Dream? Nightmare more like.
Proper speakers on proper wire please. Less is more.
The big dog in the streaming Wi-Fi speaker business has barked and delivered a sub-woofer - called the Sub. In fact it launched it a year and a half ago, but we can only now write about this heavy boom-box, so to speak, because the damn thing costs the best part of six hundred quid and we've had to save up our pennies. It's …
No, any reasonably chunky cable will do. Mains cable is good. Much better at keeping signals in phase than wifi.
Audiophile and Sonos mentioned in the same article? Really? If I could afford to be an audiophile, I'd have me some Volti Vittoras. Admittedly they're $17,000 a pair but I can dream...
If I only had enough money for a Sonos system, I'd buy a proper amp and speakers, not some Fisher Price wifi lashup
Making a fashion statement is the most important part of being an audiophile. It's like having a letter on the side of your headphones.
Sure you could buy something that sounds better for half the price, but it would not look like a big black doughnut and be sort of wireless.
Yes,decent amp + Speakers is the way to go, but I do love the idea of whole house audio using the LAN for control, there is no reason lossless audio can't be shifted over a modern wifi and decoded in whatever box is being used to do the sound, which is pretty much what UPNP/DLNA does I think, the trick is synchronising playback and what is played back on each device, which last I checked UPNP/DLNA can't do.
Ive been looking at Bose's new system that uses WIFI, looks promising, if more expensive than Sonos.
>I've been looking at Bose's new system that uses WIFI, looks promising,
Wow you are probably going to get downvoted on that statement. I am far from an audiophile and even I know (and can hear) Bose with their paper cones are garbage. They are only priced like they are legitimate. The one exception I have ever seen was a few years back they had a decent looking and sounding sub $100 desktop computer speaker set but even then there was still better quality to be found for cheaper.
Chunky cable, indeed, very important. Decent speakers, not this plastic junk.
For that kind of money, I can at least afford a valve/solid state hybrid amp,a nd add an airport express to strearn digital music to it. Or a bluetooth audio adapter, if you don't mind losing a few bits.
You end up with a halfways decent audio system, and standardized interfaces, rather proprietary junk in a plastic enclosure. Junk with good D/A, but still <shudder>
Indeed, I was going to mention items like the Goldmund Reference turntable, and the Infinity Reference System loudspeaker... then there are Krell amplifiers. Six hundred quid being "audiophile"? Well, yes, not all high-end audio equipment has stratospheric price tags, but the speaker in question is not particularly expensive audiophile equipment.
And any decent shop should tell you that too!
When I got my CM9 speakers and Cyrus amplifiers I asked what type of cable I should use. They showed me some chunky, but not expensive, cable (around 2.50 a meter IIRC). As that was the type of thing I was already using I didn't replace it.
I asked what the hideously expensive cable was for and they said they had to stock it for some people to take them seriously even if they never recommended it. Some people just didn't believe that you could spend less than 1000 on speaker cable and so didn't.
I loved that shop, they saved me huge amounts of money by focussing on sound and not price when I bought stuff (I saw some lovely speakers - looked lovely, and had a price tag to match, but they said they were a waste of money and that the CM9s at half the cost sounded so much better. And they did!). It's a shame the owner decided to retire when the shops rent came up for renewal...
Glow in the dark audio as in '50s Mullard 5/20 (Maplin Millenium with E34L / E83CC and E86F) + a pair Roth Oli RA3 + bog standard B&Q 15A mains cable blows Sonos Sub away... seems to work fine with Virgin V+ box and Samsung TV. And it costs less than this Sonos 5h1te.
The Maplin Millenium valve amp schematics are still out there...
True hifi has as little 'processing' between source and speakers preferably using vacuum state audio :)
Paris as she was always fond of a 7' hot tube.
LC
Did you miss the words "low end HiFi"? Spend only £150 on a Cambridge AM1 amp, a pair of Wharfedale Diamond 9's and a Harmon Kardon Bluetooth Audio adaptor and I guarantee you'll be able to tell the difference between this and a £250 Sonos Play 3
""low end Hi(gh) Fi(delity)" - is it an oxymoron?"
Not really. As with anything, you can have low and high end of the range where each individual example will still be high fidelity compared with the mass market.
But you can use the term "budget end" instead...
Oh, it's far less than 50quid in parts. Probably more like £16 if they're running them off in quantity in a Chinese factory. It's all marketing, baby, just ask Bose. They used to be a technology company, now they're just a very good marketing firm with a herd of lawyers to patent and prosecute. Kinda sad, really. Dr. Amar Bose must have died an unhappy camper at what happened to his company.
Sound is air in motion. The lower the frequency, the more air you have to move for the same sound pressure level. Basic physics. It is possible to "cheat" the listener by having a very peaked response down around the kick drum range. Claiming that it's flat to 25Hz is absurd. I see that the article didn't claim that, but proper specifications would list the -3db point as the lowest useable frequency. Little bitty units like this will need a sensitive detector to pick up their signal at 25Hz. A unit this small isn't going to have the umph to piss off the neighbors either.
If you want to commit structural damage by Toccata and Fugue in D minor played on the big pipes, you are going to need more cone area, excursion and plenty more amplifier. (and a good sense of fun)
Foam will maybe cut some HF - but that won't be present in a sub-woofer in the first place. Maybe a sturdy MDF baffle shaped to give some asymmetry to the interior volume might work. On the other hand, if you're after the one-note bass typical of 'impressive' subwoofers, the standing waves may actually help!
I paid 750 for my sub sometime in the 90s - hardly use it now because I don't buy DVDs any more and haven't got any BluRay discs either.
It gets some exercise if I bother to stream music to the system but it never seems worth sending the TV sound to the system and the HDMI I have on this (Samsung) TV doesn't do Dolby Digital from my laptop.
Not that the stuff I have has DD, Netflix missing something there I guess - it's all about the HD now I think.
"Audiophile", especially the silly/expensive stuff, is relatively poor quality (sub hi-fi) kit sold to the domestic market, which p*ss-poor enthusiast magazines have been duping innocent (but usually non technical) music lovers into buying since around 1977. Monoblock amps, valves, etc .etc. have nothing to do with hi-fi.
Phew got that off my chest. Well the author says ...contemplative core... fabulous jolts as it climaxes... wonderful precision....It's like moving from a Trabant to a Mercedes." and so on and so on. That's great, but it sort of depends on what you were listening to before the sub woofer. I guess you were using rather small speakers ?