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Thanks to this little gizmo, LPs sound better than CDs or FLAC files (phonograph pre-amp)
CNet ^ | 2 November 2014, 12:05 am AEDT | Steve Guttenberg

Posted on 11/02/2014 10:46:45 PM PST by Olog-hai

I’ve lost track of how many Schitt headphone amplifiers and digital converters I’ve reviewed, but their all-new Mani phono stage is a very different kind of product. Mani amplifies the minuscule voltages generated by a turntable phono cartridge, so your LPs can be played over AV receivers, desktop powered speakers, boom boxes, etc. The little Mani’s all-metal chassis measures a scant 5 × 3.5 × 1.25 inches (127 × 89 × 32 mm).

It works with moving-magnet (MM) or moving-coil (MC) phono cartridges. Mani has four user-selectable “gain” modes (30-, 42-, 47-, and 59-dB), so it’ll sound great with any cartridge you pair with it. Cartridge impedance loading can be set to 47 Ohms for moving-coil cartridges or 47,000 Ohms for moving-magnet cartridges. If you’re using an AV receiver or a turntable with a built-in phono preamp, the Mani would be a logical upgrade. …

(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...


TOPICS: Music/Entertainment
KEYWORDS: highfidelity; lpvinylrecords; mani; preamplifier; schiitt
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To: AnotherUnixGeek
CD is far easier to maintain

to just jump in here...., What about degradation of CD media over time that i use to hear about ?

21 posted on 11/03/2014 2:48:49 AM PST by urtax$@work (The only kind of memorial is a Burning memorial !)
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To: FredZarguna
the manufacturer’s name is about as good an argument as you’ll find for why engineers/inventors should not do their own marketing.

Are you kidding? That's the best Schitt!

22 posted on 11/03/2014 2:56:54 AM PST by no-s (when democracy is displaced by tyranny, the armed citizen still gets to vote)
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To: Olog-hai

Nothing will ever match the sound of vinyl.

The cut in/cut out of CDs is jarring... I’ve mostly gotten used to it (since music on vinyl is almost unavailable), but it is not the fade in/fade out of vinyl. And music served in digital slices loses something. Your ears aren’t digital; music should not be digital either.


23 posted on 11/03/2014 3:03:51 AM PST by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: AnotherUnixGeek
But I do miss the large format artwork on LPs. - -

TresHombres

ZZ Top's was hard to beat

24 posted on 11/03/2014 3:34:37 AM PST by Loud Mime (Liberalism cannot survive without conservatives to fund it.)
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To: Olog-hai

Audio Ping.


25 posted on 11/03/2014 3:37:37 AM PST by Chainmail (A simple rule of life: if you can be blamed, you're responsible.)
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To: AnotherUnixGeek

I am with you on this... Nicely said. You are not alone.


26 posted on 11/03/2014 3:42:32 AM PST by teeman8r (Armageddon won't be pretty, but it's not like it's the end of the world.)
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To: OftheOhio

CDs accurately reproduce sounds up to 22KHz which is good enough for mere mortals. I suspect an audiophile’s hearing goes a bit beyond that frequency.


27 posted on 11/03/2014 3:44:45 AM PST by edh (I need a better tagline)
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To: Olog-hai

I just plug a $13.00 Scosche FM transmitter into my receiver’s headphone jack and transmit the playing record anywhere within 75 feet.Works great!


28 posted on 11/03/2014 4:05:18 AM PST by Renegade
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To: AnotherUnixGeek

Sure, and static or any other kind of EM field has absolutely no effect on FLAC, never mind the integrity of the playback software. Right?


29 posted on 11/03/2014 4:20:54 AM PST by Olog-hai
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To: Renegade

“I just plug a $13.00 Scosche FM transmitter into my receiver’s headphone jack and transmit the playing record anywhere within 75 feet.Works great!”

FM seriously degrades the quality of the sound.

That said, try a REAL FM transmitter - 0.5 watts (just DO NOT leave it on all the time nor transmit over any existing FM channel in your area):

http://www.amazon.com/KEDSUM%C2%AE-Range-Stereo-Broadcast-Transmitter/dp/B00D826PU6/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1415017737&sr=8-16&keywords=fm+transmitter


30 posted on 11/03/2014 4:30:39 AM PST by BBB333 (Q: Which is grammatically correct? Joe Biden IS or Joe Biden ARE an idiot?)
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To: Olog-hai

ping


31 posted on 11/03/2014 4:57:22 AM PST by hdbc (FUBO)
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To: Company Man

Digital is for people that can’t handle reality. :-)


32 posted on 11/03/2014 5:17:54 AM PST by glorgau
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To: AnotherUnixGeek

” OCD, which is a necessary side-effect of trying to be an audiophile while listening to music embedded on vinyl”

Based on the “audiophiles” I know, OCD is not a vinyl-media-limited condition.


33 posted on 11/03/2014 7:12:37 AM PST by catnipman (Cat Nipman: Vote Republican in 2012 and only be called racist one more time!)
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To: Olog-hai

Thanks to this little gizmo, LPs sound better than CDs or FLAC files (phonograph pre-amp)

...

