A lot of newer audio technologies have been promising “HD” audio, with features such as “192 kHz sampling”. But what does this mean?
CDs sample 44.1-kHz audio at 16 bits per sample. Considering the standard was defined back in the early 1980s to be played with state-of-the-art technology back then, you’d think this is far inferior to what we could cough up now, right?
Not really. For starters, 44.1 kHz allows the audio to accurately represent any waveforms below about 22 kHz (due to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem). Well, human hearing only extends to about 20 kHz, and less …read more

Like many people, I’ve recently been hearing more and more about this new thing on the air waves called HD Radio. What is it we are talking about here?
Well, first off, the HD does not stand for “high definition” (it seems to stand for nothing — it’s just a marketing ploy), and it doesn’t provide anything like HD quality. The second most important part is that you have to have a special receiver to get these, which are still a tad expensive and aren’t standard equipment on much of anything yet.
What does it give you? It gives …read more

I’m a big fan of FLAC, the super-high quality, Free Lossless Audio Codec. I have a bit of my music stored in FLAC. However, my iPod doesn’t support FLAC as it stands: the highest quality format is Apple Lossless, so I’ve been using that for a lot of my modern music.
Even some artists online are selling FLACs of their music for the high-def audiophiles out there. For example, Jonathan Coulton has a FLAC store.
A problem I have is that once I’ve bought said music and want to listen to it, or if I want to listen to …read more

Since the days of Napster, the Internet has been flowing with this magical, wonderful beast known as “MP3″. What is it, exactly?
Well, it’s a compression standard dating back to 1991 that shrinks the size of audio by throwing away parts we don’t hear very well. The higher the compression ratio, the more information is thrown away and the lesser the quality of sound.
Needless to say, we’ve learned a lot about audio compression in the years since 1991. After all, MP3 is part of the first set of standards on digital video set forth by MPEG (MP3 = …read more

I am currently in the market to buy a new home audio system, which presents a few problems for me.
In the past, I’ve been of the opinion that your audio equipment should be completely separate from your video equipment: the additional splitters used in the all-in-one home theater systems could cause noise and signal delay problems. In addition, you’d be stuck with a monolithic solution that would eventually stop being up-to-date when either the audio or video components became outdated. They should be separate and connected via S/PDIF, I always said.
For the most part, this was true, especially …read more

 
EngadgetHD all day has posted a bunch of galleries of their experiences at CEDIA, the trade show for companies to show off their new HD gadgets off to the world. To say the least, they really spent a lot of time touring and taking pics of all the new shiny TVs, DVRs, and other HD components that could be found on the showroom floor. Here is a round-up of all the links to their tours going from the first to most recent:

FUZE Media System
Sony
LG
Sharp
Toshiba
Philips
JVC
Mitsubishi
Hitachi
Epson
Fujitsu
Panasonic

Hold on, need a breath… And here we go…

Moxi
Sanyo
Dish Network
DirecTV
Logitech
Samsung
Yamaha
Gefen
Monster Cables
Denon
Klipsch
Alienware
And finally, HD-DVD

Phew… Glad that’s over. Although …read more

HD Radio has been mainly advertised for your cars and other automobiles, except for the occasional RadioShack ad on the radio, but Sony is looking to change that around a little bit. EngadgetHD released a quick, and I mean quick, run down of what they like and don’t like.
We like:

Gorgeous, mid-century modern design.
Clear, easy to read display, even uses RDS.
Phone-like reception meter even works with AM/FM.
Decent enough sound output.

We don’t:

Massive friggin power brick. Oh, and it can’t be unplugged from the unit.
Annoying to scan channels with the dial.
Included aux cable looks like it will fit your iPhone. But it doesn’t.
Actually …read more