Ramblings
April / May 2008

 

Red Faced Rich Again

  This review of the Oppo DV-980H in the January 2008 issue of Stereophile, Kalman Robinson identified some AV receivers as incompatible when playing SACD discs over the HDMI link because the subwoofer (0.1) channel is inactive. I did not check for activity in the subwoofer channel and missed the problem. The fix, a response to Dr. Robinson's discovery, is on the Oppo web site where you need to navigate to the Do-It-Yourself Firmware Update Instructions for  the Oppo DV-980H, release date of October 9, 2007 or later. Download the update on your computer and transfer it to a USB stick or a CD ROM. You then place the USB stick or CD-R in the Oppo unit. The Oppo will then update itself. The instructions on the site are very detailed which should help make the upgrade process painless. If you have any questions, I found the phone support very good with little wait time.

As an aside, some DVD players and AV receivers are independently certified to ensure the HDMI ports are working properly. Best Buy is a strong proponent of certification. Unfortunately, a certification sticker would not help prevent the SACD problem. I spoke with a couple of the certification entities at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and learned they are not testing for DSD compatibility on the HDMI link at this point in time.

 

The Audiophile Who Cried Wolf

A long time ago, an audiophile descended from the forest to warn that preamps could alter the sound of a Hi Fi even if they measured very well. The wise men of the village who belonged to the Audio Engineering Society (AES) debunked the claim and the villagers were happy. A little later the audiophile descended from the forest to announce cables could improve the sound of a Hi Fi system. The AES wise men investigated and again found it untrue. Yet, the audiophile returned from the forest on several more occasions to announce that plugging in a digital clock would improve the sound, that vinyl sounded better than CDs, and tube electronics sounded better than transistors. The wise men dismissed the audiophile, believing he was crying wolf. Now the audiophile has re-emerged to assert that the sound of compressed downloaded music is worse than CD, even at the highest 256kbit/sec rate. The wise men of the village confirmed the claim. Nonetheless, the villagers continue to download without any worry about the sound quality because they stopped worrying about a wolf ever having lived in the forest a long time ago.

 

CES 2008

As far as I could tell, little changed from 2007. Major companies like JBL, Infinity, Onkyo and Yamaha skipped the show entirely preferring to show at CEDIA. The press corps must have multiplied ten-fold with all the internet websites and bloggers. As a result, the high-end music rooms were overflowing. The fact that almost all the high-end equipment was being demonstrated on three floors of the Venetian hotel (CES organizers made the change from the spacious Alexis Park last year) did not help matters. Even if an intrepid soul could work through the crowd to secure a prime listening spot, it was next to impossible to get listener-selected music played. My specially-prepared CD-R was an especially hard sell for more than a minute or two (playing chamber music is a good way to clear a room). It is easy to make a speaker sound good by using specifically selected material the manufacturer has chosen. How the speaker sounds with your source material is the key at a trade show or at a dealer's showroom.

Worse, some demonstrations were run off hard drives on a computer. Running off a hard drive was claimed to produce less jitter although I do not agree. The demonstrators explained they had no CD player on the equipment rack thus locking anybody out of using demo material they brought to the show. Some reviewers said they would bring a USB stick loaded with their personal reference material to work around this problem for CES 2009. My thought is to skip CES 2009 in Las Vegas completely.

As for SACD, the Sony car audio demo was the only place I could listen to my SACD test material in multichannel. Hooray for Sony for supporting SACD. The reps at the booth claimed multichannel audio makes more sense in a car where one is constrained to listen instead of watch as in a home theater. I hope this model succeeds. The small fraction of us who listen at home can “ride along with the trend.”

-DAR