One reason is a feature I just totally overlooked in my initial review.  Spotify is a streaming service.  This means none of the music resides on your computer, it comes in from the great “cloud”.  I decided to test out the Spotify app for my iPhone this week.  A funny thing happened.  Once I signed in, my iPhone appeared on the Spotify list of devices, and then a screen popped up that allowed me to sync my iPhone to my playlists. I thought, hmm, how is this going to work if I am in an airplane and have no internet connection?  Then I noticed the sync seemed to be taking about the same time it takes to download files.  Then I noticed the little bar that showed how much space this music was taking up on my iPhone.  This had me jump to the Spotify website to find out that if you have Premium you can actually load up to 3,333 songs onto your portable device for use when you are off line!  Now how cool is that!!!  So for my two upcoming business trips this week, my iPhone is now full of music I have never heard before, I can listen to it on an airplane, and when I am tired of it, I just delete it and add more new music! Make sure you go to the settings on your iPhone and select stream high quality and sync high quality to get the best performance.

If you read my first review of Spotify, I mentioned the fact that it did not seem that all of the music was in the higher resolution 328kbs format Spotify claims.  Well, after the songs had downloaded, I did a little quick math. Since I knew the total time these files comprised and the amount of space they took up, I calculated the average bit rate was 204kbs. This of course is not a standard, which means some of the songs are probably 328kbs, and some are obviously lower, probably 256kbs, 192kbs, 160kbs, and 128kbs.  If you were really deep into it, you could load them in one song at a time, do the math and find out, but that’s too much trouble for me, when there is nothing I can do about it other than to keep posting to Spotify to make all songs for Premium users 328kbs like they claim.

The next cool feature I found by playing around is just how much fun the artist section is. This was just added without much fanfare this week.  You find an artist and can see all of their albums/songs available on Spotify.  The next tab is a biography of the artist, which can be very interesting to read.  The fun one though is the next tab, which is related artists.  Here you see artists whose musical style is similar to the artist tab you are on.  Well you can imagine what happens from here…you start exploring and finding music you love that you just flat never knew existed!! And, it’s a virtual click to not only save this music to hear later, but also make it port over to my iPhone!  Spotify has a “star” feature next to each song and an entire album.  Click the star and that’s all you have to do.  I’ve been up way too late many nights this past week exploring this world of new music.

Artist Biography Screen

Spotify also added Artist Radio this week.  This is their answer to Pandora.  It will start playing songs similar to the main artist.  You can see what is coming up like in MOG, but you get what you get and cannot give a thumbs up/down to alter the upcoming content.  I was satisfied with this version; however with the way you can find and add new music, I am not sure if I will use it much.  I’ve added so many playlists and filled them with new music; I may never need the random play of Pandora.  One thing European users of Spotify have that I am sure will land here soon is the ability to random play by genre or decades or a combination of them both.  That would make it even more competitive to Pandora.

Related Artists Screen

I guess I am more of an active listener who likes to pick out and discover, which is the overall factor that makes all of Spotify’s features so appealing to me.  I can guarantee you one thing, when you get into this streaming music idea you will want to upgrade your office music system!!!  I’m already trying to figure out how to fit a bigger pair of speakers at my desk.

Well, this Friday morning several of us came in early to meet with Dave Nauber, head of Classé, and go over details of their new stereo preamp, the CP-800.  Classé is recently on a roll, with their latest amps winning all kinds of awards and getting reviews as some of the best sounding amps in the world, regardless of price.  With the high end audio market oversaturated with stereo preamps, we were all interested to see what Classé had pulled off to make the CP-800 unique.

