Music and Home-Cinema

Do you want to know everything there is about sound? The secret lies in the harmony. Every element is important, a Hi-Fi system is something very fragile. If one element is bad then the whole sound won't be good. It is better to buy a cheap but coherent system than something very expensive but incoherent.

The harmony is not only a matter of price. Each element has its own unique sound. Hence it is important to take care of the sound of each of them. The different flaws have to compensate themselves.

There is no secret, the sound is a matter of subjectivity, you have to listen! We can talk about the general characteristics of those components.

"The amplifier : the more powerful, the better" This is, in fact, wrong. It is onlythe imagination of the customer. Hence the power is really a bait for advertising! It is necessary to have a minimum, but 50W RMS should be enough for everybody's use. Pay attention only about RMS Watts and peak Watts, the musical Watts mean nothing scientific, it is a tric to increase the values.

Naturally, the loudspeakers have to be able to accept the power of the amplifier otherwise you will destroy them.

Beware of those strange guys! They are looking for the perfection, the sound without any flaws and the perfect Hi-Fi system. Believe me, they are searching! The problem comes from the subjective aspect of the sound, the only way of evaluation is to listen. I'm not saying that they're always wrong but sometimes they are ridiculous!

The good points : They are playing with the quality of the electronic components to increase the quality of the sound. I agree but only for the integrated circuits or for those which have a direct influence on the sound like filtering elements. They put the speakers on anti-vibrations pins in order to increase the stability and avoid parasitic vibrations. They isolate the CD player to avoid vibrations and misreadings of the disc. I am not sure about this, now the player are very stable and the chassis are already isolated, thus : it has to be checked. It is better to have separated power supply for each channel. That is true, it increases the peak power and the dynamic of the amplifier.

The rest : The displays have to be shut down because they disturb the high frequencies. In the ultra-sound range maybe? The capacitors can be shielded in order to avoid magnetic leaks. No comment. The cables that connect the speakers should have the same length for each channel. Not convinced!

The vinyl has a better sound than the CD simply because it is an analog support . Due to the way it is read, it is damaged very quickly and the heat of the vinyle appears in the background.

The CD, as everybody knows, is a digital support with an optical read (without contact). The fact that it is digital introduces a noise called quantification noise that is added during each A to D and D to A conversion. The advantage is that the quality of the sound is the same each time you listen to it. Moreover, thanks to the technical progress the players are able to minimise this noise using interpolation programs.

Different quality of CD are available, it is not because it is digital that it is always at the top level. The quality of the disc relies on the quality of the recording.

Ladies and gentlemen, the CD will die! The main manufacturers are fighting together for the succession! A terrible war is happening between the Audio DVD and the SACD.

The goal of this evolution is to allow the customer to take advantage of a multi-channel sound (5.1 or more). The Audio DVD is an audio version (that's why it is called "Audio" DVD, thank you DJ Holo for your super explanation) . Its capacity is bigger than that of the CD thus it allows to record sounds with a very high quality and with more channels. The same DVD will be able to contain an album, some video clips and maybe some interactive PC softwares. The SACD (Super Audio CD) is quite the same but it has one more advantage. Let me explain myself, every new track will be on a specific layer and a second one will be available which will contain the normal stereo tracks. The advantage is that those discs will be readable by a simple CD player with stereo sound.

In both case, in order to enjoy the improvements we will have to invest in a new player, even for the Audio DVD, the encoding of the sound will be different than for the video DVD.