Sunday, January 10

Apple Airport Express

Cheap good featuredDigital IOWifi

Apple Airport Express The Apple Airport Express is not new by a long shot, 6 years in fact, but it does sport a nice feature making it worth mentioning anyway, a feature I failed to mention when commenting on Apple TV: They act as a remote output through what Apple has aptly named Airtunes. You can select Airports and Apple TVs around the house when playing songs from iTunes and have them play through one or more simultaneously. What is more, it has a Toslink connector buried inside the miniscule output jack for a purely digital connection to your sound system, should it support it.

Apple Airport Express There are a few catches. You cannot kill a connection initiated by one computer from another, i.e. you cannot start your music from the computer in the office and then when you get to the kitchen, take a computer there and select another song. This can be a major hassle [to be very diplomatic] if you use more than a few computers. Also you are pretty much limited to playing music via iTunes. There are a few hacks out there allowing you to route sound from other applications to an Airport, such as Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba, but these tools are compromises. Particularly latency is a big issue, especially when watching video and routing the sound elsewhere. Applications competing for the Airtunes connection is another issue adding to the brew of annoyances. Having to manually kill a connection made by Airfoil to open one for iTunes is certainly not befitting my workflow.

Setting up an Airport is straight forward. With it comes a setup application that browses the network for Airports and lets you connect to whichever one you like and configure it. Should you have special needs in terms of authentication protocols or topologies it lets you handle that too, albeit considerably less elegantly.

The Apple Airport Express costs next to nothing so if you already use iTunes, this is a really cost efficient means to a distributed music system. Airtunes has some design flaws but works remarkably well considering.

Apple Apple

Digg This

Friday, January 8

Lossless audio explained

My favourite company and defacto curators of good sound, Bower & Wilkins, just published an article on their Society of Sound web site, explaining lossless audio in general and Flac in particular in what can only be described as kid’s stuff. One can argue whether digital sound distribution is difficult material, but I find it indisputable that the topic is notoriously hard to convey. It is this last bit I think B&W did better than anyone before them.

If you don’t know Flac, read it to get a non-technical explanation. If you do know the technicalities, read it anyway… if for nothing else, then to get an example of how to explain it yourself.

B&W Society of Sound B&W Society of Sound

Sunday, November 29

Danish High Fidelity shuts down

high-fidelity  A beacon in the Danish hifi community has decided to turn off the lights. Dating back to 1971, High Fidelity was the pinnacle magazine from Forlaget Audio for many years. In 1997 the magazine was sold to its editors and now a poor financial foothold turns the final page.

Digg This

Tuesday, November 10

Linn Majik DS-I

High end hi-fiFlacDigital IOOgg-VorbisuPNP

Linn Majik DS-I I may be pushing the icons above a bit on this one, since Linn has not yet disclosed anything specific on their new compact. Following in the footsteps of Naim and their Uniti, Linn has gone and committed a similar product. A complete unit, albeit sans the radio and the transport. Okay, so it isn’t a complete system. It does, however, appear that the Linn Majik DS-I has everything in the realm of in- and output. Even a phono input. All you need is a tuner for the BBC must-haves, a CD transport for the not-yet-ripped CDs and a pair of speakers that can receive the angel dust from the DS and sprinkle your abode with magic.

Linn Linn

Digg This

Bowers & Wilkins P5

High end hi-fi

Bowers & Wilkins P5 British hi-fi deluxe company Bowers & Wilkins have spawned a first born of a new family of products – headphones. People have cried for years and begged for the mighty islanders to get on with it and build a pair. Now they have. Specs are sparse at the moment, as are all sorts of availability data. But the photos are portents of good things coming this way. Indeed.

Efforts has been put into verbatim sound reproduction instead of meaningless enhancements that could never fit two persons anyway, let alone thousands. The ear pads are semi-closed to allow some ambient sound to pass and covered in leather. The cable has an inline iPod remote control and, what is quite a rarity, the cable is user changeable. If that means that there is an optional remote-free cable is unclear but that would definitely be something to hope for.

Bowers & Wilkins Bowers & Wilkins

Digg This