Multi Processing

For a while a lot of attention was paid to multiple CPUs in computers, multi-core processors, in Macs especially. They still tout them in the new Mac Pro.

Multi-core processors are like having several computers all working at once on your motherboard to speed things up because they can work in parallel, they can share the things your computer is trying to do; they can divide and conquer. While you’re downloading a movie or a song here, you can be surfing the web there, and playing a game here, while checking out Facebook there, and looking at your iPhone pictures over here, and letting that spreadsheet run a monthly tabulation down here. All at once. Instantaneously. Because each activity has a CPU, a processor, a core, handling that task.

Except that doesn’t happen.

Operating systems were designed with one core in mind, and as far as I can see, they - or the software that runs under them - aren’t designed to take advantage of multi-core hardware. Operating systems aren’t delegating tasks amongst the processors, and as good as the computers might be, the operating systems and software haven't caught up.

That pisses me off.

I spend a lot of time waiting for my multi-processor computer to respond to what I’m doing. It doesn’t. It can’t, because its OS isn’t able to delegate the work (I think).

Why?

Computer companies need to make money, so they’re catering to the next big thing; pocket devices, cell phones, smartphones.

The iPhone 6 is keeping my real computer from advancing.

That pisses me off.

The Black Keys at Barclays Center Brooklyn - 9/24/2014

Melanie and I saw The Black Keys last night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. It was a fun night and I enjoyed the band's performance.

I've never been a fan of concerts in arenas, which are built for sporting events with little consideration given to acoustics. It was also weird going to a big rock show in the middle of the week. Since it was a school night I wasn't in Party Mode especially, but we enjoyed a couple of beers and once we settled in, it was easy to forget we had to get up the next morning for work. Oddly, the Barclays Center stopped serving beer fairly early, before 10:00p. I don't know if that's because it was a weeknight or if that's their usual policy, but I thought it was odd. Unfortunately, for the bigger acts, arenas are often your only way of seeing them.

The Black Keys are one of the few modern groups I listen to and follow. Not surprisingly, part of that is because they're a kind of rootsy, blues-based rock unit. I love their stripped-down aesthetic - they're like The White Stripes that way - and the lack of gimmicky studio production on their albums. They're kind of garage-bandy and are noticeably influenced by the blues. One of their albums, the EP "Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough," is all covers of the bluesman Junior Kimbrough.

At their core, the band is made up of just two guys, Dan Auerbach on guitar, vocals, bass, piano, organ, keyboards, and synthesizer (though not at the same time), and Patrick Carney on drums and percussion. They tour with two additional guys, Richard Swift on bass and vocals, and John Clement Wood on keyboards, vocals, organ, synthesizer, guitar, and tambourine. That's the unit we saw last night.

I love the look of these guys, kind of nerdy cool. These aren't faces that normally sell records to teenage girls. But the band is big, and their approach and music heartfelt and organic without a lot of posturing. Not to say they aren't dynamic because they gave an energetic performance. Because The Black Keys are such a stripped down band, you could easily imagine them playing in a local bar, and part of their appeal is that such a basic band got to be so big.

The sound of the venue was obviously compromised, but the drums were mic-ed well. You could hear and feel the solidity of Carney's playing, the sharp thwack of his sticks on the skins, and the pounding of the kick drum in your chest. I like how prominent the drums are in this band. For a small group without a lot of embellishment or pretense, these guys rock with energy.

I've gotten most of their catalog over the years and they played the bulk of their familiar songs. Not surprisingly, they seemed sharpest on the material from their new album "Turn Blue." Even if you aren't familiar with the band, you'd probably be surprised at how much of their music you've heard before.

Great show.

Now if I could only catch them at The Rockwood Music Hall in the Village...

Boyhood

Melanie and I saw the movie “Boyhood” tonight written and directed by Richard Linklater, a fascinating movie shot over an eleven-year period as its lead grows up. Seven when the movie opens, the actor Ellar Coltrane is 17 or 18 at the end of the movie and it's fascinating to see.

I like this one. I like slice-of-life movies anyway which this definitely is, movies that lack the artificiality of manufactured story lines and conflicts and dramas that need to be cleverly resolved. Real life is adventurous enough on its own if you know how to depict it. And though not a documentary, "Boyhood" has that feel about it because you watch the entire cast age in real-time before your eyes.

