New Nine Inch Nails album free online in various formats

The Slip is Nine Inch Nails‘ new album. Nothing special so far. But hey, it is officially offered as a free download! And not in just one file format, so choose what suits you best:

• MP3: nice and space saving for your portable player.
• FLAC lossless: with the right codec, you can play this directly, but do not forget that you can also convert this to WAV files and make a CD with audio quality identical to what will be sold in June.
• Apple M4A lossless: if you want to be limited to a closed format suit yourself.
• HD audio WAV 24bit/96kHz: these files are in the tune of the high definition SACD and DVD-Audio formats. By far the best quality of sound, useless for your computer or MP3 player, to be appreciated only with a proper high quality sound system. Download size is 1.4GB. (continued)

ElectronRun is now a hosted blog. New posts will continue to appear here for limited time. For new posts point your browser to http://electronrun.com and subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon.

Blu-ray adoption extremely slow

Was Toshiba right to state that Blu-ray is not going to replace the venerable DVD on the way to movie downloads and VOD? Judging by Blu-ray player sales, it now seems like a very possible scenario.

Still being happy with DVD discs, I have supported that there are many good reasons to not adopt the Blu-ray format. And that was before HD-DVD’s sudden end… But apparently, getting HD-DVD out of the way was the easy part and the hard job is to convince consumers that Blu-ray devices and discs are the road forward. According to NPD numbers, player sales fell 40% January to February and rose by only 2% February to March. (continued)

ElectronRun is now a hosted blog. New posts will continue to appear here for limited time. For new posts point your browser to http://electronrun.com and subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon.

SACD and DVD-Audio vs CD – Which sounds better?

ElectronRun is now a hosted blog. New posts will continue to appear here for limited time. Continue to read new posts by pointing your browser to http://electronrun.com and subscribing there by clicking on the RSS icon.

Both SACD and DVD-Audio formats are effectively dead, but the question whether high resolution audio is distinguishably better that CD sound still lingers in the air.

The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society conducted a very interesting comparison in the form of year-long double blind ABX comparisons. The results? 50% of listeners found no difference between CDs and high-res formats. Furthermore, no single listener was able to consistently distinguish formats correctly.

The pressure on Hi-Fi and home cinema audio equipment

Gadgets and electronic games are the rage before every Christmas season. Behind all this onslaught of new products there is the traditional scene of hi-fi equipment as well as the scene of the now mature but still evolving home cinema. A good amplifier and impressive loudspeakers no longer attract attention, the headlines are full of iPods, gaming consoles and mobile devices. So how come that such impressive equipment is getting so little coverage compared to small devices with questionable sound and small screens? Here is a few reasons…

Decades of improvement in analogue electronics reached the point where sound quality is extremely high with small margins for improvement. The successful matching of amp and speakers is still difficult business that requires extensive testing and experience -maybe some luck also- but delivers formidable results and a system that can be simply switched on and enjoyed. Unfortunately, all this comes at a price. You thought your Voodoo PC was expensive? Well, set up at home a decent home Hi-Fi and you will change opinion. Set up a home cinema where the number of speakers is multiplied by three and video equipment is extra and any PC will seem a bargain.