Issue 217   November 2011
The Golden Age
Editorial By Robert Harley

 

  Welcome to our annual Buyer's Guide, a special edition of The Absolute Sound that brings you mini-reviews of our top picks in every product category and at every price point. No matter what your budget, you're sure to find some great options in this issue. These product selections and capsule reviews represent the cumulative judgment of our ten most senior editors and writers. Together, they have more than 250 years of combined experience reviewing high-performance audio equipment — experience that can guide you in putting together your system.

I'm particularly happy to bring to you in this issue "Computer Audio Demystified," a ground-up primer on how to join the computer-audio revolution, written by cable manufacturer AudioQuest. As I posit in the essay below, computer audio is ushering in a new golden age of high fidelity.

 

Audio's New Golden Age
Many old timers in high-end audio look back wistfully on the "golden age" of audio. Just when that golden age existed is open to interpretation, but there's no debate about what constitutes a "golden age" — technical innovation, new discoveries, and significant sonic improvements. No matter what decade you see as "golden," its hallmark is the discovery of new ways to get better sound, accompanied by the dissemination of that information through high-end retailers, magazines, and word of mouth within the audiophile community. Audiophiles put that information to good use through hands-on involvement in the hobby. We built Dynakits, swapped tubes, shared tweaks, and, especially, optimized our LP-playback systems. Audio was an interactive pursuit in which one's skill was rewarded with better sound. Who among us hasn't thrilled to discover a significant sonic improvement just through proper turntable setup?

The lament among many old hands today is that audio has become so mechanized and commoditized that the fun of hands-on tweaking and making new discoveries has been replaced by the unbridled thrill of clicking a mouse. In fact, many consider the rise of the compact disc as the precipitant of the long slow decline of enthusiast audio and the high-end retailer. After all, there's not much to tweak in a CD player, and pressing the "Play" button doesn't offer anything remotely like the involvement of playing an LP optimally. And now we have computer audio, which ostensibly furthers that trend toward less and less consumer involvement in optimizing the playback system.

But I'm here to tell you that computer audio represents the dawn of a new golden age of audio, one more exciting than any that has come before. The potential for getting unprecedented sound quality, accessing a wider variety of music, fostering hands-on involvement, and enjoying music with greater convenience make the computer audio age truly promising. Music may exist as ones and zeros in a file, but how those files are stored, extracted, processed, transmitted, and decoded produces a staggeringly wide spectrum of analog-like variability in sound quality. I recently heard a demonstration of USB cables, software settings, and isolation devices beneath computers and hard drives that spelled the difference between mediocre and great sound. It turns out that everything matters in computer audio. Adjusting music-management software settings is today's equivalent of adjusting a tonearm's vertical tracking angle.

Hands-on involvement by the enthusiast has returned, and with it, the need for the retailer's expert knowledge and guidance. Computers may have become commoditized, but the skill necessary to set up a state-of-the-art music server has not. Moreover, computer audio represents a point of commonality between the traditional high-end ethos and a new generation of music lovers. It's a way to connect with a new audience, and to pass along to them a culture that holds that because music is important, reproducing it with the highest possible fidelity is important.

Similarly, the knowledge void at the cusp of this profound technology transition can be filled by high-end audio magazines. Just as TAS has guided previous generations of music lovers through every innovation in music-reproduction technology over the past four decades, we now have a significant role to play in making computer-based music systems understandable, accessible, and most of all, superlative sounding. That's why you'll see a major expansion of our computer-audio coverage in the coming months. It begins in this issue with a primer that will bring you up to speed on the fundamental technology and lexicon of file-based music systems. This will be followed by a massive, groundbreaking four-part investigative report evaluating every aspect of computer-based audio — what parameters matter, their sonic effects, and how to optimize them. We'll have interviews with the top experts in the field, how-to articles, and of course, lots of reviews of cutting-edge products.

Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be an exciting decade.

 

 

 

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