Those Bachs

I received the cd set I ordered a few days ago, Christine Schornsheim playing J.S.Bach's Well Tempered Clavier or "Das Wohltemperirte Clavier" as it says on the cover. Sound is awesome playing on my system, though I was surprised that the sound engineers boosted up the volume unnecessarily. The harpsichord is a soft instrument. There is no need to make the volume higher than normal; that's what amplifiers are for, if someone wants to play it louder than it actually would be live. This recording's inflated volume is probably part of the "loudness wars" that some audiophiles complain of. It does harm the music, in my opinion. It tends to compress the dynamic range of music. There is a site that rates popular cd's for dynamic range. 

Here is a good discussion about how new technology could anticipate the end of the loudness wars. 

Here is a very good description with images showing the damage that loudness wars do to music.

That the music on the Schornsheim Bach was made louder is kind of silly. The harpsichord is basically a one-loudness instrument. There's no loud or soft, the strings are plucked. It's why the piano was invented, to permit the musician to change the dynamic range of each key hit and allow more expression in music. I suppose the sound engineer made this cd louder just to "compete" with other loud music. Kind of dumb, especially for the expected audience of this music. 

I think it's likely that the music was not damaged by having the recording be so loud. It could be that the engineers placed the mic's inside the harpsichord. I don't notice any room reverberation. But because it is louder than it should be you must turn down the volume to have it sound realistic.

In any event Christine Schornsheim plays wonderfully and the cd is very very good. The instrument she is playing on was built in Antwerp in 1624, 61 years before Bach was born. It has a pure sound. I hope to play the cd's many times until I know everything well. I am already quite familiar with book 1, less so with book 2. Just wish I didn't have to turn down the volume so much.

I listened to almost the whole of Book 1 before I tired of the harpsichord sound. Since I was playing Bach I decided to give his son, CPE Bach, another try. Yesterday I gave up on CPE's Fantasia in F#-, H.300, Wq.67 played by Danae Dorken so I gave it another go today. It was a relief after the harpsichord sound and after the strictly baroque sound of the father. And it is amazing how good the streaming music sounds through my system with it's new DirectStream DAC. This album may be one that I want to buy. But is it necessary? The sound streamed through the DAC is already terrific.

It's hard to believe that this Fantasia was written by Bach's son. It's so different from his music. You can hear something of the baroque, but with romanticism added. I understand that Mozart and Beethoven and others were influenced by him.

I also listened to the last cut on the same album, Schubert's Fantasy in C, D.760, Op.15 ("Wanderer"). Enjoyed that too. 

Choices

Finished The Art Forger: A Novel by B.A. Shapiro last night. Enjoyed it, read most of the second half while listening to music in the den. Never did that before. Fun.

This morning I started off trying to listen to more of an album I began last night, Fantasy by pianist Danae Dorken. I chose Fantasia in F#-, H.300, Wq.67 by Carl Philipp Emanuael Bach. I thought it would be baroque and high spirited but it was slowish and brooding, not the best to get you going first thing, so I turned it off. I really don't know much music from this second surviving son of J.S. Bach. I should learn more:

Stylistically distant from his father's rigorous polyphony, C.P.E. Bach was something of a proto-Romantic; he was the master of Empfindsamkeit, or "intimate expressiveness." The dark, dramatic, improvisation-like passages that appear in some of Mozart's and Haydn's works are due in part to his influence; his music in time became known all over Europe. His impulsive works for solo keyboard, which lurch into unexpected keys, change tempo and dynamics abruptly, and fly along with wide-ranging themes, are especially compelling. One account of Bach's after-dinner improvisations described the sweaty, glazed-eyed musician as "possessed," an adjective that would be applied to equally intense and idiosyncratic musicians in the Romantic age. Many of his symphonies are as audacious as his keyboard pieces.

-- This from the biography of the composer on ClassicalArchives, (c) James Reel, All Music Guide.

Next I tried the father, J.S. Can't go wrong there. Continued with Glenn Gould playing the French Overture (Partita) in B-, BWV831, playing from the cd set that I own. This is the last piece on the album. So I finally finished. I'm sure it won't be the last time I visit this set.

