(formerly)tangentmind.org

So, I've spent hours upon hours in the last few days researching audiophile stuff. Mostly headphones and multichannel music. Which is ironic because headphones only have 2 channels(for the most part...haven't researched the "phantom channel", or surround headphones much). So far I haven't found any good 5.1 music to test. I have, downloaded "Monkey Audio" encoded 2 channel music that was downsampled from a 5.1 channel SACD. The two competing formats are DVD-A and SACD. DVD-A is actually better than SACD but for some reason SACD is more popular and people have this false notion that it's better, probably because it's developed by Sony and Panasonic. I think both formats are crippled because all of the audio players for the formats output in RCA analog instead of digital optical, because the Record companies are paranoid that digital outputs will make it too easy to pirate the audio...bunch of bastards.

Some DVD-A discs will play in DVD video players but not only in a DVD-V compatible mode. Same for playing on PC dvd players. Similarly hibrid SACDs will play on DVD and CD players at CD quality. I think most, but maybe not all DVD-A discs are multichannel and some, but not all SACD disks are multichannel. Both formats need enabled players to play them at their full potential. There are benefits to both formats besides being multichannel, specifically "High Resolution" audio. I would link to pages describing them but a simple google search is sufficient.

As for the computer, the computer can play a hybrid SACD in cd quality and can also play DVD-A disks at DVD-V quality(with a DVD drive, of course). I think it's obvious which is better in that scenario. Also, there are a couple formats which support multichannel. The only two I've really found so far are apple's proprietary "ALAC" lossless codec and xiph.org's "FLAC" lossless codec(lossless meaning they do not "lose" any of the audio in compression and are usually therefore quite large in file size). I think the ever-trendy Ipod might be able to play ALAC files and of course Itunes and Quicktime, I think, are the only software players that can play them.

I know of two hardware players that can play FLAC. One of them is a car audio player called the PHAT Box. It is quite sweet, and rather expensive...some might say over priced. The other is the RIO Karma, which I believe is a wholly awesome device. 20gb hard drive, portable digital audio player that suppors a whole range of audio formats, and I think also has good sound reproduction, and costs about $200, at least $100 less than a comparable Ipod. So, I will probably obsess about wanting one of those for a while, but considering how poor I am, I may never get one.

Something more in my price range that I've been obsessing over, though, is the Sennheiser HD201 headphones. Most of my headphone research has been on http://www.headphone.com/ so it's not really well rounded, good research, but I think the HD 201 sounds like fantastic headphones for $20. I should really get a job.

Music:

Dave Brubeck is a jazz musician and well respected composer. I think most, if note everyone, in the world has heard his song "Take 5". Everyone should listen to at least one Dave Brubeck cd in their life.

Chesky Records produces some rather orgasmic music. They also have SACD and DVD-A recordings as well as some good articles on their website.

Fiber seems to have some interesting electronica.

Rothkamm is very interesting music. "FBO1 is music from mathematics played by a human, pure electronic music synthesized via frequency modulation on sine waves, the most fundamental building blocks of sound."

Kahvi.org is always good too

Other stuff:

BeSweet is an audio transcoding tool. it lets you convert audio files from one format to another.
supported formats : MP3,AC3,WAV,MP2,AVI,Aiff,VOB,Ogg Vorbis.

Doom9.org FAQ: Incredibly good source of information on Audio and Video.

I think that's all for now. This post is too long.