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Computer Audio Symposium - quick impression

Posted by John Swenson (A) on June 29, 2009 at 00:26:28

Yep, I was one of those complete idiots who went to this event (the saturday session), I have to start out with saying that this was one of the most rewarding events I have ever been to. Contrary to all the pre-event predictions, nobody was trying to sell anything, as a matter of fact we had a very hard time trying to pry information out of some of manufacturers when questions about their items came up.

The event event consisted of three main sections, a live recording session presided over by Keith Johnson, a panel discussion on technical issues, interface issues etc, and a equipment demonstrations setup to see if the people attending could hear differences between things like SSD and spinning disk etc.

The recording session was very interesting, we divided up into two groups, one in the recording studio, listening live to the performers and the other group in the control room with Keith. After the recording we swapped places and did it again.

Keith went into detail on the microphone setup he used,why he set it up that way and what he was doing during the recording. It was very fascinating. The biggest problem with this section was that Keith was so fascinating to listen to that it was taking too long and going over schedule, the organizers had to cut the questions off. The files from these sessions will be available on Chris's website.

The second section was two sessions of panel discussions with a wide range of people and topics covering many different aspects of computer audio, including some detailed discussions on digital filters, aliasing, Nyquist etc. There were discussions on how hi res files are being used in studios and various methods of distribution. We also had some very interesting information on the physiology of human hearing and little bit on how this relates to what we hear.

I probably new about 65-70% of this information, but there was still a lot to learn. This was definitely the concentrated disemination of this information I've ever encountered. And the amazing thing was that it was done from an audiophile perspective, NOT an AES point of view. There was a lot of "we do this and it makes a difference in the sound, it shouldn't but it does", and "its all about tradeoffs, optimizing this can compromise that, you have to strike a balance for good sound".

Even though every body on this panel was commercially involved in computer audio in some way, NONE of them were spotlighting their own creations, it was about the generic issues in computer audio and the various ways these can be addressed.

Then we came what to me was the most fascinating part of the whole event, the hardware demos.

This consisted of 4 systems, a Matan server (custum built server) a silent PC running XP, a G5 Mac and a modern MacPro. All the systems had Lynx AES 16 cards (the MacPro was PCIe, the others were PCI) each connected to its own Pacific Microsonics Model 2 machine via AES. The model 2s sent a clock back to the Lynx cards so the Model 2 was the master.

All of these had been checked for bit perfectness and volume matched to within 400th of a dB. I'm not sure about all the details of the rest of the system, it had Magico speakers and sounded wonderful.

First off we listened to each of the systems with a SSD drive. The Mac systems were running Amara. I think the PS was using Samplitude, and the Matan had its own special playback software.

To my ears the PC was distant third compared to the other three which al sounded fairly similar.

Next we tried Spinning disks, then a NAS. The spinning disks did not do nearly as well as the SSDs. A number of people didn't like the NAS at all, but I thought it sounded in between the SSD and spinning disks. I presume that was due to different focus and preferences in the sound.

Then we tried the Macs with and without Amara. WOW, what a difference that made. I was not prepared for this. Without Amara it sounded like the soundstage collapsed and the low end almost just disappeared. Singers sounded like plastic cutouts without it and living breathing human beings with it. Without Amara the Macs and PCs were rather similar.

And remember this was done with Amara in bit perfect mode (actually tested to be so) on systems where the DAC was in complete control of the timing, and it STILL make that big a difference. As an engineer I was floored by that because I have no idea whats actually going on here.

There were several other systems at the symposium which were also running of Macs (including the new Ayre USB DAC off a Mac Mini) and they all exhibited this behavior, Amara just made a huge difference.

There were also other caparisons between different sample rates, everything was significantly better than 44.1, but 176.4s were even better than the 88.2 or 96. We didn't listen to any 192, since were were primarily listening to master files from several recording engineers and none of them record at 192.

Oh yeah, the food was GREAT. And I had some wonderful conversations with other audio nuts.

All in all a VERY worthwhile event.

John S.

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