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Chipamp

While working I’ve been listening to music on my Mac on my ER4s. Which is nice, but I don’t like wearing headphones all day. I didn’t want to go out and buy a set of high-end ‘PC speakers’, although something like the Fujitsu TEN might be fun for an afternoon. And anyway, since I bought my B1s, I’ve had a pair of decent speakers spare — either a pair of Neutron 3s, or Dynaudio Contour 1.1s, depending on which I keep as rears on my main system. So I decided to build an amp instead. Looked briefly at a few …

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Jack and FLAC

Have updated my music player to use the JACK low-latency realtime library for output, and replaced Mplayer with alsaplayer as the media player. Have also dropped the Meridian 518 and Yamaha decoder from the output chain, feeding audio straight into my Bryston via the music box’s onboard DACs. Given the hardware (and purpose of the box), there’s little benefit to be had from the low-latency features of JACK, but the realtime support helps keep the output smooth in the face of other stuff running on the box (CD ripping, for example). And something in the combination of the simplified signal …

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Retro Patina

They’re still making stylus-free laser turntables in Japan. I’ve never heard one, but look at its immodestly chunky styling: it must sound fantastic (and evidently it does). And just over $10,000 for the basic model. Still, it seems the only way to experience that retro vinyl patina without degrading the media at the same time. But isn’t that cheating? Part of the vinyl experience is the harrowing of the grooves with each playback, surely.

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Glanceful Kunstkopf?

Thinking more about glanceful interfaces, and the communication of complex multivariate datasets. For reasons I haven’t gotten around to writing about here yet, I’m veering towards sound cues for a lot of things, particularly binaurally-located vocal cues. I’m looking for a pipelining spatialiser using some simple head-related transfer function (HRTF) that I can feed audio into at approximately realtime. For ‘earcons’, simple samples are easy. For vocal cues, I’m thinking of using FESTIVAL. But I need the spatialiser, and I can’t find one that runs on Linux and accepts a stream input. Maybe I’ll have to hack something in Max. …

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audio