Presenting the new Classe CP800

In a word, I would not call the CP-800 evolutionary, but revolutionary!  With inputs it starts out pretty ordinary, with 3 single ended audio ins and 2 balanced audio ins.  After that, it takes a new path for audiophile preamps.  There are 4 toslink digital inputs, 3 coax digital inputs, 1 AES/EBU digital in, and get this-2 USB inputs, one on the front and back!   As you might assume from this, the Classé has an on board DAC (but more on that later).  It’s the output side that really sets it apart.  There are five single ended and five balanced audio outputs.  These are configurable!  For the first time ever, we have a high end two channel preamp with really cool bass management.  Those of us who feel a great subwoofer adds a lot to a system no longer have to compromise and use a surround sound processor to manage bass.  There are three outputs you can configure for the sub(s), making it super flexible with various slopes.  Classé did not stop there.  If you’ve been playing with audio gear for a long time, you may remember the Quad preamps of the late 70s and early 80s that had a “tilt” control.  This was quite a useful feature, altering the sound of a less than stellar recording to make it more pleasurable to listen to.  Classé has come up with a new kind of tilt control where you can adjust both the frequencies and the shelf!  Not only that, tone controls are back with a fully configurable bass and treble control. And for rooms with acoustic issues, Classé has incorporated the same eq circuitry of the SSP-800, giving you five fully configurable bands of room correction eq!   All of these adjustments occur in the digital domain of the Classé (which as you will learn next, is quite special).

The business end of the CP800

Classé has come up with a first in the CP800 with a new kind of power supply.  Switching power supplies have huge advantages, but one drawback for audio has been the noise they introduced.  Classé came up with a unique way to attack this. The result is probably the best audio preamp power supply ever designed.  It’s got the lowest measurable noise floor of anything available by several dB!

The USB DAC category has been extremely popular for people who have music libraries on computer and want them to sound better.  With a USB DAC, you connect a USB cable from your computer to your DAC, and the DAC converts the digital signal into music.  Building the USB DAC into the preamp has a lot of advantages, but to this date, no one has done it like Classé.  They have figured out a different way to clock the data that has not been done before.  Many current state of the art DACs use an asynchronous clocking system.  The Classé incorporates this clock in a unique way, resulting in much better music reproduction.

The inner workings of the CP800

Once Dave went over all of the technical details, he told us the sound would be like nothing we had ever heard.  That’s a claim one hears a lot in the world of high performance audio, so I was a bit skeptical.  Dave told me after playing his prototype at home he started ripping CDs like crazy: he could not believe how much better it sounded.  Dave then hooked up the prototype CP-800 and left it with us to play with for the weekend.

Friday afternoon around 5, our CP-800 disappeared off the sales floor and went into the back of my truck.  By 6 PM I had it connected into my system.  Unlike Dave, I already have all of my CDs ripped and use a Mac Mini to play them back with.  Connection was really simple, using a USB from the Mac and audio outs to my two channel power amp.  I’m currently still playing around with the PSB Sync 1s in my room.

About 10 minutes later, I sent Dave an email with a couple of expletives: he was right!  I have never heard ANYTHING like this for digitally based music.  NEVER EVER!  It’s hard to explain until you hear it, but first of all, there is this sense of the music flowing with no effort.  The noise floor is incredibly low, with every instrument very clear and focused.  I kept trying song after song that I’m extremely familiar with and it was like hearing them for the first time. The CP-800 reveals so much in the way of micro dynamics, I got a sense of immediacy like nothing I have experienced.  If you thought Alanis Morissette was an emotional singer, you’ll be blown away by all of the new colorations you will hear in her voice.  You’ll hear more of how Eric Clapton moves his guitar strings.  It’s simply amazing, and frankly, I was just stunned.  You will think your favorite recordings have been re-mixed to improve the audio quality, it’s that big a difference!!

The world of two channel performance preamps can get into stratospheric pricing pretty quickly.  If I would have had to guess the price of the CP-800 after hearing its feature set, I would have guessed a price north of $15-20,000.  Well, it’s not!  For all it offers, the CP-800 is competitive with a high performance USB DAC alone (never mind that it’s an amazing preamp), initially selling for $4995! Classé will soon activate the Ethernet jack on the back and it will become a streaming player as well. Then the price will go to $5495, and people who buy the unit initially will only pay the difference for the upgrade.

We should be getting our demo in soon for both Raleigh and Charlotte, but for now, I’m going back to listen to some more of my music for the hundredth time, and really hear it for the first time!  In my book, the CP-800 gets an A+++!

Well, I downloaded the player and thought, huh, this looks very rudimentary. (That may be giving it too much of a compliment.  More on the interface later.)

I clicked on the button to upload my music and it started scanning my computer for music.  It scanned over 14,000 songs and did not find any it could upload!  It turns out it only can deal with low resolution MP3 and AAC.  Since all of my music is in AIFF (my preferred format for best sound), I had to convert to MP3.  I decided to try one song to start with, an acoustic Alanis Morissette song I use a lot for testing.  I then did the manual upload.  Interestingly enough, I am on high speed RoadRunner, yet it still took a full minute to upload one low resolution MP3 file. 