Bull. Audiophiles are nuts when it comes to music.


34 posted on 11/03/2014 7:15:22 AM PST by Moonman62 (The US has become a government with a country, rather than a country with a government.)
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To: rusty schucklefurd
http://schiit.com/, is their home page. They seem to have a lot of fun with their name. Apparently it's pronounced in the obvious way.
35 posted on 11/03/2014 7:57:05 AM PST by FredZarguna (Schiit manufacturing: when it works, it works like Schiit.)
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To: urtax$@work

A scratched CD is far less forgiving than a scratched record.

Even a dust speck or fingerprint causes more chaos.


36 posted on 11/03/2014 8:58:21 AM PST by a fool in paradise (Hey Obama: If Islamic State is not Islamic, then why did you give Osama Bin Laden a muslim funeral?)
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To: edh
CDs accurately reproduce sounds up to 22KHz which is good enough for mere mortals. I suspect an audiophile’s hearing goes a bit beyond that frequency.
I think that CDs have a 50,000 sample per second rate, which give a Nyquist frequency of 25,000 Hz. The trouble is that any signal content at frequencies above the Nyquist rate are “aliased” - after sampling, a 26,000 Hz frequency component is indistinguishable from a 24,000 Hz frequency. And if you had significant signal level at 49,000 Hz, after sampling it would sound like a 1,000 Hz signal after sampling. I don’t know the technology being used to address that issue; in the old days an analog filter was the best that was practical, but today it should be easy to sample initially at 100,000 per second - or even double that, I suspect - and use digital processing to kill the frequency content above 25,000 Hz - finally reducing the sample rate down to the target 50,000 per second with essentially no aliasing, and no attenuation below the 22 kHz frequency you cite. If, indeed, not flat all the way up to 25 kHz.

The other issue is the reconstruction of the waveform in you CD player. The trivial approach to the D-A process is to always output a voltage proportional to the last sample, thus producing a step waveform - and assuming that the ear can’t tell the difference. If you wanted to go full-on purist, you would create a digital “filter” with a sin(x)/x impulse response function, where x is the time after - or before the nominal time you assign to each sample as you are playing it back. When x is zero, sin(x)/x is unity, and when x is an integer multiple of pi, sin(x)/x is zero. Thus, each “dog has his day” when its value is the only thing that matters to the output - but at other values of x (which imply a higher sample rate than the 50,000 per second on the CD), theoretically all past and future samples have a more or less meaningful, positive or negative, effect on the output of the “filter.”

There is of course a practical limit to how many samples you could give influence on the filter’s output, so you couldn’t implement sin(x)/x perfectly, and there is a limit to how high an output sample rate it would be considered “worthwhile" to generate. But subject to those limitations you can theoretically reproduce the original waveform that you digitized. It would seem improbable that anyone could hear any difference between 100,000 samples per second and any higher rate, so it would seem that such a filter if implemented would be used to only double the sample rate. But in a world of gigahertz graphics chips . . .


37 posted on 11/03/2014 9:34:07 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: urtax$@work

As CD’s are digital, the content will be perfect up to a point, then extra bits in headers and so on will correct errors so it will still sound perfect, then it will simply fail completely.

Here’s an article that suggest “centuries”, plural. Maybe, maybe not. At any point before complete failure, a re-copy to a new CD will give you new perfect content with its own new lifetime.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/08/18/340716269/how-long-do-cds-last-it-depends-but-definitely-not-forever


38 posted on 11/03/2014 10:32:04 AM PST by jiggyboy (Ten percent of poll respondents are either lying or insane)
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To: OftheOhio
I still think I’m stuck in the 70’s music wise. It wound be grand to get the old Garrard zero 100 turntable rocking again. I’m still using my giant 5 way Op 9 speakers from 1972. I once saw an “Allied” tuner/receiver from the 50’s that had automatic scanning. I really couldn’t believe the advanced state of the art it represented and it was a tube amp at that.

I also love the older gear. I still have my parents' Technics SL1200 and always will - superb Japanese engineering, built like a tank, still in the same magnificent condition my father always kept it in and a pleasure to behold (yeah, I know it's direct-drive and wasn't considered an audiophile turntable but my old man knew what he was doing lol).

Some plastic covering a DAC and a power supply doesn't exactly compare, but the music - if engineered correctly - has never sounded better. And I never have to worry that I'm stressing the vinyl if I play a song twice in a row or if I want to cue up a guitar solo a few times because I like it. The recordings will sound as good in 30 years as they do now.
39 posted on 11/03/2014 7:09:03 PM PST by AnotherUnixGeek
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To: Olog-hai
Sure, and static or any other kind of EM field has absolutely no effect on FLAC, never mind the integrity of the playback software. Right?

Of course digital sound can be contaminated, and similarly motor rumble and other external factors could affect turntable playback. But you eliminate the medium itself as a source of sound contamination with lossless digital, you eliminate the restrictions on playing the same piece of vinyl too often in a given time, and you eliminate the elaborate care and cleaning of the medium needed by LPs.
40 posted on 11/03/2014 7:27:26 PM PST by AnotherUnixGeek
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