I recently decided to convert some single ended Van Den Hul – The Thunderline cable which I was originally using as an interconnect a few years back in to a nice AES/EBU digital cable. There is a standard for the wiring of balanced cables but there is also a lot of other ways to wire a cable.

In the diagram above the top image shows the standard way to wire a balanced cable. This is Pin 2 Hot, Pin 3 Cold, and Pin 1 to Ground (GND). This works great for the standard digital applications and also for microphones where a hum and noise could be introduced in to the cable.

The wiring of audiophile cables is slightly different, traditionally you would leave the Ground (GND) connected only at the source end of the cable. This method provided the same screening as the standard method but reduces the chances of creating ground loops as the ground is disconnected. This probably doesn’t work too well for microphones where long lengths are used and there is a pretty good chance of noise being introduced.

My problem came when you have dual shields in a cable. Do you connect it the standard way and ignore a shield? Do you wire both shields together and follow the standard connect it at both ends? Or you could do the third option which is what I did, connect in the standard way but leave the outer second shield disconnected at the receiving end (Second Diagram).

If I were wiring for analog use then I would follow the audiophile method and leave the ground disconnected at one end, For all other uses including microphones, digital interconnects the method pictured above should be great!

Just a quick recap:

I was just looking around for some reviews of the new Apple iPod line up and after reading a few something became quite clear. All of the reviews I had read had waffled on about this and that in great detail but what was missing from all of them was a proper review of the players sound quality! This after all is a music player (hopefully) and therefore sound quality should take pole position on the check list.

I know that a lot of people have detuned their hearing over time by listening to too many <= 128k mp3 files but their is still no excuse to not give a run down of a units tonal qualities. If a unit sounds good ot should make those nasty low bit rate files sound awful and make them re-encode them using a higher bitrate, or make them search for higher bit rates to download.

From what I have read in a few forums the new iPods are using an Apple branded D/A chip made by Crystal and a new DC coupled output stage. Due to the new DC coupled output stage previous iPod mods will not work, many of these mods were a change in the output capacitor of the previous generations.

Taking a guess at the sound quality is hard, iPods generally have a good neutral sound which I hope they have kept instead of them tuning it to be bright and tizzy or lumpy and bass boosted like many players on the market. The use of the Crystal D/A suggests that it might have a slight treble boost in the top-end that is heard in many designs using a Crystal part. Designs featuring DC decoupling usually present a cleaner bottom end due to the removal of the coupling capacitors, so I’m interested to find out if this is the case with the iPod Touch.

What it really comes down to at the end of the day isn’t what parts they have or haven’t used, it’s the implementation of the internal audio circuits. Hopefully Apple haven’t spent all their time on other parts of the devices and chucked any old textbook circuit with crappy parts in thinking that people don’t really care how it sounds, but they will love this because they can look at their photos now! (Wow)

Not too sure about all this stuff, DRM Free is a good move, and also seeing the quality increase to 256K AAC is pretty good. Now the downside, the price hike from 79p to 99p for what they are calling premium versions. To start with they will be offering an upgrade option for the EMI tracks you already own, of course your gonna have to pay extra for that also.

The whole way through they kept mentioning that they are not offering anything that is not available already on CD. So lets look at the case for CD, you can get a CD cheaper from Amazon than buying the download, you get whatever quality you want to encode the tracks at, all the tracks are DRM free, you get a nice CD and case and art work. You can play your CD on your Hi-Fi car stereo etc… if your iPod or other player or computer gets stolen you can just re-encode from the CD.

CD is the clear winner, downloads only represent a small percentage of the market and the CD offers better quality and all the options you want. So why are they all going mad about advertising downloads? Well the record companies can make more money by getting rid of the overhead of physical media and distribution costs and keeping them for themselves, they can sell you a compressed format and a few years later offer you a better quality for a new price. The only store that had the right idea for downloads is Warp Records that have been offering all bitrate qualities including Lossless formats and all DRM free for the same price and a few pence more for the CD. They have been doing this for years and seems like the best thing to be doing. With the huge amounts of storage and large amounts of bandwidth we have lossless shouldn’t be a problem.

Buy the CD in the first place and you can have it anyway you want it for less!

Don’t get me wrong this is a great new step but CD is still king!

I recently bought some new earphones, these are the Sennheiser CX300’s. I love a good Sennheiser product, I use both their headphones and earphones. I have had quite a few of them over the years.

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As promised ages ago here is a follow up on the Soniclink S-Gold mains leads. If you have no idea what I am on about try checking out this post.

Over the past few years the market for power (mains) leads has grown due to the magazines pushing these very profitable accessories. The Soniclink S-Gold was one of first wave of cables that came on the market in around 1998 from what I remember. I got a single Soniclink cable back in 1999, around that time I tried it on my cd player and it made it sound quite dead from what I remember, I then tried it on my power amplifier which at the time was a reworked Quad 606 MK1. The difference this cable made to that amp was amazing, I carried on using it with Quad right up until I got rid of the Quad in 2001.