Would the movie work without the gimmick? Would it work if shot over a two month period with different actors playing the kids at different ages? Yes, though having actors age over a twelve year period is a real tour-de-force that would be missed.

Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette play the mother and father and we watch them age with the rest of the cast. I applaud them both for committing to such a long project. And the acting is refreshing, natural, and honest throughout. I don’t know if Ellar Coltrane will continue pursuing acting - how determined was he to be an actor when he was cast at the age of seven? - but he’s a likable presence if a bit flat as he ages in the way of many self-conscious teenagers.

All around an enjoyable, tender movie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyhood_(film)

Music Server

Enjoying setting up a music server at home. For a long time I’ve wanted to consolidate all my digital music into one easy-to-access hi-fidelity location, and after a lot of research and years thinking about it, I finally took the plunge. Especially with the rise in hi-resolution digital downloads, I wanted to put together a central repository for everything, including rips of my CDs and the digital copies I make of LPs on my computer (I clean the nosier records up, then burn my albums to CD for easier playback when I don’t feel like using my turntable).

Apple’s iTunes is how most organize their digital music, but people generally compress their CDs when they import them. Digital downloads too are typically compressed in lower-resolution MP3 files, or in Apple’s version of MP3 called AAC which is also a “lossy” compression format. I’m not a fan of MP3s and compressed audio formats. Especially at the most popular commercial resolution of 128k, MP3s are noticeably inferior in sound quality to CDs and vinyl copies of the same recordings. MP3s are fine for casual listening or playback on portable devices with mediocre earbuds, but on any good stereo system you can clearly hear the thinness of an MP3 file compared to a higher fidelity copy on CD or LP. I think of MP3s as being similar to typical FM radio broadcasts; not bad, but not true hi-fidelity. Years ago The New York Times ran a story where the reporter bought into the hype and described MP3s as having CD-quality sound. They printed my letter where I disagreed and compared the sound quality of typical MP3s to those plastic records you used to cut out of the backs of cereal boxes.

Fortunately you can import CDs into iTunes at their full resolution without applying any data reduction. The resulting files take up more space, but you don’t sacrifice sound quality.

There’s a lot of hi-resolution digital music available now via download in 96k/24bit resolution which is used by Super Audio CDs (SACD) and DVD Audio discs (DVD-A), and in the 196k/24bit resolution used by music Blu-ray discs. (What do you mean you’ve never heard of Blu-ray music discs?!) When it comes to resolutions, basically the larger the numbers, the better the sound.

Growing up, vinyl LPs were the best fidelity available for home playback. Pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes were available for a while, but they were often released at the inferior playback speed of 3-3/4 ips (inches per second) instead of the better 7-1/2 ips. (The faster the record/playback speed of analog tape, the better the fidelity.) Recording studios record analog tape at 15 to 30 ips, whereas standard consumer cassette tapes play at 1-7/8 ips!

I love digital technology, but I also love vinyl LPs, especially some of the remarkable audiophile releases available today. Vinyl can have a wonderful warm sound and a great sense of space. But I love well-made digital recordings too, even CDs. I have a high-resolution download of an album by The Band and also a recent vinyl release of the same album made from the same masters. When I compare them, I don’t hear a difference, they both sound great, so I disagree that vinyl is inherently superior to digital. On other albums where I have the LP and a CD or hi-res digital download, I DO hear a difference, but that’s usually because one copy has been remastered to sound better than previous releases. 

To me, the biggest difference in sound quality by far is in the mastering and remastering of an album. The format you use - CD, LP, hi-resolution digital audio - isn’t nearly as important as are the ears of the engineers making the final product. On the other hand, no matter how well engineered, a cassette tape and a low-resolution MP3 will always sound inferior to a CD or LP of the same material.

So what this means is I’m fine with digital audio. My initial enthusiasm for CDs (Perfect sound forever! A copy of the master tape on a disc in your home!) abated when I realized how horribly bad-sounding some CDs were, but I think the technology itself, even at 44.1kHz/16bit, is fine.

I’ve thought about getting a central music server for a long time, but the stereo market hasn’t come out with a decent device yet, mainly because the field is still rapidly changing. There’s no one unit I’ve seen that logically organizes in an intuitive way all the different formats of music I have.

