Gramophone’s Favorite Things

The New PSB Headphones: The Greatest Thing Since a Tax Refund

What a great week! I had my taxes done and have a nice refund coming my way. My daughter settled on a new home, my son got approved for a mortgage, the Orioles won their opening day game and PSB released their new headphones. Call me a bad father or a lousy fan, but these headphones are bringing as big a smile to my face as any of these things.

Over the years I’ve been lucky to have listened to, and owned, some great headphones, but these new ones from PSB are remarkable. Whether you want to use them for private audiophile listening, plugged into your iPod, or to relax when you’re on a plane; you have to hear the PSB's. They sound superb, (great bass without being out of balance, very dynamic, and a level of overall clarity that brings new life to any music you listen to) they’re VERY comfortable, they look great, are extremely well made, have three modes of operation (passive, amplified and noise cancelling), and come with a compact travel case. At $400 a pair they’re not the lowest-priced headphones out there, but there isn't a pair of headphones near the price that I’d rather own.

I’m off on a business trip for the next week and really looking forward to taking these with me. Even if I get sandwiched in a middle seat, I can escape to my own world of great music.  

-Brian

Are MP3s the beginning or the end of listening to music? (Part 2)

(cont'd from Part I) As a reminder, one of our readers, Jon P. asked one of the most frequently asked questions we hear: What's all this talk of MP3s & digital music files? Why does it matter what format my music is in?

In the prior post I talked about lossy compression schemes used for many streamed and ripped music formats out there, and I ended with the question, “Can you hear the difference?” The simple answer is, yes, if you listen carefully there’s no doubt that there’s a difference between the original recording and one ripped or transmitted using a lossy compression scheme. But there are some caveats too.

 

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How to import music at a higher quality

First, the ripping software (e.g. iTunes) typically offers you a selection of “bit rates”.

What's a Bit Rate?

Bit rates determine how much information gets discarded during the ripping process. Lower bit rates mean lots of discarded information but smaller files; higher bit rates mean higher fidelity but bigger files.

If you’re using iTunes, this is how to select the bit rate for ripping music*:

• Go to the “Preferences” menu
• Select “General Preferences” 
• Once in the General Preference menu, you should select “Import Settings” 
• FYI: Other ripping programs offer similar menus and choices.**

Of course, you’ll have to decide if your hard drive has enough room to hold all of your music in the larger file sizes. If, though, you're more interested in getting a ton of music on your hard drive & you've decided that you'd rather sacrifice sound quality & large quantities of information, you can choose to rip music using a non-lossy format.  

*To see a full video tutorial click here.

**Since I have both Apple and non-Apple music players I use Apple’s MP3 encoder set to the highest quality custom rate which is 320 kbits. 

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Listening to higher quality music

When you listen to high bit rate music, you will want to remember that the quality of the earbuds or headphones you’re using will make a difference in your experience. Just like loudspeakers, these vary dramatically in both sound quality and durability. In addition, some are noise cancelling and some aren’t. In particular, if you hear little or no difference between low and high bit rate copies, your earphones may not be capable of revealing the finer details of the music.

So, what differences will you hear between highly compressed and less compressed music files? The best way to tell is to rip two copies of a file, one at a high bit rate & one at a low bit rate and immediately compare them to each other (and the original, if possible). I'd recommend music that makes it easy to hear differences--jazz instrumentals with vocals & many Country recordings. If Classical’s more your thing, choose string quartets or other smaller groups to get the best samples for comparison. You can also rip one copy in a non-lossy format for comparison to the lossy versions.

You don’t need to be a Certified Audiophile like me (I say I’m Certified because several of my friends have told me I’m certifiable) to hear the differences. Some things to listen for when comparing low bit-rate audio & high bit-rate audio:

At lower bit-rates:

• there’ll be less “air” around instruments 
• less harmonic richness to the sound
• sound will be more distorted & fuzzier (in the same way that non-HD video is fuzzy)
• less sense of the recording space where the performance took place
• instruments may actually start to sound different than what they sound like when played live (not recorded)

At higher bit-rates:

• you'll be able to hear the instruments as though they exist in their own space on a "stage"
• the sound will have more richness
• sound will be less distorted & clearer (in the same way that HD video is clear & crisp)
• there'll be a sense that you can visualize the performance, and
• the instruments will sound clearly & exactly as they sound when played live (not recorded)

You can experiment to see at what bit rate the losses become noticeable or intrusive, and you can decide how much you care about the missing information, if at all.

Next Up – Choosing those headphones…

-Joel R.

All trademarked and copyrighted terms are property of their respective owners.

