Recent content by johngw

How about a DAC with volume control + remote and separate power amp? E.g. Matrix mini-i pro into a Quad 909 power amp. You should be able to pick up the Quad second hand and it's a great little amp.

They do like to make this point... while they have several shops and one international distributor actively advertising on their own forum. I myself listened to the ADMs in Bartlett's HiFi i London about 2 years ago. Prices were the same as AVI's own when they sell direct. So more to the...

Agreed. I think B&K are very hard to beat for the price.

Disagree. The B&W is beatiful estechically but sonically quite poor. Ilkka Rissanen over on Home Theatre Shack did some comprehensive tests and measurements of a large number of subwoofers some years ago. Most of it still still there. Unfortunately he stopped when he eventually took a job at...

Did you listen to them in the same room? It's quite some claim given those (and lesser) Genelecs are common in high-end studios and the review in SoS even makes very specific mentioning of the "absolute rock solidity of the phantom image". Not to say they are necessarily the Genelecs that...

No experience of the Whaferdales but I would recommend having a look at e.g. Thomann.de and their active studio monitor range - some real bargains there in comparison to the "classic" HiFi scene. On a quick glance, for approx £200 you should be able to get a pair of ESI active 05 or 08, the...

Yes I do think this was one of the themes for a while... Probably around the same time as the obsession with wattage and the superiority of classic Class AB amp designs vs over-complicated and underpowered Class D. Had to abandon that too after someone actually took the ADMs apart, measured them...

Interesting - so with direct streaming from e.g. iTunes you don't get the issues at all? I used Airfoil for a while but had huge issues with the first 802.11n AEX so stopped using it back in 2010. Not of the type discussed above though. And ironically this now seems to be the version which works...

I'd go with an AV amp, arguably the most bang for the buck and definitely the more flexible option. Several brands including Yamaha refresh their models on a yearly basis, often with smallish tweaks, and tend to price dump remaining stock on previous models. Look at Yamaha RX-V775 for example...

There are various threads on this on the internet from people with similar issues and speculation and empirical testing as to which of the AEX models is "better" from a clock sync perspective. You could always go ATV but then it also resamples to 48kHz, which is not an even multiple of 44.1kHz...

Agreed. Obviously the difference would have to be described in 24/96 - no way to effectively diff the 2 files otherwise - so you would downsample 24/96 to 16/44.1 (with dithering etc applied), then upsample to 24/96 again, then compare against the original.

Actually, to nitpick, the above in bold is false. Depends on what you mean with "the original waveform". But I agree with the rest...

Usually integrated stereo amps offer no bass management and the sub out is only an additional line-level out controlled by the master volume as with the main speaker connections. Your main speakers will still be fed the full frequency range. Sometimes the amp also collapses both channels into a...

If your media centre mini PC is going to be used headless, why not use any old (cheap) machine, hide it in a cupboard, and stream via AirPlay to an AEX next to your HiFi?

Looks much more attractive than the standard Intel NUC plastic box, but at the price of £48 plus £310 for the motherboard, adding CPU, memory and disk, you're in Mac Mini territory from a price perspective... Likely above even.