Next up was a Mozart string quintet played by the Guarneri String Quartet plus an extra 2nd violin. I own this set, but it's not available on ClassicalArchives. Here is a very good set for you to listen to by the Grumiaux Trio ensemble. I heard the String Quartet No.2 in C-, K.406. The trouble with the Guarneri set is that the sound is not as good as I'd hoped. It's a live recording; maybe the mic's weren't set up properly. There's not enough bass and the violins sound a bit shrill. I love these quintets so much, I may have to purchase another set, maybe the Grumiaux.

A Good Night

An unusual night last night. I sat or lied on the couch for almost three hours, reading a book while listening to music. Usually I can do one or the other, but not both at the same time. 

The book: The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro. 

I'm reading it on Scribd.com. It's about a woman that is hired to copy a Degas painting that was stolen many years before. So far it's a good read.

The music: First I finished listening to Bach Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1 performed by Christine Schornsheim. I heard Preludes and Fugues numbers 15 through 24. I wanted to keep going and play Book 2, but decided to change performers. I wanted to stay with the harpsichord, was having such a good time listening to the plucking and ear-tickling sound of the instrument, so I chose Peter Watchorn on the Music Omnia label, a different sounding instrument, still thrilling, perhaps deeper.

Book 2 kept playing for about an hour, I kept reading. When I'm on the green couch I'm only a few feet from the speakers, but it was fine. Quality music being reproduced magnificently.

I stopped the Bach, wanted something different. So I put on a recent release, Through Time with bassoonist Rui Lopez. The overtones of the bassoon are so much fun to hear. Lopez plays Villa-Lobos, Jean Francaix, Mozart, Vivaldi and Elgar. Heard the complete album.

I wanted to keep reading so I chose another new release, Gabriel Faure's Nocturnes performed by Sally Pinkas. I heard the first nine before finally turning off the music and closing the book (turning off the iPad). 

An almost average morning

Yes the morning could be considered average. I listened to Gould playing another of the French Suites BWV 813 on cd, then wanted to hear Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. I have Gould playing it on an LP, on a piano of course, but wanted to try something new so listened to Christine Schornsheim playing on a very old harpsichord from 1624. The old instrument still sounds good.

Watch video

Next I listened to the Beethoven String Trio Op. 9 No. 1 in G major. Sweet sound. High def file.

But everything seems high def since the DirectStream DAC appeared. And that's why it was an almost average Monday morning.

44,100

44,100 cycles per second must not be enough. That's how many pieces engineers decided to break sound into, when the cd was invented. Sound was sampled 44,100 times per second and a number represents the wave form at each moment in time. Seems like a lot, and since people supposedly can only hear tones up to around 20,000 cycles per second, doubling that seemed safe. Surely that was enough to represent sound - music - completely. Nothing would be missing. Even though the waveform was broken into pieces they would be so small, almost infinitesimally small, that nobody would be able to tell the difference.

But they were wrong. 44,100 is pretty good. But it turns out that it's not just that people can't hear above 20,000 cycles per second. And this is my own conjecture: People are sensitive to more than just the tone itself. They sense how the tone is created. Something in the person can tell if something is continuous, like analog sound - never digitized or "broken into pieces", or the digitized sound we have gotten use to.  

That's why the DirectStream DAC sounds like real music. The software / hardware solution promotes 44,100 and every other sample rate to 10 times the DSD sample rate. In doing so it "fills in the blanks", that is, (I assume, I don't actually know this as fact) it mathematically figures what the intermediate steps would be if the music was sampled at this much higher rate. The resulting set of bits is then used to reconstruct the analog waveform that the music must have had originally. That's why the sound coming out of this DAC is so much more realistic and sounds more like real music. The missing bits are filled in at such a high rate that when the bit representation is converted to analog there's no "jumpiness". The human ear and body (for we do listen with our bodies, too) is satisfied that the sound is real. The engineers of 44,100 had the right idea. They just didn't go far enough. What is amazing is that we can take the cd format and reconstruct to a much higher degree what the original sound must have been.

Is this streaming?