Are MP3s the beginning or the end of listening to music?

One of our gurus, Joel Rosenblatt, recently was asked a question by one of our readers. Find out what his thoughts are on this frequently debated issue:

Hey Joel,

What's all this talk of MP3s & digital music files? Why does it matter what format my music is in?

- Jon P.

 

Hi there Jon,

Look around: If you’re outdoors, in a mall, at the airport, or anyplace with lots of people around, there’s bound to be dozens of people with some sort of portable music player plugged into their ears. Even during the heyday of Sony’s famous Walkman, listening to music wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. So, with all these folks listening to all this music do many choose to pursue the passion for performance audio? Mostly, the answer is no. So why is that?  What exactly are you listening to and what can you do if you want to improve your music enjoyment?

The vast majority of downloads and “ripped” music uses some form of compression to reduce file size. As per Wikipedia, among the most common are:

• MP3: MPEG-1 (Motion Picture Experts Group 1) Audio Layer 3 is the full name of the most common digital music format. MP3 audio files are the ones commonly traded (usually illegally) on the Internet, and they're the most common digital music codec used on PCs & digital music systems in a wireless network.

• WMA: Windows Media Audio is the standard audio format used by Windows Media Player and compatible hardware. A lossless version of WMA does exist, but most WMA files use a lossy compression system.

• AAC: Advanced Audio Codec is the format used by Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store and is the default codec for music within iTunes. Like WMA, AAC files are lossy (though within Apple’s iTunes system there is a lossless codec as well, called Apple Lossless).

So, what’s lossy compression?

A computer “looks” at the music as it’s being ripped and based upon pre-determined criteria the computer eliminates the information it believes you won’t miss. That information is gone from the resulting file, no matter which of the above schemes is employed. For example, say you’re ripping a piece of music that has a relatively quiet bell ringing rhythmically within it. During quiet passages the bell might be kept in the ripped file by the encoding process. But if there’s a loud crescendo that comes along, the encoding system will assume that you’d never hear the bell during that part of the music and so it will not record the bell during the crescendo. By doing this throughout the ripping process the encoder will generally make the file up to 80 to 90% smaller than the original!

 

Tune in next time when I'll answer the frequently asked question: Can you hear the difference? 

-Joel R.

GRAMOPHONE of BALTIMORE, MD Receives Houzz’s 2012 ‘Best Of Remodeling’ Award

1st Ever Survey & Analysis of More than 1.2 Million Members Reveals Top-Rated Professionals & Current Design Trends from Across the Country

[View Original Press Release Here]

[BALTIMORE, MD]  --  March 19, 2012 – Gramophone of Baltimore, MD has been awarded  “Best Of Remodeling” 2012 by Houzz, the leading online platform for residential remodeling and design.  Gramophone, a 35-year old company, specializes in the planning, designing, installation, programming, and maintenance of media rooms & home theaters, high-performance music systems, and automated lighting & smart-home control.

 

Gramophone was chosen by the more than 1.2 million registered members of the Houzz community to receive the Houzz "Best of Remodeling" award for 2012, which is given in two categories: Customer Satisfaction and Design.Customer Satisfaction award winners are based on homeowner members who rated their experience working with remodeling professionals in 12 categories ranging from architects, and interior designers to contractors and other residential remodeling professionals.  Design award winners’ work was the most popular among the 1.2 million members, also known as “Houzzers,” who saved more than 16.5 million professional images to their personal ideabooks via the Houzz site and iPad/iPhone app. 

 

Brian Hudkins, founder & president of Gramophone, graciously accepted this award:

"We enjoy working as a team within the Gramophone offices and also including the client in all stages of their project.  Houzz lets us showcase some of our best work & the feedback we get from the community has been overwhelmingly positive. We're so pleased to have been presented with this award & we look forward to sharing more projects with the Houzz community!" 

 

“With 3.5 million monthly unique users and 80 million monthly page views, Houzz has rapidly become the largest community of active remodelers, providing homeowners and design enthusiasts with first-hand advice from Houzzers who have been through the renovating and decorating process,” said Liza Hausman, vice president of marketing for Houzz. “This is a real stamp of approval for Gramophone from the Houzz community and we’re thrilled to welcome them to this elite group of ‘Best Of’ winners.”

 

With Houzz, homeowners can identify not only the top-rated professionals like Gramophone, but also those whose work visually aligns with their own design goals. Homeowners can also evaluate professionals by contacting them directly on the Houzz platform, asking questions about their work and evaluating their responses to questions from others in the Houzz community.