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I have never really been one for many tweaks with Hi-Fi but sometimes there are the odd things that can make a difference. Power cables are an odd one as sometimes you end up doing more harm to the sound than good, what you think is an improvement is really just different. With this in mind I found an oldish Soniclink S-Gold mains cable that I have laying about for a while and plugged it into one of my active speakers. The result with just one mains cable was apparent, things were clearer on one side. I thought this was pretty interesting so I had a look around for another one of these mains leads but Soniclink were no where to be found.

A few years back Soniclink changed their name to Black Rhodium, so this is where to start, the cables name had also changed their name from the S-Gold to the Supermains 13 I think?. Well I now have another which I got at a very good price, the only problem at the moment is that my left ear is a bit mashed. (Very Mashed!) Anyway I have given it a try and there are some differences and for once unlike audio in general they are not subtle you can clearly hear a difference. But with audio is this a good difference?, well I can’t really say until my ear is better but here is my general observations so far.

The overall balance of the sound is much better everything seems to fit together a bit nicer, the bass is much deeper and more coherent in general, in the lower registers you would think the sound had somehow slowed down but it hasn’t somethings seem faster but the notes are better defined. The mids seem smoother and a tad clearer but at the same time it seems to add a tiny tiny bit of warmth which you could say is the leading edge of a note not having as much attack but still retaining it’s bite. In the top end everything seems to be great, nice detailed. I will report some more on the top end once my ear is sorted out. Overall the sound is pretty good, what hits you is the lack out background noise and general hash seem to be missing which is great!.

Ok after all this is it better? well I will have to tell you when my ear is better as I can’t hear much HF out my left ear so that makes it very hard to say what going on with the imaging and the top end. Will report soon.

Just saw the new iPod 5G which looks great and the size seems pretty good too. Good to see that apple are doing black again, many companies have started doing stuff in black so I guess I’m fashionable again! (Hopefully the nasty cheap silver and fake wooden floors syndrome that people have is over?!) Glad to see that the battery life is getting there at 20-Hours. Now for my complaints:

1. No remote! so that means that all the nasty people can have a butchers at your nice new iPod before stealing it off you. 2. Still got the nasty white earphones (even with the black version), the ear phones aren’t that bad for freebies that come with products but come on if you can afford the £219 then you can afford some good earphones like the Sennheiser MX-500’s. The problem is that like the iPods ear phones the Sennheisers are white and are also nasty bastard attractors! But all you silly fuckers that wear the white ear phones as a fashion thing you deserve to get the shit kicked out of you and your stuff stolen. (Sennheiser still do the black/metalic blue ones.)

The main reason I tell people to get new earphones is mainly because the iPod really is a good sounding piece of kit, it has a huge base of people that buy it for fashion and not sound quality this really isn’t a bad thing as it allows these dickheads to hear something that sounds good and introduces them to the fact that great sound helps you to enjoy music more and will also allow them to listen to new things.

Ok on with the 5G, the 5G can playback video which isn’t really that interesting and I have already heard people moaning on the net about the fact that it will only playback certain formats etc.. the most interesting and good things in 5G are the bigger HD and the improved battery life, oh and the fact it comes in black! Ok some simple advice if you own a 4G/iPod photo with black and white display or the colour version (photo and later 4G’s) I personally wouldn’t upgrade unless you really need that extra bit of battery life. For owners of the 3G which are bored and have too much cash to spend or the battery is on it’s way out you have two choices. 1. Buy a new battery which has increased cappacity for 30 notes. 2. Buy the 5G and have the new looks, have the extra 12-Hours battery life over the 3G and have all the bits of the iPod photo all together for 219 notes for the 30-gig. Now for my plea, please someone out there be it Apple or third party please make a remote for this thing.

(Ira if your reading this stop making excuses and finally go out and buy one, it’s good value really and you will like it!)

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My whole collection of Micromega pictures are now up on the web, there are some really great pictures both inside and outside. Most of the images are of the Trio.CD.2/Trio.BS.2/Trio.AL the other images are of the T-DRIVE/T-DAC. I will be adding some more images of the DRIVE 3 / DAC and some other stuff I have like the Optic.BS and the STAGE 4 Boards etc… There isn’t many photos of these great sounding products, this is normally down to the fact of reliability problems in the Concept Series. If you have any question about Micromega drop me a mail.

The Meridian 101 is finialy running well. Thanks to the help of Dave Hall at Meridian I now have a phono input, well not a fully working phono input. The 101 uses a modular approch on it’s main input this consists of an input module and if it’s a phono module then an EQ module. The 101 can also be fitted with different output modules, Meridian used to supply a whole range of these modules. The Meridiian 100 Series won the british design council award in 1982, my particular Meridian 101P was made on the 3 April 1979 so that make it older than me.