Last evening, the first full evening I had with the new DAC, I started with listening to Harold in Italy by Berlioz, streamed from ClassicalArchives. It was wonderful. I hadn't heard the piece since college, when I did a paper on program music.

The piece is 40 minutes long. I listened all the way through, undistracted. I didn't read, or look at magazines or the web. I just listened. It was easy to do because it really sounded like music. Yes it was a compressed mp3 stream, some of the highs were chopped off. But the DAC made it sound like real music, soft, loud, and no brittle sound in the loud parts, everything flowed like music. I was still stunned at the quality of the sound. I wouldn't say it rivaled cd's, I would say it was better than the cd's I'm used to hearing, that is, before this DAC.

Later I started Pandora and typed in "James Taylor". Pandora started a string of Taylor and other mostly male singers. I only clicked off a couple of songs, one by the Eagles. Again the sound was fantastic. I didn't get that tired feeling you get after listening to mp3 streams after a while. The music sounded "musical". 

I know this sounds repetitive, but I don't know how else to put it. The DirectStream DAC takes in what you give it, whether it be mp3 streams, cd's or high definition files and puts out what sounds like music. No digital artifacts, no compressed icky sounds, no tiring imitation of what could be music. This is the real thing. 

I was able to sit close to the speakers during Harold in Italy, something I usually can't do because the digital streaming usually hurts my ears. Not so anymore. The music sounds sweet, and I want more.

Wow DAC

Wow I got a new DAC, the most expensive piece of equipment I ever bought. It arrived yesterday, I plugged it into the system (with difficulty because the RCA interconnect cable I bought didn't work with it -- the Left and Right outputs were too far apart to fit the Audioquest cable), and away we went.

It's the PSaudio Directstream DAC, which just started shipping in May. It's unbelievable!! I never heard a really really good DAC before, and I was actually quite happy with my Schiit BiFrost DAC, but the DirectStream is amazing. Even with streaming audio, the presence of the music is uncanny. I played the Beethoven piano sonata No. 23 in F-, Op. 57, "Appassionata" piano sonata performed by Andras Schiff, streaming from ClassicalArchives. Hot dog, it's like the piano is in the room!

It's a case of you don't know what you're missing until you try something new. I really loved my BiFrost DAC. It's reasonable in price (cheap, actually) and is small and simple, user upgradeable and nice looking, well built. The sound was a big step up when I got it.

The DirectStream is something else entirely. It's really expensive, big and heavy, with fancy touchscreen controls and even a remote. But to me the sound is everything, and that's where it is undeniably great. My first reaction after hearing it for the first time was that at last I could play orchestral music that didn't get all "flubby" when it got loud. The sound stayed clear and not confused. The problem with reproducing orchestral music on cd and streaming sources, even high def files, is that when everyone plays at once it sounds kind of like a mish mash. You can't pick up the individual instruments, it sounds cluttered, not really like music. This is probably partly why I've always preferred listening to chamber music, piano music and other solo instrumentals. I love the Bach solo violin sonatas and partitas and solo cello suites. These sound very good, even on lesser equipment. 

But orchestral music just doesn't work in recordings, not very well anyway. Until I heard the DirectStream. When the orchestra plays loud it still sounds good, the music remains clear, and it gets more exciting. But that's what the loud part of a piece is supposed to do: wake you up, become the high point of the music. With DirectStream this works.

I've got a lot of listening to do, because I have to listen to everything over again, to enjoy it even more. Hot dog.

I think I've settled on using Pure Music. It sounds the best of the audio software I've tried.

I played one cut of an Anna Netrebko: Opera Arias, high def download, the aria from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Act 1: Ancor non giunse!...Regnava nel silenzio. When she hits the loud high note at the end of the aria, I thought I was going to faint, it was so beautiful and stunning. That never happened to me before. Thanks DirectStream! And Brava, Ms. Netrebko.

Even the sound coming from my cd's of Glenn Gould playing the Bach English and French Suites was excellent. One of the amazing things this DAC does is "promote" a cd's sound to a higher more defined sense of accuracy. How it does this is very technical; some of the details are on PSaudio's web site. But the point is that all cd's, even streaming sources, sound much much better than before. There's much less of a difference between high definition audio and regular cd's because of this. Wow!

