My cell phone hasn’t been ringing lately. Anyone who tried to call me was ignored and sent to voice mail. A moment or two later, the phone would ping and display the call that I just missed. I checked all of the usual things. The volume wasn’t turned down, the ringer was turned on, the phone is not on “do not disturb” and I can hear rings in the Settings section. So what’s a person to do? Head to the Apple Store on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica and spend some time at the Genius Bar. That’s what I did for the past couple of hours…I waited over an hour to be seen by an Apple Genius support engineer named Mark.<\/p>\n
He checked all of the things that I had already checked. It seemed as though I was doing everything right. Then he told me he was going to turn off the phone and reboot it. As soon as he said it, I told him, “that’s going to fix it…I can feel it. Why didn’t I remember to do that?” And sure enough, when the phone came back up and he called it…it rang just like it was supposed to. I felt pretty stupid. As a reasonably smart guy and former repair technician, the first thing you do is restart or pull out the power supply. I knew better. At least I got a couple of hours out of the office and treated myself to a nice lunch.<\/p>\n
A little knowledge can sometimes go a long way. What may seem obvious and simple to one person can twist others into knots. That’s what happened the other day when I picked up the phone. Carl was asking why the “blue light” on his new audiophile Sony Walkman ZX2 didn’t illuminate when he plays his “high-resolution” FLAC files. What is it with the blue light thing? Is this a flashback to the dilithium crystals that powered the U.S.S. Enterprise? I think they glowed with a blue light as well. The Pono player also indicates something with a blue light. I think it means that you purchased the tracks via the PonoMusic website…so you know you’ve gotten “the best resolution available” on all of your favorite tunes.<\/p>\n
When I drilled into the problem a little further, Carl told me that he’d ripped some CDs, sample rate converted them to 192 kHz\/24-bit PCM and then encoded them as FLAC files with metadata. Why weren’t his new high-resolution files triggering the blue indicator on his Sony ZX2? I thought to myself, here’s a guy that just spent more than a $1000 on the latest high-resolution portable player from Sony and he doesn’t have a clue about what a high-resolution audio track is, how they are produced, and where to acquire them. Standard resolution tracks don’t magically become high-resolution worthy when converted to FLAC or upconverted to higher specifications. And the presence of a blue light on your Pono Player or the new Sony ZX2 doesn’t tell you anything about the fidelity of the file.<\/p>\n
Wouldn’t it be better to address the core issues associated with high fidelity audio without blue lights, inconsistent logos (the ZX2 has the JAS hi-res audio logo), and ignorance of provenance? I certainly think so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My cell phone hasn’t been ringing lately. Anyone who tried to call me was ignored and sent to voice mail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[97,657,50,83,40,172,57,967,1032,640,26,42,961,298,251,645,638,637,968,227,643,169,954,261,150,347,27,659,660,661],"class_list":["post-4714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dr_aixs_posts","tag-5-1-surround","tag-advanced-resolution","tag-aix-records","tag-analog-tape","tag-analog-vs-digital","tag-audio-resolution","tag-audio-specifications","tag-cd-illumination","tag-dvd_audio","tag-hd-music","tag-hd-audio","tag-high-resolution-audio","tag-high-res-audio-logo","tag-high-res-music","tag-high-resolution","tag-high-resolution-audio-experience","tag-hires-audio","tag-hires-music","tag-how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality","tag-hra","tag-hra-listening-experience","tag-mark-waldrep","tag-music-server","tag-npr-music","tag-pcm","tag-spectragram","tag-spectragraphs","tag-uhd-audio","tag-ultra-high-definition-audio","tag-ultra-high-resolution-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4716,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4714\/revisions\/4716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}