Sal1950

"Sharing my love of music and good sound goes to another level when my 12 year old daughter and her friends come up to my listening room. It's Atmos music all day long, by request. That's a story for another time." That one peaks my interest.

In my desire for a silent music-video server PC I currently run a Linux OS and have 12tb of internal storage spread across 6 SSD fat formated drives. I have no real use for a networked system so have avoided those complications. All files are stored as either flac or mkv with only few exceptions. Backup is done manually to an outboard 14tb spinner drive using a rsync terminal command about every 3 months or so. I'm still procrastinating creating some sort of off-site backup in case of catastrophe. My uploading data speed is just too damn slow to mess with, looks like I'll end up with second large spinner drive kept at some friends house or whatever. Going back to my years passed, I would have never imagined, even just a few short years ago the need for this much storage. But the advent of Atmos coded bluray music discs along with 5.1, etc has spun things out of control and I'm avoiding storage of large video files as much as possible. 😛 Good to shake folks up now and then to remind everyone of what "can" happen.

Chris, Thank so much for covering the immersive side of the Munich Audio Show, specially for recording the Steven Wilson presentation. It was extremely informative on the very wide range of spatial audios place at the top of high end audio and it's ability to place the listener in a artistic musical experience. Sure it's "spatial", in that it can produce an image outside an area that's locked between the speakers to include slight amounts of width, depth, and height. BUT it's a very limited, crippled if you will, spatial experience that even the most basic Quad system is capable of taking miles beyond basic stereo. Multichannel spatial can open and extend that experience as far as the artists and production engineers desire to take it. An experience that's capable of completely enveloping the listener in a cocoon of musical pleasure..

Thrilling news about Steven Wilson at the Munich High End show !!! This could be signaling the breakout of Immersive Music into High End audio. Wish I could be there.

"the version I listen to most often is the 24 bit / 352.8 kHz DXD version transferred from 15 ips analog tape by the team at High Definition Tape Transfers." Silly numbers game waste of bandwidth, it adds nothing audible over what could be offered at a much lower data rate.

See my recent reply to the his sad rant there. Let's see if it survives. "Sal1950 Submitted by Sal1950 on January 19, 2024 - 5:57am Why the constant negativity towards Atmos or anything multich for that matter? Rather than promote the SOTA in immersive audio and then encourage a change to a lossless stream, all you can do is continue to berate. Lossless Atmos files are huge and very demanding of bandwidth but it could be done if the market demands. It took us decades of asking for the lossless streaming of 2ch before it became a reality. Stereophile has had it's head on backwards towards surround sound ever since J. Gordon Holt left over the issue and the loss of Kal's Rubinson's "In The Round" put the final nail in it's coffin at this magazine. While over at The Absolute Sound multich coverage continues and expands with things like Robert Harley's October 2023, 8 page article on the building of the new HT/Music room in his home. Mr Austin, your short sighted vision of High Fidelity's SOTA is slowly leading this magazine into the stone age and to it's demise. I highly suggest you step down and turn the reins over to someone with a wider view of High Performance Audio. Sal1950"

What is a Home Theater as opposed to a Multich Music Reproduction System? By all rights they should be one and the same, the very best system you can afford to play back everything from mono 78's to todays best immersive audio techs. Whether needed or not, any display from a small ipad to a 120" projector can be turned on or off as pleased.. Good post Joe, a few further recommends for the 2023 release list. What an absolutely incredible year it's been for surround sound music enthusiasts. Here's just a few choice picks from my library. A Bad Think - Short Street Bruce Soord - Luminescence Duran Duran - Danse Macabre Jethro Tull - Rokflote Katatonia - Sky Void Of Stars Richard Wright - Wet Dream Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex Black Sabbath -Paranoid (2023 Quadio Release) Ten Years After - A Space In Time SCHILLER- EPIC Rush - Hemispheres Mr Big -Lean Into It Everything But The Girl - Fuse Porcupine Tree - Closure Continuation Kenny Wayne Shepherd - Trouble Is Van Morrison - Moondance

Site, naw? You must mean Amir. We're all entitled to be in error on occasion. You've done so many times here. 😛

Pursued simply out of the love of music and it's accurate reproduction. High Fidelity I don't know how you can read any hate into this Chris. The only thing I hate to see is the unopposed snake-oil con of enthusiasts hard earned money. What amazes me is how hard you've try to hide the factual science sides of audio. Let me quote 2 of the industry most revered luminaries. J Gordon Holt. "Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing." Read his entire speech at https://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/index.html Also Peter Aczel, 10 Biggest Lies In Audio, starting here. 1. The Cable Lie Logically this is not the lie to start with because cables are accessories, not primary audio components. But it is the hugest, dirtiest, most cynical, most intelligence-insulting and, above all, most fraudulently profitable lie in audio, and therefore must go to the head of the list. The lie is that high-priced speaker cables and interconnects sound better than the standard, run-of-the-mill (say, Radio Shack) ones. It is a lie that has been exposed, shamed, and refuted over and over again by every genuine authority under the sun, but the tweako audio cultists hate authority and the innocents can’t distinguish it from self-serving charlatanry. The simple truth is that resistance, inductance, and capacitance (R, L, and C) are the only cable parameters that affect performance in the range below radio frequencies. The signal has no idea whether it is being transmitted through cheap or expensive RLC. Yes, you have to pay a little more than rock bottom for decent plugs, shielding, insulation, etc., to avoid reliability problems, and you have to pay attention to resistance in longer connections. In basic electrical performance, however, a nice pair of straightened-out wire coat hangers with the ends scraped is not a whit inferior to a $2000 gee-whiz miracle cable. Nor is 16-gauge lamp cord at 18-cents a foot. Ultrahigh-priced cables are the biggest scam in consumer electronics, and the cowardly surrender of nearly all audio publications to the pressures of the cable marketers is truly depressing to behold. Read more at https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/ten-biggest-lies-audio/

We already have one, Feel free to join us at Audio Science Review A site where myth and conjecture meets reality. ;)

The Great Sulk ? Ha More like The Great Coverup "You can't stand the truth."

Just thought I'd mention, I did my first full listen to the Peter Gabriel - I/O BluRay disc last night. Most excellent, better than I expected. YMMV

I understand what your saying, If there's modern technology that can reach into those 60+ yo recordings and come out with improved SQ, better revealing of inner detail, lower distortion, etc; fine. But that should be just as easily accomplished then in 2ch mode. But AI or no AI, I don't believe you can take a mono or simplistic ancient 2ch recording and turn it into something that realistically can be called a genuine immersive recording. I use my AVR's included DS, DTS, and Auro software daily to upsample 2ch sources, but I still don't consider that immersive, just a psychacoustic trick. In the big picture I feel these money grab releases only shed a bad light on the intended purpose of the artistry from serious musicians and engineers. YMMV

BTW, we're exactly the same age. LOL

On this point I would agree with you, for classical or rock. That's not art, it's greed. There is much of that going on everywhere, what was there to be gained in the old Beatles albums being reissued in Atmos from old mono or 2 channel tapes of which no stems ever existed, besides making money. But that's just the way of the world partner, little different from whats been going on in the 2ch reissue market for many decades now. Come up with any excuse to claim it "sounds better" and make a bunch of dough. Of course no scientifically supportable evidence is ever required. I'm thinking MQA here. LOL ;)