Pure Music

I mentioned the software Audirvana Plus a few times in past posts, notably yesterday when I turned off the "direct" button to go back to using Apple's CoreAudio which (strangely) improved the sound. Before I got Audirvana I used software called Pure Music from the company Channel D. I liked Pure Music a lot, but there were bugs. About six weeks ago they announced version 2, and offered customers a 1/2 off discount to the upgrade price, but only for a week or two. I missed the time. I emailed them a couple of days after the discount expired to see if I could still get the deal, but never heard back. That's when I looked into Audirvana. That software worked better; it didn't have the bugs that Pure Music had.

Last night I tried Pure Music again. After the episode of improving the sound coming out of Audirvana with the "direct" change, I thought maybe I should check Pure Music again to see how the sound compares. I did, and it did seem better. It seems more alive, the Glenn Gould Bach I've been going through seems even more alive. I keep saying "seems" because I can't be absolutely sure without an "A B" test, switching quickly between the two setups. It's hard to do, and I haven't. But it sure "seems" like Pure Music sounds better. The Gould went from dull (Audirvana using direct mode) to good (direct mode off) to the old Glenn Gould that I know from the Mozart piano sonatas -- the best at being alive and exciting. It was the music was back the way it was supposed to be. 

Again, I can't be sure, but I know I turned the volume up and listened to more of the Gould Bach than I did before, and listened more closely. 

There was an upgrade to the new version 2 from Channel D which squashed the bugs that were appearing before, so I decided to go back to Pure Music and bought the upgrade. I'm happy.

After breakfast I listened to Mozart String Quintet No. 3 in C, K 515 performed by the Guarneri String Quartet. I love this piece perhaps more than any other Mozart. I said this out loud and my wife asked why. "Because of the interplay between the violin and the cello is so wonderful, and the melody so sweet and pure" (we were listening to the beginning of the first movement). I first heard the quintets as a teenager and fell in love with them. I think that is when I decided I liked chamber music more than orchestral music, a preference I still have today.

The Guarneri is not available on ClassicalArchives. Here is a link to their recordings of the quintet.

Not Direct

I started this morning with the Glenn Gould Bach English and French Suites again, on the ripped file from the cd that I own, taking up where I left off, with English Suite No. 6 in D-,  BWV 111. I wasn't really looking forward to it, hadn't been enjoying this set nearly as much as him playing the Mozart Sonatas, though I couldn't put my finger on why. I enjoy Bach (maybe not as much as Wolfgang). 

Then I remembered that I had switched the software, Audirvana Plus, to access the DAC using the "direct" method, rather than going through Apple's CoreAudio software library. A couple of weeks ago when I installed this software I played around with this setting and found that using "direct" sounded funny but couldn't put my finger on exactly why. But I turned it back on because the manual said it was best. 

This morning after the first movement I stopped the playback and turned the "direct" setting off. I started the second movement. Wow, what a difference! It sounded like Glenn Gould again! Couldn't believe the difference. It was like it was dead before, and now came alive. I remembered why I liked him playing the Mozart so much -- you could hear the life in the recording. I restarted the piece from the beginning because I wanted to hear what the first movement really sounded like.

Don't know why this setting should make such a difference, but software is a complicated business. I use an optical cable to connect my MacBook Pro to the DAC, rather than the more commonly used USB interface. Maybe that makes a difference (though it shouldn't). Whatever the reason, I will keep using this setting turned off. Makes me wonder how good CoreAudio must be, and what the music coming out of Windows computers sounds like. I know that underlying audio software on Macs is better than Windows, because in Windows you often need to add drivers to use high performance DAC's, whereas in Macs you don't. 

Anyway, after I listened to BWV 111 and 112, I played another Beethoven sonata, actually the same one I played yesterday, the Waldstein, Sonata No. 21 in C, Op. 53. I mentioned yesterday that I have been going through the sonatas and playing mostly Andras Schiff, but that there were over 60 artists listed with recordings. So I tried another, the very first that comes up, Wilhelm Kempff. Good, accurate, but the banging on the repeated high note in the last movement hurt my ears. 

