Melbourne band Drink have just launched their new website, take a look at: Melbourne Band, Drink.
They’ve launched some great new features like upcoming gigs and a gallery. Get along to the gig coming up at The Espy.
Check out the great Aussie band Selahphonic (not selaphonic, selafonic, cellarfonic, celafonic, celaphonic, but SELAHPHONIC!) they’ve got some almost full length MP3s on their site so you can get a feel for their music. They rock! Check ‘em out. www.selahphonic.com.
A question came up on a forum that I was loitering at:
How would the quality differ from a Maya (USB 4-channel audio card) to an M-Audio (PCI Delta 44 audio card)?
I thought, good question, and I pecked out this reply. I worked on it so hard I thought it’d be good to put this here also in case anyone else finds it interesting.
The difference is mainly in the quality and design of the board, the quality of the preamps (if they have any), and the quality of the converters (digital to analogue and vice versa).
As far as simple technical specs go, you’ll also find differences in bit-rates (16-bit vs 24-bit) and resolution (44khz vs 48khz vs 96khz), and also noise floor ratings (noise introduced from the components only) and “headroom” (the amount of signal level you can pump in before distortion occurs) which I think is also referred to as dynamic range.
I’ve got a pretty good ear and can definitely tell the difference between a cheapy multichannel card and a good one. You can get it down to technical specs, and those mentioned above are the first step.
Digital is fairly unforgiving on audio sources, so you can really tell the difference with a cheapy card with cheap converters as compared to a well designed card with decent quality converters.
For a subjective comparison, you will notice that a better quality card will give you a “sweeter” sound, sounds will be reproduced more accurately, and you will be able to discern more detail in a better quality conversion.
Some ways to compare (if you’re an audio freak, or interested in becoming one), although not too technical but more subjective, (if you have the ability to have them side by side) is this:
I’m sure you could come up with a similar experiment to test headroom, although my brain hurts after typing all this, so I’ll leave that for someone else.
If you really want to compare how crappy sound cards sound, get out a laptop and run some of these simple tests. Most laptops have terrible quality audio cards, it should almost be a crime, although I understand the design constraints and interference from other componenets in a laptop chassis. The worst I’ve ever heard was a Sony VAIO FX770, if anyone has one of those, give it a whirl.
I just remembered, there are other things to consider also:
As far as the comparison of the M-Audio and the Maya on paper:
Sample Rate: M-Audio: 96khz Maya: 48khz
Bit Rate: M-Audio: 24-bit Maya: 16-bit
Dynamic Range (A/D): M-Audio: 99dB Maya: 85dB
Dynamic Range (D/A): M-Audio: 103dB Maya: 87dB
Just on paper it looks like a BIG difference (also note that dB are logarithmic, meaning that a 3dB increase is the equivalent of 2x - I think maybe an audio geek can help out here, but I believe that’s right)
I hope someone has some fun with this. If anyone can comment or add anything feel free!
How cool is this? At the present moment, there is a case in London where the record label “Apple” (they own all the Beatle’s recordings) is suing Apple Computer because of a breach of agreement between the two parties. Previously the Apple record label had allowed Apple Computer to use “Apple” and its logo as long as it did not enter the music business.
What is cool about it is, that the judge is a self confessed iPod user. Who would have thought? It’s cool that this is one technology that has really broken down the barriers between geeks and every other normal person on the planet. Steve Jobs is a smart man to go where no computer company had gone before, and has created a roaring success by doing so.
In an interesting and probably gutsy move, Samsung have brought on the talent or Paul Mercer, the bloke to helped create the original iPod many years ago. It has been done before, but I’m not sure that I could point to any real success stories from doing this.
One question that occurred to me after seeing a picture of the new Samsung YP-Z5, apparently the outcome of Mr. Mercer’s talents, is why?
Why would Samsung bring in a previous iPod engineer and try to create an MP3 player that is supposed to knock off the iPod with an iPod knock off? It saddens me to see that companies are not inventing new designs or technologies, they’re just trying to imitate the success of the iPod. Honestly though, you can’t beat iPod’s interface by imitating it. You can never make it the same due to patents, so any imitation is just going to be flawed.
Samsung and other digital audio manufacturers should invent new interface designs. Something even better than the iPod. I really hope that this happens, but most companies seem to see things very short term.
Samsung have just announce the introduction of a new type of digital audio player, the new Samsung SBH-300. What makes this MP3 player different is that it has native Bluetooth support built in. One of the major advantages of this technology is the ability to upload your songs from another Bluetooth device, such as a computer, laptop, PDA or mobile phone. On top of this, you should also be able to use the headphones of the player for your mobile phone.
This would be handy for those carrying around a mobile phone as well as a MP3 player. You could just pop your phone into your bag and never have to take it out! The audio player would do all the work.
Other features include 2Gb of memory, expandable via a MicroSD slot, an FM tuner and an OLED colour screen. No word on an Australian release date, but hopefully we’ll see it here soon.