I hear, and that’s just bully for them.

There are tons of ugly headphones in the world. Just look at those 1930 crystal-set-ish Grado cans, or pretty much anything by Stax. Again, Parrot doesn’t just bend the rules, the go head and fracture them. Designed by Starck, function is blended with style, as the outer surfaces are actually touch sensitive controls. Swipe up, volume raises, the reverse for a downward swipe. Swipe forward, tap to pause, answer your phone, etc.

Nearly all curcumnaural headphones have issues with heat buildup. A human head radiates quite a bit of warmth, being the area of the body that looses heat the fastest. Cover the hears, and they do get toasty. The Parrots are no exception, and would actually be quite nice on a chilly day. But aside from being a bit warm long term, they are very comfortable. The cushions almost feel fluid filled, reminiscent of the Koss Pro 4A, if you’re old enough to remember them. Yet lighter than the Koss, and with much less head-crushing force too. They also seal quite well, giving above average ambient noise reduction just by being on your head. Then, switch on the active noise cancellation had it gets just plain scary. Noise cancellation has been around for over 10 years now, and works fairly well, but is usually not applied to full-size, over-the-ear headphones, much less Bluetooth phones. It’s a nice touch, and will be very very nice on the next flight. The noise cancellation remains functional even when they are cabled, a nice bit of finesse.

Slightly on the down side, there are a couple of technical glitches. They don’t seem to want to just jump in there and pair up with a device they’ve already met and got to know. If you pair them, then walk far enough away to disconnect them, they probably won’t just re-pair. Sometimes the initial pair-up is sluggish, but nearly always happens eventually. Answering a phone call may not always go silky smooth. But these are all things to deal with in a firmware update. There’s also no using them as passive headphones with just the cable and the power off.  You’ll get some sound, but you won’t like it much.  You have to use their built-in electronics, so the ‘phone phreaks with phancy amps are wasting their hardware on the Ziks.

These days you can get really good headphones for less than ever. You can also spend thousands on the hgih-end ones. At $399, the Parrot Zik headphones land north of cheap by quite a few miles, but way south of ridiculous. But considering the features, comfort, styling and all the Bluetooth functionality that pairs with your iPhone, plus the free app, they’re actually a hands-down win. If they had the features but not the sound quality, they’d be only fair. If they had the sound quality but none of the features, they’d be expensive. But all together, I think they are actually a really well-priced set.

Buyers should be prepared to fiddle with them a bit until the firmware gets fixed, assuming that’s a possibility.

Yes, I know, beating a dead 3D horse again, but I saw this story and thought it was less of a comment, more of an underscore.   The short version: too much trouble, not enough benefit.

Yes, we knew that didn’t we?  So what did we REALLY get out of 3D home video products?  We got really great 2D!  At CEDIA in September Epson introduced a couple of new projectors.  Even their reps openly said, “Yea, it comes with a couple of pairs of glasses, you can keep then in a drawer and watch great 2D.”  All that R&D to get 3D to happen resulted in brighter, sharper 2D, and at lower cost.  It pushed the tech forward, and we win.

3D is always something I think I should love, but really hate, at least in movies and video.  I love the antique Stereoscope cards and viewers, and I’ve shot tons of 3D stills, but for me it doesn’t work for video or film beyond the obvious novelty, and that novelty is usually so obvious that it rips you out of the narrative.

3D has been raising its head in about a 15-20 year cycle, and always lowers it again.  This time it’s lasted longer and more content was produced than at any other time, by a very large margin.  But the audiences didn’t embrace it enough to make it really a win.  It’s a novelty still, and while it’s better than ever, it’s still just that.  So let’s go enjoy some really great 2D on those 3D displays, and save the glasses for eBay.

If the Disc is Dead, then so is everything else!

First, welcome to the new location of the Blog.  Please update your bookmarks, etc.

So now we have Ultra HD, the old 4K. Looks like it’s not going away very soon. And so for, manufacturers have been working on the “easy” part – the display. Yes, that’s a lot of pixels, but those pixels are at the end of the food chain. Once lit up, that’s pretty much it until our eyes get involved. What comes before the display? HDMI, true, but that’s a done deal. The AVR, yes, also a done deal. How do we handle the content? Blue-ray Disc is now just a bit small, so we need a disc with more capacity…again. Or do we? Discs are so 2011. Perhaps the disc can just vanish now, and we’ll be media-free.

Not so fast there Babbage. Remember raw 4K is not just twice the data of 1080p, it’s more like 4X the data. How hard is it to get 1080p over your DSL right now?

Let’s look at some data rates. Raw 2K video used in production lumbers along at 1.8Gbps, while 4K used in production flies at 3.8Gbps. Either version gets hammered down to 40Mbps for Blue-ray, and way below that for any of the 1080p-capable streaming services that need to squirt it down a less than 6Mbps pipe to your home. Our home has the Elite Uverse service that “maxes out” at 20Mbps (read: never actually hits it), but even that seems slow on occasion because of net traffic, swamped servers, and all sorts of other excuses.  Even Youtube bogs down way too often. Barring an order of magnitude leap in bandwidth (not very darn likely) 4K would have to stream into that same little pipe too. And that would mean even more deft bit-rate reduction and compression than is now used for 1080p, which we already see as inferior to the relatively massive 40Mbps coming off BD.

Not a pretty picture, is it? In fact, how the heck…

Scaling to the rescue! Remember back when, before we had HD-DVD and BD to fight it out, we had DVDs and scaling players? Remember how much better a DVD looked when properly scaled to 1080i or 1080p? It’s still going on full blast.  Our current disc players and and better AVRs all scale video. Turns out, the more raw information a scaler a has to chew on and the less it has to do, the better the results. Scaling 480p to 1080p is a 6X scale with very little initial information, but scaling 1080p to 4K/Ultra HD is only a 4X scale, assuming identical frame rates and color depth, and there’s a lot of detail there to begin with. And, given the artifacts will be visibly smaller, the scaling to 4K should look more than adequate for most people.

In fact, a little reality check, if you sit at a recommended distance to your 1080p screen, the resolution is limited by visual acuity, your ability to see detail, already. Ultra HD will move that distance even closer to the screen, which for many will be just too close.

We can and do have Ultra HD now in scaled 1080p. We’re ready! And BD wins, of course, as the raw material for scaling, though no doubt the streamers will do it too albeit with less to chew on. We’re probably not getting real 4K into our Internet pipes any time soon. But I welcome the ISPs of the world to prove me wrong…quickly.