Papa Haydn

Feeling in a kind of out of sorts mood this morning. Wan't going to play anything, but thought, hey, if it can make me feel better, why not try? 

I keep a few tabs opened to different composers or albums I'm going through in ClassicalArchives. I have one for the Haydn Symphonies. It's been a while since I've played those, and his music is simple and almost always positive and light, so I continued my perusal with the next up, Symphony number 19 in D, Hob.I:19. I chose, and have been choosing almost from the beginning, Christopher Hogwood conducting the Academy of Ancient Music. As it started playing it seemed awfully bright and simple (as I told myself it would be), but darned if it didn't start to get me out of my funk. I played two more in sequence, no. 20 and 21, also by Hogwood. These are short pieces, all three played in around 45 minutes. 

After breakfast I sat in the den and played a Beethoven piano sonata. I also have a tab for these. I was up to No. 21 in C, Op. 53 "Waldstein". I've been listening to Andras Schiff. I just counted, ClassicalArchives has over 60 different pianists to choose from! I guess I should try somebody else, but I do like Schiff.

Funny, as I began playing (that is, "clicking on") the Beethoven my wife said she'd just been thinking about that piece. So we were both happy.

Too Much Music

I had too much new music yesterday. I received the set of Glenn Gould playing Bach's English Suites and  French Suites which contains 4 cd's, and I also decided to buy the high definition download of Martin Frost playing Mozart. I didn't previously have any clarinet music, and was enamored of this disc after viewing the promo video on the eClassical web site.

The video is well done, the playing is beautiful and it's Mozart pieces I mostly hadn't heard before. 

I really like high def downloads because they sound so good! This was was not exception; the playing is terrific too.

The Gould Bach takes a little getting used to. You have to be in the mood for Bach, and for me that's usually early in the morning. Late in the day, which is when I installed these discs into iTunes, it's more of a musical stretch. But I labored with it. And I had to labor with iTunes too because it put the 4 discs into a set of two, doubling up the track numbers for each disc. It took me a good 15 minutes to manually straighten everything out so it shows up as 4 discs with the proper tracks in each disc. 

The Gould recordings are also old. The sound is not up to today's standards. I turned down the treble a bit because the piano hurt my ears. Still, I'm sure it will grow on me. I have to admit that one of my most favorite sets I own is Glenn Gould playing the Mozart piano sonatas. I spent a year listening to it on Classical Archives before getting a cd copy. I still listen and it's still a treat. He's so original and precise and outrageous in his playing. It's inspiring, he's fearless.

I watched the documentary "Genius Within" about Glenn Gould on Netflix a few years ago. It really shows you what his life was like. Very well done.

I backed up up my computer yesterday, because I've been adding so much music lately I was getting nervous about losing something. That's the downside of using computers to play music. Still I think the benefits outweigh.

This morning's breakfast concert included more Bach English Suites by Gould, and Dvorak's String Quartet No. 12 in F Major "American" Op. 96. This is a high def file and sounds it. 

Finishing up

I finished up listening to the Bach Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord which I began yesterday. They're wonderful. I heard the last piece, Violin Sonata No. 6 in G, BWV 1019. The disc comes with extensive notes, written by the harpsichordist Peter Watchorn, who also happens to be a founder of the record company that published it, Musica Omnia. I found it hard to read while listening, so I put it away for later. The music is just too beautiful to ignore. (I was able to eat breakfast while listening. Nothing interferes with eating!)

Hearing music like this makes all the trouble I've taken setting up the HiFi worth it. It does make me feel a bit smug. I can live with that.

I didn't realize until reading the notes for the cd that these sonatas are thought of so highly. Bach wrote a lot of music, and I guess I have some major gaps in my listening.

I also finished the Schumann disc from yesterday, hearing Robert Schumann's Piano Trio No. 3 in G-, Op. 110. It's fine, a bit depressing. I like the Clara Schumann trio I heard yesterday better. Maybe because it's more of a morning piece, more upbeat. The Robert Schumann stuff is more sad, harder to take first thing in the day. This disc also comes with extensive notes, which I have yet to read.