 

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Gramophone's Media Rooms

 

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About Gramophone

From computer audio systems and smart TVs to media & entertainment rooms and whole home automation & smart-home systems, Gramophone (gramophone.com) is one of the nation's most respected & leading businesses in the consumer electronics & home technology industry.  Offering expert sales, design, installation, and service in both new construction & existing residences, our design team can create the ultimate easy-to-use system that our customers fall in love with time-and-time again.  We work with any sized budget to create exciting & innovative spaces for our customers. (@gramophone_md)

 

About Houzz

Houzz (www.houzz.com) is the leading online platform for home remodeling, providing inspiration, information, advice and support for homeowners and home improvement professionals through its website and mobile applications. Houzz features the largest residential design database in the world, articles written by design experts, product recommendations, a vibrant community powered by social tools, and information on more than 1.2 million remodeling and design professionals worldwide who can help turn ideas into reality. @houzz_inc

 

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Discovering Pinterest: Gramophone's Favorites from February

Disclaimer: this post has been written by a woman, and that woman uses Pinterest.

If you haven't heard of Pinterest yet, we're pretty sure you're a hermit without access to the internet.  It's all the rage, yeah primarily women are using it...and we know we primarily get male readers, but hey, we love our women customers & readers just as much as the men*.  Don't be timid though, men...you might just find a few of your buddies secretly over on Pinterest as well.

Here's the secret to why people (men) aren't "getting" Pinterest: They're trying to make it way more complex than it actually is. If you've ever used a computer & an actual, real-life, bulletin-board then you can use Pinterest.

We've created a bunch of Pinboards & pinned a lot of cool stuff over the past month, and what we're sharing with you today comes from our Best of February 2012 board.  It's a lovely collection of just cool stuff from around the web that we think you'll like.  Take a look & let us know!

[Once Every Four Years] Leap Day [Choose Your Own] Sale [for our Fabulous Facebook Fans]!

Want to see the rest? Click here for the complete Leap Day Sale Promotion List!

Not a Fan of Gramophone on Facebook yet? No worries, you still have time! Visit our Facebook Page between now & February 29th to be given access to this (once in every four years) Sale!

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday the 29th of February! Mark your calendars now to swing by one of our 2 locations (Columbia, MD & Timonium, MD) between 10am-7pm!

Part II: What’s Multi-room Audio & Should I Care?

Continued from previous post: There are also a few wireless multi-room audio systems available which can make for fairly easy installation without the expense of running wires.

Controlling Multi-room Audio

The most advanced systems typically use keypads and/or touch screens throughout the house for control. The simplest ones may just have a volume control in each zone with no other control available from that zone. Like so many other devices today, some of these systems let you control them with your smartphone or tablet. Some systems include doorbell options, telephone and/or security interfaces.

 

Speakers for Multi-room Audio Systems

In most cases the speakers for these systems are installed in ceilings or walls for a relatively stealth appearance. Although they’re not invisible, they can be pretty unobtrusive. And their quality has improved significantly over the past several years to the point where the better ones offer real high fidelity performance when properly located and installed. There are also thin speakers that can be mounted on the wall and even some speaker devices that can be mounted behind sheet rock or other surfaces that make the surface they’re mounted to a speaker!

There are speakers available today that can withstand exposure to the outdoors and survive installation in showers, saunas, steam rooms and other “difficult” environments. That means you can have music around the pool, the hot tub, in the shower, around the deck or patio, and just about any other location you choose. 

When designing a distributed audio system you’ll want to determine whether there’ll be any zones where someone will seriously listen to music as opposed to background use only. Because the type, quality and location of the speakers installed in the listening zone will usually be different for serious listening as opposed to background enjoyment.

 

Flexibility of Multi-Room Audio Systems

One of the nicest aspects of a many multi-room audio systems is, if you wish, you can start small and add on to the system, as your needs and budget allow. In particular, the wireless packages that are out there are most flexible this way. So you can have music in the kitchen and dining room for example and over time add the great room, den, master suite (or if you like me, the bedroom) and more. You can even do this with the flexible Sonos system we mentioned at the beginning of this topic.

The best part of this is you can get basic distributed audio in limited locations in your house at reasonable cost. And imagine the increased enjoyment you’ll get with a good music system available in select areas of your house.

 

-JR

Part I: What’s Multi-room Audio & Should I Care?

Multi-room audio, also called distributed audio, is music that can be accessed and controlled at several locations throughout the home. Multi-room audio can be as simple as a second zone output found on contemporary surround sound receivers or as complex as 36+ independent audio zones with local and remote controls and even local sources in the zones.

