Paul911 posted an update
4 months ago (edited)
Scott,
I’m in New England and the Audiokarma members there have a twice yearly festival. At one of them last year, they had a guy who had worked at some of the big stereo retailers back in the heyday. He talked about what the process was like and it was fairly interesting.
This might be a good video for your channel and I can try to find out who that was if you want.
Also, were you going to do videos on adding streaming devices to vintage systems?
mrsteve4761 and StereoNiche5 Comments
Longer term, I am working on more interview type videos. I have a few tee’d up now and I am working on editing them for future release. The first one was with Walt Stagner who was in sales of HiFi in the 1970’s and I would love to find others, so if you can reach that person, please do and see if they would be interested.
Others I have completed or have scheduled are with industry veterans like Dean Miller of Nakamichi/B&O, a former engineer at Audio Research and a couple of others who have owned audio retail stores.
On streaming devices, I do want to cover that arena, but I have not yet signed up for any services, so that is still in the planning stages. Any advice? 😀
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@StereoNiche I highly suggest a “lossless” service such as Qobuz (e.g. with no audio compression). I’ve lost track of which service offers lossless and at what tier, pricing, etc. as this is constantly changing. But a bit of on-line research and pricing considerations should answer this.
I will tell you I had Spotify at one time because of its extensive library (I believe they still have the largest) but I and my audio friends could detect compression artifacts far too often when played over our capable systems for me to continue on with it. My friends and I have been very happy with Qobuz, though do research of which lossless service has the best library for your taste in genres.
The only services I have experience with are Apple Music and Spotify. I’ll say that both are fairly easy to use though if you truly want the best fidelity, it can be a bit of a mess determining what’s what. @mrsteve4761 is probably right about Qobuz but again, I have no experience there.
If you go down this route with the goal of listening through a vintage system, you’ll want a music streaming device such as a Wiim, Bluesound or others. Darko Audio’s YT channel has a bunch on this though you may hit pitfalls there too. I use a Wiim Pro on my main system and a Wiim mini on a bedroom system. I wanted to get a Wiim Ultra but that doesn’t support Airplay, which I needed.
The part I liked about the Wiim Ultra is it can play FLAC files off of a USB drive. This potentially leads you down another rabbit hole of ripping CDs. I used XLD on the Mac to do this.
So, as you can see it can be a big topic and I’m not sure how much you’d want to go into it, but at least some depth might be good for the channel. Wiims are likely the easiest.
I should also say that I work in software and am responsible for large systems. When I come home though, I have limited patience for dealing with “tech” and a lot of the time, I’d rather just put a record on, flip a big switch on a vintage receiver or amp and relax without software updates getting in the way.If you do decide to go down this route, I’d be happy to help as I can.
1@paul911 Agree, WiiM is great to start delving into streaming, and the accompanying mobile app is quite good and is continually being improved. The only nuisance I find is having to start the WiiM app before entering Qobuz (or any other supported streaming service) which can get a bit quirky at times. An outboard DAC can always be added later to the WiiM (as likely with any of the streamers) to take the next step which is what I did with my WiiM mini.
I mentioned Wiim products, but I should add a caveat. They have a few new products announced and like the Ultra, they won’t support Airplay. So it seems that’s the direction they’re heading in and it’s disappointing.