Next I listened to Beethoven's 8th Symphony. I really enjoy this set with Frans Bruggen conducting the Orchestra of the 18th Century. Even over the mp3 stream (I don't own this set yet) the drums and basses sound really full. The first time I played one of these Beethoven Symphonies (I think the 4th) I was stunned by how much drums there were (timpani). I'd never heard it like that before. Changed my idea of the piece altogether. Much more fun. 

I read a review of this cd set that was a bit tepid, but I've been enjoying it a lot. Sometimes the tempos are a bit different from the usual, but the sound is very fine.

I am currently listening to an exploration of all the Beethoven symphonies by Robert Greenberg. They are published by the Teaching Company; I purchased it from Audible.com. This is the second course I've heard from Greenberg. I also listened to How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd edition. I recommend both whole heartedly. Mr. Greenberg knows his stuff and his delivery is light enough and fun enough to keep going through what are quite long sets. The Beethoven is 24 hours, the Great Music set is over 36 hours. I listen while exercising or driving. 

After the Beethoven I tried hearing some Schubert, but I guess I'd had enough and should have stopped there. All in all a good listening morning which left me happy and satisfied. 

A Bach kind of morning

Got two new cds in the mail yesterday. One is J.S.Bach Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014-1019.

J.S.Bach Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord

 The other is Robert and Clara Shumann Piano Trios, Op. 17, 88 and 110.

Schumann Piano Trios

When I purchase cds I rip them using iTunes to the Apple Lossless format before playing them. I almost never play the actual cd on a cd player, because then I wouldn't get to listen using the software on the Mac and the wonderful DAC (see previous post) which makes everything sound so good.

The Bach is a two cd set and lasted way past breakfast. At first I was put off, thinking, oh no I've wasted more money on something I will only listen to once. "It's not interesting enough." But after maybe half an hour, either the music got more interesting or something happened to me because it became more than just a background drone of simple Bach but a subtle interplay between the single violin and harpsichord that my ears enjoyed the more they heard. It's like I got used to the sound and following and anticipating the flow of the musical lines and felt motion in the music and in me.

I finally stopped it after about an hour and a half. There was still some music left to play on the second cd (iTunes just keeps playing all the tracks in the set) but I had enough for one morning.

I had heard the piano trio by Clara Schumann before, on ClassicalArchives.com. I just played the first movement, the 10 minute Allegro Moderato. It sounded great from the uncompressed file from the cd.

I often will order cd's I like after hearing them first on ClassicalArchives. It's a fabulous resource for finding new stuff and listening to things you might not buy but want to hear. They have so much music available and it's sorted by composer and artist and work. You can play a single movement, an entire work or the whole cd. You can choose which artist to choose for any work they have. Some popular pieces have many artists and recordings to choose from. It's really terrific.

Here are the Bach Sonatas on ClassicalArchives.

Of course the stream from ClassicalArchives is in compressed mp3 format so isn't as perfect as listening to a cd or high definition download, but it's still very good.

Recently I installed a new piece of software for interacting between the iTunes library and the DAC. Audirvana Plus takes over completely playing the music, even skipping Apple's CoreAudio software and talking to the DAC directly, if you want it to. iTunes is still used for selecting what to play, but Audirvana plays the music. Sounds great and so far has been foolproof.

Listen to the music

The Blog

This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing list of what I am listening to, why, and the effects of the music, along with other miscellaneous ramblings. I love music, can't ignore it, have strong likes and dislikes, enjoy listening in depth and at length especially when there's something special about the music or performer.

Why Listen?

Music may be the most subtle and profound of the arts. A melody lasts a few seconds and then it is gone. Where did it go? Music exists in time and space. The more material arts exist outside of time since they don't need a performer. You hang a painting, install a sculpture. But for music you need a performer. There is a starting and stopping point to the music; it is here and then instantly gone. Music needs time and you could say defines time using rhythms, time signatures and syncopation.

I listen to be affected by music. Each piece has its own ideas and mood and is the composer's attempt to create something beautiful or startling or new. A beautiful melody affects the listener, and in this way the listener takes an active role with the music. The composer creates and the listener is affected. 

Why Write?

There are two main reasons for writing about music I listen to:

1. Writing helps me explore things I feel and think about while listening and helps bring into consciousness what might be below the surface of my mind as the music plays.