I plugged my Grado headphones into my new Peachtree Music Box (I’m blogging soon on this little jewel) which is now connected to a Windows 7 Dell computer.  I clicked play and the song started playing immediately.  My first thought was something must be broken. This particular track starts with very deep and detailed bass information from a bass guitar and kick drum.  However, there was just no bass at all.  At first I thought, maybe the MP3 down rez had screwed it up badly, so I went to my J River player I use for Windows and played back the down resolution MP3 file I had there for uploading.  While it did not sound nearly as good as the AIFF version, it had the bass information. Unlike the Amazon playback, it was also not covered in a distorted haze.   My opinion of the sound on the Amazon Cloud Player: big time thumbs down!

So, I started thinking: maybe there is some other benefit to this system that would outweigh the horrible audio performance. (Yeah, right.) I dived into the player.  Well, to sum it up, there is nothing.  Its player adds nothing of value.  You just see your albums, artists, songs, and playlists.  Amazon could not even find cover art for the stuff I uploaded, even though they sell the music in their store and have the cover art on their site.  And speaking of their storefront where they sell music, that is where I think they really missed the boat.  As most of you know, digital music has meta tags identifying a whole bunch of information about the song including artist, album, name, time, etc.  Amazon, as one of the worlds largest resellers of music, has all of this information on their website.  It would have been cool for their cloud based player to pull information back in from their site based on those meta tags.  They could pull in reviews, album information and heaven forbid, even show you some songs you might want to purchase.  Did they do any of this?  Heck no!   Amazon Cloud Player interface: another big time thumbs down.

Lastly I thought, perhaps this cloud based system would let you have just tons of music stored you could access from anywhere. That would be kind of cool if I was traveling and had access to tens of thousands of songs I had uploaded.  So I clicked on the little icon to upgrade my storage capability just to see how much this might cost.  I had to do a double take on the pricing which I show below.  They actually want $1000 per YEAR for 1TB of cloud storage. Yes, per year!!!! A quick check of current prices for external hard drives shows you can buy 1TB of storage for under $99!!!!!  Are they out of their minds??

So can someone help me out here?  Amazon is getting all kinds of good press for beating Apple and Google to the punch with their cloud based music system.  Did any of these people actually investigate the offering?  Don’t get me wrong, the idea is great.  One thing is for sure, their first attempt does not set the bar very high for whatever Apple or Google are planning!

First, let me give you a quick run-down of what I mean by cloud based music. Music broadcasting started with regular old AM and FM radio. It was not cloud based, but you tuned to a station and got music. XM and Sirius satellite radio were the next phase in the evolution of broadcast music, offering custom stations targeted to specific kinds of music genres and commercial free, all for a small monthly fee. Next, the popularity of high speed internet connections led to music streaming in from “the cloud.” This is music based on the internet, stored away from your physical location. Rhapsody was one of the pioneers offering unlimited internet music choices for a monthly fee. Then Pandora and a host of others came along. For a very low yearly fee, Pandora lets you tell the system what type of music you like and plays similar kinds. Both Pandora and Rhapsody have pretty low bit rates, meaning they are not very close to CD quality.

MOG has been around since 2005 (with a launch in 2007), but has recently added a bunch of features that make it very interesting. The CEO of MOG was the founder of Gracenote, the world’s largest music database, which sold to Sony for $260m. I believe MOG gives you the best of both Pandora and Rhapsody, and it has a much higher bit rate of 328kbs. It’s still not CD quality, but a lot closer. MOG costs $10 per month for the service. For this you get all of the features of Rhapsody with millions of songs you can access and store as playlists. You also get an even better variation of what Pandora offers.  In MOG you choose an artist, then you can decide to what degree you want to hear songs from that artist only, or a bigger variety of similar artists. They call this the “slider” and I just love the concept. Unlike Pandora, where you have no insight into upcoming songs, MOG gives you a full view of what it intends to play next, giving you the ability to directly skip to a song you might enjoy. 

My favorite feature of MOG is all of the information you can get about the current artist playing.  Many times I will sit listening to music and go onto the internet to try and pull up lyrics of a song or the webpage of the artist to learn more about them. This is all built into MOG!! 

