cluster - mediated space etc. » Music

Chipamp

Darrell Berry — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:49:38 +0000

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 cheap tube kits, and decided I didn’t want the hassle or sheer bulk of something with a huge transformer — or the risk of the cats getting their paws somewhere high voltage!

After some research, I’ve ended up intrigued by the whole chipamp movement — the promise being ‘around 10W of high-end sound for under a couple of hundred dollars and some DIY’. Wanting a nice enclosure, I ended up ordering a Charlize Tripath module and one of Art Taylor’s custom cases. Put it all together one morning a couple of weeks ago, powered from an external power supply.

How does it sound? Well, it’s low power, so efficient speakers help. I’ve never really liked the Neutrons much anyway, and they sound boxy on the Charlize. The Dynaudios sound as good as they ever did (which is pretty good for their size) — and it’s them that have stayed hooked up to the Mac. But the real test for my little chipamp was the B1s, driven from either my homebuilt FLAC jukebox or by my Arcam FMJ DV27. And the truth is that it actually sounds quite amazing, for size and price! I need to spend more time going through my music, but — especially for recordings of vocals and acoustic strings and percussion — it does as well, to my ears, as my Bryston – and possibly better (!) when it comes to depth and positioning. The percussion on No Lonely Nights, from Keith Jarrett’s Rarum, in particular, sounds astonishing. Likewise Cat Power’s Metal Heart, off Moon Pix.

Big, dense, heavily studio-processed recordings don’t fare so well, muddying up a bit. But. This is from an amp the size of a CD case, that cost me maybe £150 to build. I could live with it, happily, as long as I had a great pair of speakers to hook it up to. Impressed.

Martyn Ware Interview

Darrell Berry — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 21:20:20 +0000

Uh forgot to mention — we recently got to talk to Martyn Ware for BigShinyThing. Read the interview in full on the site.

Glanceware Music Navigation #2

Darrell Berry — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 16:45:58 +0000

For starters, drop the idea of a single rigid taxonomy — there are too many ways through, even assuming that canonical representations are possible. So we’re probably looking at something at least personal, possibly community-based. Folksonomic tagging would be a start, but how to navigate in a neatly glanceable fashion?

I’m thinking of building a personalised acoustic surface, where patches of looped sound are snippets representing genres and subgenres, and which morph into one another ‘at the edges’ so you end up with a navigable 2- or 3-space which is a musical patchwork. ‘Drill down’ into any patch and explore the subgenres under it. Everyone (or their software) could generate their own personalised surface — which would keep things small enough to be navigable — from a CDDB-style online database of user-contributed, tagged patches. Easy to make, with a few rules and some code to allow individual people and their software to stitch them together seamlessly into their own personalised surface. And would appeal to long-tail passion: people who care about genres would be motivated to have them well-represented by nice patches…

Glanceware Remotes?

Darrell Berry — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 23:02:34 +0000

So. Sometime soon, broadbandwidth and QoS sufficient to stream 16/44k1 audio reliably, longhaul. And at some point a bit later, maybe, OMD aggregators which will be able to provide access to most of everything that way.

On my mind at the moment is the question: how to navigate the whole of music space, in a glanceable fashion: minus clunky jogwheels and textual taxonomies. I’m thinking, as rules of the game, to allow only a 5.1 surroundfield and a remote useable one-handed, without any interactivity built into the remote itself — effectively a system which could be used in the dark, or without a screen visible. How to make such a thing that would, with a ‘reasonable’ amount of time/effort spent on interaction, get to the specific tracks anyone wanted, with the whole of world music as the source? It feels possible. More soon.

love will tear us apart

Darrell Berry — Mon, 30 May 2005 22:30:50 +0000

… the individual crackling surfaces of analog media in their instantiation — ‘my’ copy of that 12” single vs ‘yours’.

Installation proposal: ‘love will tear us apart’: an archive of the different surface noise on once-lovers’ separately-purchased copies of once-shared albums, made by subtracting the signal common to both copies, leaving only the remaining patina, unique to each disc…

Glitch

Darrell Berry — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 20:05:02 +0000

Indescribably beautiful glitch on my music server tonight, randomly time- and pitch-shifting parts of tracks as they playback. A reboot cured it, but seemed completely appropriate for a day when that idiot and by extension his wranglers ended up still in place, perverting the world…

Vivid

Darrell Berry — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 15:03:48 +0000

Busy week. Have been in Amsterdam (lovely) and South of France (also lovely). On Sunday we went to a hifi show in the wasteland hotels near Heathrow airport. Many average or averagely good things, and we ended up short of time, so didn’t get to see everything. But the standouts, by far were the Avantgarde Duo and Vivid speakers. The Duos demonstrated (at least from vinyl, through decent valve amplification) the most transparent sound I’ve ever heard. The Vivids, on the other hand, seemed ready for absolutely anything — not as ætherial as the Duos, but as happy with every nuance of solo vocals as they would be with dance music or theatrical cinema effects. Spectacular. And the Vivid team were really nice people. Laurence Dickie himself (most famous, maybe for the Nautilus) was running the demo.

OMD Aggregators…

Darrell Berry — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 13:47:37 +0000

With the blossoming profusion of online music sales sites, it must just be a matter of time before meta-sales sites turn up, offering simple consolidation of search (so you can specify an artist/song and the service will track it down for you at a price/in a format you want). Such a portal would have an interesting effect on the market: I can’t imagine it unseating ITMS, which is heavily tied into a brand experience and standalone software (iTunes), but the effect on the smaller online music distribution (OMD) businesses could be quite dramatic, adding to sales but weakening branding and brand presence: the endless cycle of commodification continues.

What I’d be most interested to see would be such a portal also offering on-the-fly format transcoding. Not exactly a commercial proposition (wait for the lawsuits on that one!), but certainly something that, if released, deCSS-style, as a covert open source hack, might prosper in the wild: cheap easy online music sales, where the music companies actually get their cut, but consumers get the freedom to use a single portal interface and whatever device they choose for listening…

Dolby DIY?

Darrell Berry — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 15:09:18 +0000

Now that I’ve moved most of my music onto my music box, I’ve been looking at the possibility of building my own surround decoder, a fantasy which has quickly led me into a void of tools: there is very little in the way of PC hardware and open source software to help. The lack of open source software I can understand, as Dolby is obviously a proprietary format. But the dearth of hardware is more surprising — so far I haven’t been able to find a single pro or semi-pro hardware decoder card that does Dolby Digital. Creative Labs have a few Dolby-compatible cards/drivers, but they’re really designed for gaming (tiny plugs! tiny plugs!), and besides I would prefer to have the decoding and DAC functions on separate cards so I can mix and match performance and capabilities.

So for the moment I’m stuck. I haven’t really had time to play with building a software-only solution using say gstreamer, and anyway suspect that even if it worked, I would rapidly run into latency issues. Any ideas on hardware?

With Nude Media, All You Hold is But A Cache of What You Own

Darrell Berry — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 08:24:43 +0000

That’s the crucial fork between my view of digital media and the more traditional one (wherein MP3s, for example, replace vinyl as object in one’s possession). If your local copies are simply expedient cacheings of that to which what you’ve purchased rights, then restrictions on formats, limited freedoms of transcoding, and the other restrictions that are currently being wrapped into DRM, are obviously inappropriate, arbitrary restrictions the only benefit of which is to support particular business models.

This isn’t new news. But…