2. Readers may be encouraged to do their own listening to these (primarily) "classical" pieces of music (not only musicology's Classical period, but art music that is generally thought of as "classical"). For many reasons this is a good thing. It exposes more people to good music they may not have heard, and encourages others to think about and be moved by music.

In addition, keeping a personal listening log helps me remember what I like and don't like, and tracks my own development as a music listener.

The HiFi

My stereo setup has improved over the last five or so years as I progressed to more serious listening. First I added a MacBook Pro computer to experiment with computer audio. I streamed music from the web as well as ripped cd's to iTunes. 

Next I bought my first DAC (digital to analog converter) to improve the sound coming out of the computer and going into the receiver. I started with a High Resolution Technologies Music Streamer II+. I liked the improved sound. After a few months I wanted more, so I bought HRT's Music Streamer III. The sound was even better.

Around this time I bought a software product for the Mac called Pure Music. It replaces the sound output from iTunes with its own audio system. Pure Music also automatically sets the DAC to the correct frequency for the music file that it is playing. This is necessary when playing multiple file types, some at 44.1 Kz (cd's and mp3's) and some at 88.2k or 96k which my DAC's also supported.

I started buying high definition music from two websites, HDTracks.com and eClassical.com. The music in a quality high def file sounds more like real music, more natural, more beautiful, easier on the ears, especially in orchestral music when there are many instruments playing at once. 

High definition doesn't only mean anything higher than 44.1 Kz (cd). The word size is also increased from 16 bits to 24 bits, giving a much wider range of numbers used to represent audio waves, making music sound better. In fact some files available are 44.1 x 24 bits and are considered (somewhat) high def. In 16 bits you can represent a number up to 65,535 but using 24 bits the number goes as high as 16,777,215, yielding more accuracy.

I began becoming unhappy with the amount of bass I was hearing in my system. My speakers were Definitive Technology's BP10's, which were purchased with an NAD 7240PE receiver. I used Pure Music to set an OSX CoreAudio equalization AudioUnit to increase the bass to a more realistic level. This was better. 

When the NAD 7240 began having problems in one channel, I decided to upgrade the 25 year old receiver. I was listening more and more, and felt I wasn't getting the full sound that was in the music, and it wasn't worth paying to fix the receiver. So I bought another NAD, the NAD C 375BEE integrated amplifier. Big improvement, also more heat. This is a big heavy amp.

That was good, but I still was unhappy with the amount of bass I was hearing. Using software for bass boost was ok, but didn't sound completely natural. So I tried yet another DAC.

Around this time many new DAC's were appearing on the market, many in the price range I wanted to spend. One which peaked my interest was the Schiit Bifrost. The price was right, it was built in the US and the scuttlebutt from reading audio forums was that it sounded good.

When I replace my old HRT with this new DAC I was stunned and thrilled. Now I had bass. I thought maybe it was my old BP10 speakers, maybe they were just weak in the low frequency range. But the Bifrost DAC made the music sound great, lows appeared when before there were few. I was really struck with how much better everything sounded. It was definitely the best bang for the buck since I started playing around with digital audio.

I turned off all the equalization in Pure Music, and also turned off upsampling (calculating mathematically to a higher bit rate) which I was also doing in Pure Music. Everything sounded great in its natural bit rate. 

I've had the Bifrost for a little over a year. There's been an internal upgrade to a better analog circuit (their Uber Analog). It still sounds very good.

Finally a few months ago I gave in (to myself) and bought new speakers. Speakers are probably the most important part of a high fidelity system. I liked my BP10's but thought "there must be more". I looked around (online), read Stereophile magazine, and decided that the KEF Q900 speakers had the right sound vs cost for me. I had previously bought some KEF M500 headphones, primarily for travel, and was very happy with them, so I was inclined to buy KEF again. 

When I first used the Q900 speakers, playing a high def recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I was stunned. Finally I heard what the basses were playing, and it sounded (and felt) great. It totally changed my impressions of the recording and the symphony. Unless you get enough bass, music is just not music.

This is where I am today. It's a great system, sounds great and fun to use.