MOG also has a very cool scheme of using social networking to share and learn about music.  You can see what your friends are playing and find out what songs they listen to the most, which will help you find new music.

Right now MOG is available on your computer, smart phone, or Roku, but MOG will soon be coming to Sonos, one of our favorite delivery devices for cloud based music!

You can try MOG free for 2 weeks to decide if you like. I’d suggest you check it out.

This is a ton of fun.  Ripping all my CD’s was by far the most time consuming part. The good part is: I made my wife very happy by getting the piles and piles of CD cases off my office floor and into the attic!

Here is how I set things up:

1)      I took my Mac Mini out of my office and put it into my stack of theater gear

2)      Since I have a really good sounding Classé processor, I just connected the Mac Mini directly to my Classé with an HDMI cable that passes both audio and video.

3)      I downloaded the free Apple Remote app for my iPad.

4)      I downloaded a very cool piece of software called Pure Music. It’s only $125 and makes a big improvement in the audio (I have a future blog coming on Pure Music alone.) Just buy it, you won’t regret it.

5)      I linked up the Remote app and iTunes.

What this lets me do is sit in my chair, all of my music in my hand, with a great interface in the form of my iPad. To get started I launch iTunes and Pure Music on the Mac Mini. After that, I control all of the music selections with the iPad, and it is so cool!  I actually found myself just going to the artist section of iTunes, doing a fast scroll down, shutting my eyes and clicking the screen for the Leon version of random play!

If you do not have a really great processor (like the Classé), you will want to have a USB DAC in between the computer (in my case, the Mac Mini) and your preamp or receiver. I spent this past weekend comparing a $1000 USB DAC to the Classé direct with HDMI. In this case, the Classé sounded far superior. Luckily, this did not take too long, and I was left with spare time to enjoy music I had not listened to in years. 

If you have not made the jump to getting all of your CDs burned, you really should consider it.  The ease of use and potential great sound quality cannot be beat! The Audio Advice team can help you get started and has a wide variety of USB DACs, cables, and any other accessories you might need to make the most of it.

Steve Silberman from Ayre Acoustics was one of the presenters at our Digital Home 2009 event on July 1st. Steve demoed Ayre’s new QB-9 DAC and also gave tips about getting the best computer audio performance. Steve handed out the information below on a reference sheet for our event attendees. We’re passing it along here, and hope you find it useful. 

Ayre Computer Audio Reference

We would like to pass along a quick reference containing helpful websites that can make your use of the computer for audio playback more enjoyable. All of these sites listed below can be accessed at http://www.ayre.com/usb.htm

 We have created a setup tutorial for OSX, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Along with this we have also created tutorials for Jriver and Foobar. These are excellent options for getting the best sonic results from a Windows based music server system.

Instructions for Apple Computers:

http://www.ayre.com/usb-apple.htm

Instructions for Windows Computers:

http://www.ayre.com/usb-windows.htm

Links

1. www.sbooth.org This is an excellent site for converting files (this application will show up as “MAX”). For example, if someone were to download a high resolution file (24 bit 96khz) from a site such as HD Tracks- www.hdtracks.com  the files are sent as a FLAC file. FLAC is not compatible with iTunes.
2. www.hdtracks.com HD Tracks offers a multitude of high-resolution albums for download.
3. http://bt.etree.org/index.php This is one of the best sites for downloading live concerts. Files are sent as a bit torrent. The following is a link explaining how to use these files. http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=BitTorrent  . Here is a bit torrent reader that I suggest using. http://www.vuze.com/app 
4. http://www.computeraudiophile.com Computer Audiophile offers great information on computer audio related issues, computer setup and the maximization of performance for computer audio. Burning high-resolution downloads to DVD-A: For those of you operating in Windows http://www.cirlinca.com/index.htm For those working in the mac OSX world http://www.minnetonkaaudio.com/products/discwelder.html
5. http://www.usbdacs.com/ Wavelength audio. Wavelength Audio manufactures a full line of USB D/A converters using vacuum-tube audio circuitry. If you are a tube buff, you will find products here to make your heart beat faster. There is also additional setup information and tips a-plenty.

 If you are ever in need of help with your computer audio system please feel free to contact me, Steve Silberman at ssilberman@ayre.com at Ayre Acoustics. I can be reached by phone at 303-442-7300