Curious about what we're talking about when we use the word "zone"?

In distributed audio systems parlance, we don’t talk about rooms, we talk about zones. A zone certainly can be a single room, but it can also be a larger area, like a kitchen / dining room, for example, or a master suite with a bathroom and dressing area.

Multi-room audio has grown dramatically in popularity over the past several years and there are lots of different ways to get it in your home like:

• The second zone output of your surround sound receiver mentioned above. You would normally have to run at least the speaker wires from the receiver to the speakers in the second zone. If you want to have control over the speakers from that zone you’d need IR [Infrared] remote control wires run unless you have an RF [radio-frequency] remote system for the receiver. This would be the most limited type of multi-room audio; but, depending on your need, might just fill the bill for you. Some surround receivers will let you choose a second source for the zone output so you could be listening to one source in the main room and a different source in the second zone.

• Wireless distribution systems like Sonos. This flexible and affordable system lets you have music wherever you want it in your house without having to run wires everywhere. It’s also a streaming system, and it gives you access to Internet radio and other sources like your computer, smart-device, or MP3 player. There are multiple control interface options as well. Very cost effective and great “bang for the buck”.

• Many of these are hard-wired systems. That means it’s easiest to install them during new construction or renovation, when the walls are open. But these also offer options for retro-fit systems that can be installed in finished homes. Depending upon the layout of the home, running wires through the basement and the attic can get distributed audio to several zones in the home without tearing into the walls. There are also a few wireless multi-room audio systems available which can make for fairly easy installation without the expense of running wires.

More next post about the nuts & bolts of Mult-room Audio…

You CAN Hear The Difference! (You don't have to be an audiophile)

Famous customer phrase #2 – “Oh, I don’t think we want to spend too much on audio stuff. We can’t really hear the difference anyway.” (#1 is, “No thanks. I’m just looking.”)

 

Blasphemy! Boy, have I heard this a bunch of times in the last 40 some odd years. Actually, most people can certainly hear the difference between mediocre audio reproduction and high fidelity (high fidelity = highly faithful to the original).  I’m currently sitting here in my office with XM radio playing. It’s being reproduced over a high quality pair of speakers through decent, but not particularly expensive, electronics. Even using my antique ears it sounds pretty good. Yes, the XM signal is compressed like an MP3 file, but I can hear individual instruments, there’s decent bass response, and voices are reasonably natural sounding.

Does this enhance my enjoyment of the music? Without a doubt. In fact, because no one’s here right now it’s playing way above background level too. That makes it even more enjoyable because human hearing is such that the lower the volume, the less we can hear the highs and lows (not to mention that we miss lots of acoustic details). If you take a few moments to listen to a decent audio system you’ll easily hear the difference. The real question is: does the difference matter to you? That’s one you’ll have to answer but I’d like to offer a couple of observations:

• Music is a universal language. Almost everyone can, and does, enjoy listening to it. For most of us listening to music has a strong emotional component. There are songs that make us laugh or cry, songs that make us happy or melancholy, songs that make us nostalgic and more. A life without music is diminished in so many ways.

• Yes, many of us use music as ”acoustic wallpaper”, playing in the background while we perform other tasks. But given half a chance, well reproduced music will always enhance what you’re doing.

• The ubiquitous MP3 players expose more people to music listening but sacrifice quality for quantity. A better pair of earbuds or headphones and higher bit-rate MP3 files can make a huge difference in the pleasure you’ll get from your music.

The bottom line? Better audio reproduction will always enhance the enjoyment you get from listening to music. And you don’t have to be an audiophile, a rocket scientist, (a Gramophone Intern), or wealthy to get it and enjoy it.

-JR

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Note from the team at Gramophone: We'd love to let you test out what Joel has to say about everyone being able to hear the difference.  We enjoy letting you listen to a variety of music on a variety of speakers to see what you love.  Just like you can see the difference on the eye chart at the eye doctor, we're confident you can hear the difference!

Surround Sound Part 2: 1.0 ... 2.1 ... 5.1 ... 7.1 ... 9.1 ... 11.1

Hey, I just wanna watch a movie. What’s the deal with this surround sound number soup?

In the last post I talked about the various surround sound channels, the speakers that reproduce them and where they typically get placed in the room. If you look on the back of your DVD & Blu-ray disc “boxes” you’ll also see one or more of the numbers listed above. These numbers tell you how many channels of information are contained in the soundtrack of that disc. These descriptive numbers came about with the advent of Dolby Digital™ and later, DTS™. However, you may see them used on media that is not Dolby Digital or DTS compatible today.