So using a Mac Mini as the brain, I built my own.

Last week I picked up a bare-bones Mini for about $600 which I’m paying off interest-free over a year. I got it with the default 500GB internal hard drive and connected two spare external hard drives I already owned for music storage and backup.

One problem with playing music back via iTunes is the signal gets processed through the computer’s noisy internal circuitry. This happens even on a full-resolution track. One way around this is to add a 3rd-party program to process the music. You can still use iTunes as the interface, but the 3rd-party software takes the original file, bypasses all the computer circuity, and outputs it in pure digital form through the computer’s USB ports. The way to convert the digital signal back to an analog signal for your stereo is by attaching a DAC (Digital Analog Convertor) to the USB port. This is a small box with high-quality circuitry which processes the signal back to analog format. By getting a decent 3rd-party program and an affordable DAC, you can end up with sound quality rivaling that of very expensive CD players.

Another problem with iTunes is it doesn’t recognize FLAC music files, and most hi-resolution downloads are in the FLAC format. But the 3rd-party software DOES read FLAC files and allows you to import those files and control them from iTunes. (These 3rd-party programs also play music directly, but the interfaces are usually not as good as iTunes which, though better, also isn’t perfect.)

One of the external drives I attached to the Mini is for music storage, and the other is a “Time Machine” backup drive (Time Machine is Apple’s built-in backup software.) Even if the worst thing happened and I lost both drives (very unlikely), I’d still have my original CDs so I wouldn’t have lost anything, though it would be a pain in the ass to re-import everything to a new drive!

I have the Mini by my stereo and am using my TV as a monitor. I also have a spare bluetooth keyboard and mouse from my old 2006 Mac Pro which died a year ago. I can control everything that way, or even better, I downloaded a free app to my iPad called Remote which controls the Mini’s iTunes. Using Remote, I don’t need to turn on the TV/monitor at all. Remote lets me see all the album art and information, making it a very handy controller/interface. I can access my collection by artist, album, song title, playlist, genre, or type in a search phrase. If I turn on the TV/monitor, I can also see the 3rd-party software interface (Audirvana Plus) which looks like a CD player and displays the resolution of the original file, album title, artist, track composer if any, and the album art. So I can control playback via the Mini’s Audirvana or iTunes software using the TV/monitor, or directly from the Remote app on my iPad.

I’m in the process of setting everything up and importing my CDs (I have a spare external CD drive attached to a USB port for that). They import pretty quickly - maybe five to seven minutes per CD - but I have a lot of CDs so it will take a while (I should be done by 2025). But once they’re imported, I basically don’t need the discs anymore, I’ll have all my music in full resolution on the music server. In effect the original CDs become the backup discs.

So what are the advantages of a music server? For one thing, I’ll have all my music in one location which I can access all at once. This includes CDs, hi-resolution digital downloads, LPs I’ve recorded to digital, and even MP3 downloads. I can control the entire system with my iPad and can see cover art, and album and song information on the tablet. And the system delivers true audiophile quality. I can search for any song or album or artist I want and can create endless playlists. And I won't waste my time looking for a CD or record I misplaced because it will all be on the server. And did I mention it delivers true audiophile sound? 

It’s also easy to use. One goal was to make sure it wasn’t so complicated Melanie avoided it, I wanted her to take advantage of it too and am importing all her music. I wanted it to be a convenient and easy system and I think I accomplished that. The Mini is always running, so all you need to do is turn on the stereo, select “Tuner” as the input, and play anything you want using an iPad as the controller. We now have limitless access to ALL our music - or will once I import everything - in high-quality sound, or as high-quality as the original music is encoded for.

I’m still waiting for the DAC to arrive so in the meantime I’m using the headphone/speaker output of the Mini (1/8” jack) and connecting that to the stereo. It sounds pretty good, but the system won’t be fully ready until I get the DAC and send the audio through that. After reading tons of reviews, I settled on the Schiit Bifost with the optional USB port and the “Uber Analog” stage as my DAC, and the Audirvana Plus audio processing software.

Here’s how the Audirvana looks on the screen:

Here’s a picture of the Schiit Bifrost: