Home Audio / Re: SPDIF support

David A. Long dave at jumpshift.com
Sun Apr 8 12:49:29 EDT 2007


Having gone to CES for a few years now, listening to factory reps
pitching their $1000 power cords and fiber optic cables with gold-plated
connectors (?!) I just have no respect for that industry.  I bought
Rotel amps and processors, which is probably still overpriced equipment
but seems to be less insane than the yet "higher-end" stuff.  I've heard
Rotel called "the low-end of the high-end", which is claimed to be
better than the high-end of midfi.

After seeing how most of the midfi speakers seem to use unremarkable
drivers I found plans I liked and built one pair of my own speakers
using drivers whose measured Theil-Small parameters demonstrated they
were (most likely) excellent.  The result has been most pleasing, for
the same price as some of the better midfi speakers (Snell type E).
When I get the time I hope to make a few more for the Dolby (tm)
googleplex.1 home theater I'm sure everyone will need soon.

I wish I could do the same for the rest of the equipment (and I have
built my own Class A headphone amplifier) but with Digital Rights
Management, copyrighted and patented Dolby and DTS software/standards,
and constantly changing hardware interface standards, the days of home
built equipment (other than power amplifiers) looks dead.  Even worse,
the days of buying one good processor and expecting to be able to plug
the latest equipment into it ten years from now seem dead too.  For this
reason alone I cannot justify spending a lot of money on a control
amplifier ever again.

And, just to not be totally off-topic, I've never owned Bose and they've
turned me off wanting to buy their products if only due to their
relentless advertising. As to their "Wave Radio", if you require
low-frequency response from a small speaker then standard transmission
line speaker design techniques like they use can help, otherwise just
buy a speaker that's in a properly-sized and tuned enclosure.

-dl




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