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I've come to expect a lot from my electronics. They have to be smarter, thinner, more powerful. They should provide a fun gaming experience AND help me find a good recipe for dinner. And maybe they should shine my shoes while they're at it. Most of the time, I am not disappointed. There are a lot of...
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A car interior presents some serious problems when it comes to sound quality. Glass and plastic surfaces reflect sound like crazy, while carpet, seat covers, and other absorbent materials soak it up. Add poorly-placed speakers to the mix, and you'll find significant peaks in frequency response in most...
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You may be saying, "My factory stereo puts out 200 watts, and that's plenty of power." But there's a huge difference between 50 watts peak power per channel produced by your car stereo and 50 watts RMS from an outboard amplifier. A separate amplifier will provide more clean power than any car stereo...
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How much time do you spend in your car? If your daily commute consumes 100 hours a year, as is the case for many people , then you can easily justify a modest investment to improve the sound of your car stereo. Navigation , video screens and Bluetooth are terrific. But we think it's time to refocus on...
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Amplifiers all sound alike, right? No they don't. Many amps just make your music loud enough to overcome road noise. Other amplifiers handle music more carefully to promote higher fidelity. Small technological differences between brands often make for large differences in sound. A recent test in our...
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Gain, Level, Volume...aren't they the same thing? Everybody knows a volume control makes your music louder (or quieter), so why do there seem to be so many different ways to describe it? If you're used to dubbing, or if making mixtape cassettes was your thing, you may remember "level" has something to...
Posted to
Use & Enjoy Your A/V Gear
by
Gabrielle
on
Thu, Jul 24 2008
Filed under:
Filed under: home audio, balance, amplifier gain, amplifier, sound quality, gain, tech terms, GabrielleT, input sensitivity, volume, level
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My brother-in-law knew that his car stereo sounded bad. He didn’t know why. He spends a lot of time, every day for his job, driving around town listening to classic rock radio. He came to me for help. “I’m willing to spend five hundred dollars to make it right," he said. "What do I need, a better radio...
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In my last post , I discussed the concept of bi-wiring. Although bi-wiring doesn’t increase the amount of power going to a pair of speakers many folks I’ve spoken with felt there’s a noticeable improvement in sound quality. That brings us to the subject of bi-amping . If you’ve purchased a seven-channel...
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In my last iTunes Tune-up post I talked about changing the import default to burn CD tracks at a much higher bitrate for better sound quality. Since that time, music I've added has sounded great. But what about all those songs I had already saved at 128kbps before I changed the setting? It wasn't possible...
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I recently had an opportunity to do some side-by-side comparisons of Shure's line of in-ear earbud headphones . But this post isn't about the headphones -- it's about the importance of sound file quality. We were doing the tests with an MP3 player, and listening to different kinds of music recorded at...
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A few years back, I upgraded my truck’s 2-way front speakers to a set of component speakers, powered by an amp (40 watts RMS per channel). The improvement in sound quality was quite noticeable. The sound field moved up, there was much better imaging of instruments and vocals, and details in the music...
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I recently moved my iTunes library to an external hard drive. While it meant I could greatly expand the number of songs I could have in my library, the primary reason for the move was so I could upgrade the sound quality of the music I stored. iTunes automatically compresses songs as they're imported...
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It didn't take long for the size of my iTunes library to start taking over my computer's hard drive -- especially once I started saving songs at a higher bitrate for better audio quality. Fortunately, it was pretty simple for me to move my cramped collection of tunes out of my PC and into a 250GB external...
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One of the bright promises of satellite radio when it first appeared was the potential for delivering outstanding sound quality. I'm a long-time XM subscriber, and initially it seemed as though this was a promise that was being kept. When XM first arrived on the scene, it was common to talk about "near...