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Wednesday, November 18, 2009 11:14 PM

Is there really a benefit in lossless audio formats?

Lossless codecs are all the rage amongst those who aspire to be audiophiles.  Whether it is ripping CDs in a format like FLAC or WMA Lossless or listening the TrueHD track on Bluray movies, there are those who swear by it.   Most audio
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008 11:28 PM

Metallica's Death Magnetic Poorly Mastered

Metallica's new CD, Death Magnetic, is pretty good.  Certainly it is better than St. Anger although I suppose that's not setting the bar very high.  This CD is closer to And Justice For All than anything Metallica has done in the last decade. 
Posted by SteveRowe | 4 Comments
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Friday, May 23, 2008 10:34 AM

Are Audiophiles Going Extinct?

This article says that they are. More importantly, it says that people do not care as much about their music or the quality of their music-listening experience as much as they once did. That's very interesting if true. I wonder if this is a permanent
Posted by SteveRowe | 6 Comments
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Friday, March 14, 2008 7:08 AM

Audio Not Keeping Up With HD Video?

Here is an interesting read about how the audio in HD TV is not keeping up with the video. People are buying 1080p TV sets. The networks are paying more attention to the quality of their video, but they are not yet doing much with the audio. Many movies
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, February 05, 2008 9:23 AM

Vista Audio 1 Year Later - Interview with Cakewalk

One of my readers tipped me off to an interesting interview with Noel Borthwick, CTO of Cakewalk. He talks about the improvements made in Vista for lower-latency audio via the WaveRT driver model it introduced. To date, support for this mode among non-motherboard-audio
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Monday, February 04, 2008 2:55 PM

Project BBQ Reports Are Released

Project BBQ is the premier interactive music industry think tank. Everything from PC-audio to game audio to audio creation is covered. I attended this past October and the final reports are finally released. This year's subjects included suggestions for
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007 8:01 AM

Analog to Digital Conversion

If you want digital audio in a computer, you have to get it from somewhere. Usually that means taking analog sound out of the air and turning it into the bits that a computer can understand. Ars Technica gives us another installment of the AudioFile.
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Monday, October 29, 2007 5:23 PM

Vinyl Better Than CD?

An amazingly lucid discussion of the benefits of Vinyl over CD (or lack thereof) is going on over at Slashdot right now. So far the trolls are straying away. If you want some understanding of dynamic range compression, sampling, etc. Check it out. For
Posted by SteveRowe | 7 Comments
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Saturday, October 20, 2007 8:37 PM

Another Project BBQ is in the can

It's October and that means it is once again time for Project Bar-B-Q . This is the premiere computer music/audio think tank event. It's a gathering of 50 people from all across the spectrum. There are those who make audio hardware, operating systems,
Posted by SteveRowe | 2 Comments
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Thursday, October 04, 2007 6:35 PM

Understanding MP3 Compression

Another great article from Ars Technica. This time about MP3 compression. If you'e ever wondered how MP3 works, this is a great article to start with. No math is necessary.
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Thursday, September 27, 2007 2:37 PM

Digital Audio Primer

Ars Technica has a new primer up describing digital audio. A good read if you want to introduce yourself to the concepts.
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Monday, September 24, 2007 10:45 PM

What Is A Microphone Array?

One of our program managers, Richard Fricks, just had a piece posted on the Windows Vista blog talking about microphone arrays . He describes what microphone arrays are, what they are good for, and how Windows Vista enables support for them. If you use
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007 9:48 AM

An Explanation for the "Music Slows Down Networking" Issue

Last week there was a small storm on the internet when it was discovered that playing music on Windows Vista caused networking to slow down. Mind you, the slowdown had little practical effect for most users. It was most pronounced on gigabit ethernet
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Friday, August 10, 2007 8:52 AM

Another DRM Domino Falls

First it was EMI announcing that they would sell non-DRM'd music on iTunes. Later they announced they would sell through Amazon as well. Now the next RIAA member appears to be taking the plunge. Universal is going to be selling most of their catalog in
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, May 23, 2007 11:54 PM

The AMP Summit

Today I attended the Alliance Music Partnership's AMP Summit. This was the 2nd annual gathering of audio people from Microsoft and the PC industry. We met at the Experience Music Project (EMP) here in Seattle. There were people from all parts of the industry
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