I've been blogging lately about things that have nothing to do with Semacode. That will change very soon. So, if you're not interested in talk about Wired, awesome video, or whatever, don't unsubscribe because pretty soon there will be some very excellent news on the subject of mobile phones, barcode scanning, and all of that. Semacode has been working behind the scenes on all kinds of nifty stuff, and we'll be revealing some of it real soon now.

Anyway, not today.

I bought a pair of AudioEngine 5 speakers last summer. Actually they were an awesome gift from my sister. I got them because I needed something to play the music from the N95 that I knew I was going to be getting. I've never owned an iPod.

Anyway, I got these speakers and I happened to mention it to this friend of mine who plays in the same wind ensemble that I play in. And it turns out that he's getting seriously into the audiophile thing. At first I thought it was a bit funny. I mean, everyone laughs at audiophiles right? They waste enormous amounts of money, like $10000 on a CD player or whatever, what a joke. Well, to start off with my buddy was not wasting a lot of money, he was actually buying a lot of used gear at very reasonable prices. And secondly, the AudioEngine speakers that I got had completely and utterly changed my perception of what good audio can sound like (at only $350!).

What happened was, I plugged them into my Airport Extreme, set the volume to what seemed like a good setting (about "7" if it had numbers) and played Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat and Tears on my laptop. What came out was a wall of mindblowing brass. It was SO LOUD but SO PERFECT. It was like suddenly BS&T was in my living room blasting their lungs out. I was totally blown away.

So aside from the fact that a lot of people with more money than sense waste it on extremely expensive audio gear, there is actually a point to audiophile. The point is that normal audio gear, for a variety of reasons, does a really craptacular job of rendering sound.

At one end, there is (usually) a live source of music, which is carefully microphoned and mixed by a professional who has one of two goals, either to exactly reproduce the live sound, or to anyway make it sound really good.

At the other end, there is your speakers, which make reproduction. The goal of the audiophile is for the reproduction so much like the original that it's like you're really there, hearing what the professional wants you to hear. It's just the same as comparing a cheap $10 print of Van Gogh, with a $150 art print, to the real thing.

That's what you are missing. It is in fact possible, on a relatively modest budget, to be able to hear very close to what it originally sounded like. Like being at a live performance. It CAN sound that good, that loud, that quiet. Audiophiles talk about the "soundstage" which means, how well does the output match the original spatially, if a particular instrument was on the right, does it sound like it's on the right now? They also talk about resolution. How exactly does the reproduction pinpoint the source of that sound within the space. There's dynamic range—the quiets and the louds—just like video, are the blacks really black and the brights really bright. Can the reproduction hit the same volume as the original without distorting the sound. And so on.

With a good set up there's simply more there, there. You can hear more music in a recording you previously thought you already knew. A tired analogy is that you can close your eyes and imagine more easily that you're on the balcony or on the floor and pick out the locations of each of the instruments, forget you are in the living room and feeling like you're in the concert hall/club.

Well anyway, that's just a start. Digital is a huge advance (and cost savings because moving bits around without loss is dead easy). So you can forget about worrying about a lot of the stuff in the middle of the chain and focus on three important things:

1. The quality of your digital to analog conversion (DAC)

2. The quality of your amps

3. The quality of your speakers.

In my case, based on the research I've done, the DAC in the AX is supposed to be pretty decent, better than the DAC in an iPod or built-into a Mac or PC. And since the AudioEngine 5s are self-powered, they include both amps and speakers, making that easy too. I know that I can (and probably will) build a much better system, starting with the DAC, which turns out to be a lot harder to get right than you might think (analog is always such a pain in the ass you know? Why can't we have digital speakers???).

Anyway, enough for now.