If you follow audiophile reviewers, you’ll know that their stock-in trade is a very fancy way of saying absolutely nothing of quantifiable substance about the subject while sounding knowledgeable about imagined differences between devices that are all of superlative quality anyway. If you follow us, we’ll tell you that the only reviews that matter are real-world measurements of audio performance, and blind listening tests. We don’t have to tell you how to listen to music, but perhaps it’s time in our Know Audio series to look at how audio performance is measured.
Before reaching for the bench, it’s first necessary to ask just what we are measuring. What are the properties which matter in an audio chain, or in other words, just what is it that makes an audio device good?
We’ve now spent several months in this series journeying through the world of audio, and along the way we’ve looked at the various parts of a Hi-Fi system from the speaker backwards to the source. It’s been an enjoyable ride full of technical detail and examining Hi-Fi myths in equal measure, but now it’s time to descend into one of the simplest yet most controversial areas of audio reproduction. Every audio component, whether digital or analogue, must be connected into whatever system it is part of, and this is the job of audio cables, sometimes referred to as interconnects. They are probably the single component most susceptible to tenuous claims about their performance, with audiophiles prepared to spend vast sums on cables claimed to deliver that extra bit of listening performance. Is there something in it, or are they all the same bits of wire with the expensive ones being a scam? Time to take a look.
What Makes A Nearly Good Cable
In a typical domestic audio system with digital and analogue signals you might expect to find two types of cable, electrical interconnects that could carry either analogue or digital signals, and optical ones for digital signals. We’re here to talk about the electrical cables here as they’re the ones used for analogue signals, so lets start with a little transmission line theory. Continue reading “Know Audio: A Mess Of Cables”→
In our no-nonsense journey through the world of audio technology we’ve so far have looked at digital audio and the vinyl disk recording. What’s missing? Magnetic tape, the once-ubiquitous recording medium that first revolutionised the broadcast and recording industries in the mid-20th-century, and went on to be a mainstay of home audio before spawning the entire field of personal audio. Unless you’re an enthusiast or collector, it’s likely you won’t have a tape deck in your audio setup here in 2021 and you’ll probably be loading your 8-bit games from SD card rather than cassette, but surprisingly there are still plenty of audio cassettes released as novelties or ephemeral collectables.
The Device That Made The Sound Of The Latter Half Of The 20th Century
“Like a travelling razor blade”, a Blattnerphone steel-strip tape recorder at the BBC in 1937. Douglas Hallam, Jr., Public domain.
The first magnetic recordings were made directly on metal wires, but metal fatigues as it bends. By coating a flexible plastic tape in ferrous particles, the same simple technique of laying down an audio signal as variations in the magnetic field could be made smaller, lighter, and more robust. But the key to the format’s runaway success is the technical advancements that differentiate those 1950s machines from their wire recorder ancestors.
Whether it is a humble cassette recorder or a top-end studio multitrack, all tape recorders are very similar. There are two reels that hold the tape: the playback reel that houses the recording, and the take-up reel that stores the tape as it plays in the machine. The take-up reel is lightly driven to run faster than the tape speed, and the playback reel has a slight braking force to keep the tape under tension at all times. Continue reading “Know Audio: Mixtapes, Tape Loops, And Razor Blades”→
The legendary Technics SL1200 direct-drive turntable, as used by countless DJs. Photo by Dydric CC-BY-SA 2.5For me, the vinyl record player is the spiritual home of my audio listening experience, probably because I’m of the last generation to grow up when vinyl was king. The 12″ album, with its full-size sleeve and copious sleeve notes, used to be an integral part of musical enjoyment that hasn’t been adequately replicated in the age of streaming.
And like anyone who became an adult while CD players were still expensive luxury items, I started my journey into Hi-Fi with a turntable set-up that sounded pretty good. Since a new generation have in recent years rediscovered vinyl, it’s once again something that should be part of any review of audio technology.
I would have started this piece with a full run-down of the constituent parts of a good turntable, but since that’s a piece that I wrote back in 2017, it’s time to investigate some of the audiophile claims about vinyl recordings. It’s fair to say that this is an area where a lot of complete rubbish is spouted by people who should know better, and that’s something I find immensely entertaining to poke fun at. Buckle up. Continue reading “Know Audio: Get Into The Groove”→
Our trip through the world of audio technology has taken us step-by step from your ears into a typical home Hi-Fi system. We’ve seen the speakers and the amplifier, now it’s time to take a look at what feeds that amplifier.
Here, we encounter the first digital component in our journey outwards from the ear, the Digital to Analogue Converter, or DAC. This circuit, which you’ll find as an integrated circuit, takes the digital information and turns it into the analogue voltage required by the amplifier.
There are many standards for digital audio, but in this context that used by the CD is most common. CDs sample audio at 44.1 kHz 16 bit, which is to say they express the level as a 16-bit number 44100 times per second for each of the stereo channels. There’s an electrical standard called i2s for communicating this data, consisting of a serial data line, a clock line, and an LRclock line that indicates whether the current data is for the left or the right channel. We covered i2s in detail back in 2019, and should you peer into almost any consumer digital audio product you’ll find it somewhere. Continue reading “Know Audio: It All Depends On The DAC”→
As we’ve traced our no-nonsense path through the world of Hi-Fi audio, we’ve started with the listener, understood the limitations of the human ear, and thence proceeded to the loudspeaker. We’ve learned a bit about speaker cabinets and their design, so it’s time to venture further down the chain to the amplifier that drives those speakers.
The sharp-eyed will be ready to point out that along this path also lies the speaker cables, but since we’ll be looking at interconnects at a later date we’ll be making the dubious and simplistic assumption for now that the wires between speaker and amplifier are ideal conductors that don’t have a bearing on listening quality. We’ll be looking at amplifiers in enough detail to warrant more than one piece on the subject, so today we’ll start by considering in a slightly abstract way what an amplifier does and where it can fall short in its task. We’ll be introducing probably the most important thing to consider in any audio system, namely distortion.
The job of an audio amplifier is to take an audio signal at its input and present the same signal on its output at a greater amplitude. In the case of a preamplifier it will usually be designed to work with high impedances in the order of 50 kΩ at both input and output, while in a power amplifier designed to drive speakers or headphones it will drive a much lower impedance. Commonly this will be 4 Ω or 8 Ω for loudspeakers, and 32 Ω for headphones. Continue reading “Know Audio: Amplifiers And Distortion”→
As we’ve started out on our journey through the world of Hi-Fi audio from a strictly practical and engineering viewpoint without being misled by any audiophile woo, we’ve already taken a look at the most important component in any audio system: the listener’s ear. It’s time to move down the chain to the next link; the loudspeaker.
Sound is pressure waves in the air, and the purpose of a loudspeaker is to move the air to create those waves. There are a variety of “exotic” loudspeaker technologies including piezoelectric and electrostatic designs, here we’ll be considering the garden variety moving-coil speaker. It’s most usually used for the large bass or smaller mid-range drivers in a typical speaker system. Continue reading “Know Audio: A Loudspeaker Primer”→
![The legendary Technics SL1200 direct-drive turntable, as used by countless DJs. Dydric [CC BY-SA 2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/640px-technics_sl-1200mk2-2.jpg)
