The Hifi Podcast with Darren and Duncan

Noise, noise noise. It's all noise. To the serious audiophile, reducing noise at every point of a stereo system is job #1. Compression artifacts keep us from touching MP3s with a ten foot pole. Digital streams must contain vanishing amounts of jitter. Conversion to analog requires careful filtering. Interconnects should reject RF and EMI, and hold their own in the vicinity of power cables. Power cables shield the system from the outside world. Mechanical isolation disconnects components from vibration noise. Power supply ripple is smoothed out.

This audiophile hobby is completely obsessed with noise, and for good reason. When the noise is removed, the music flows and the magic happens. It's the recipe for success with audio, and in this episode of The Hifi Podcast, hosts Darren and Duncan go around the signal chain to discuss many different types of noise.

More listener questions are also tackled, as usual, with this week's questions centering around speaker spikes and philosophical arguments for and against separates versus integrated.

This week's album recommendation is a real mind bender. An instrumental work from a session and touring legend on the bass guitar goes in serious audiophile directions while remaining fairly genre-ambivalent. It may be hard to nail down, but this record will prove a real challenge for the subs, and a delight for the ears.

This podcast is powered by CommonGround Cables Whisper power cable. Read customer reviews and order your own at www.commongroundcables.com.

Find all of our album recommendations in one place, at www.thehifipodcast.net.

Bill Johnson, the founder of Audio Research Corp. and a legend in our business, said that he wanted power supply components to be of such high quality that music could be enjoyed through each of the parts.

We know that all audio equipment uses power — usually DC in variety — to amplify or produce the music we love, and his point is clear: clean power is as essential to the eventual excellence of a product as any of the other parts therein.

We also know that the power supplied to our homes is AC, and must be converted to DC before these devices can do their magic work, so it makes sense that the more pure the DC power is, the better for the rest of the audio circuit.

But do you know how this is pulled off? If the terms “ripple” or “rectifier” aren’t part of your lexicon, this week’s podcast will change that as Darren and Duncan winnow down to the nuts and bolts of what makes power supplies tick — and how the good ones are made. And even if you are familiar, this podcast will undoubtedly offer something new for your perspective.

A treasure trove of power-specific information is laid out in a way that dips in and out of engineer land to reveal in plain terms how the alternating current from our walls is converted and made clean and pure before it makes its way through our beloved stereo components and eventually to our ears as music.

Generally, there is a distrust of switch mode supplies in our hobby, but the guys explain that the real truth isn’t that simple. A good power supply is good because excellent decisions are made in its design and arrangement, regardless of what it’s called.

Be sure to stick around to the end, where a truly stunning album pick of the week is revealed — one that will light up your audio system like the fireworks on the Fourth of July.

This podcast is powered by CommonGround Cables Whisper power cable. Read customer reviews and order your own at www.commongroundcables.com.

Find all of our album recommendations in one place, at www.thehifipodcast.net.

Desktops of the last 30 years have become dominated by the computer monitor. Gone are the days of a big desk full of a mess of papers, or the clean workspace with perhaps a small lamp on one side and a rotary telephone on the other. As the visual element of computing has taken more real estate, its seems that less and less has been offered to the sonic element. Tiny speakers the size of beer cans seem to dominate the landscape, and while computer audio and streaming fidelity have increased, the idea of a decent pair of monitors on small stands flanking the computer screen is still foreign to many.

The fact is, nearfield listening offers a potential for some of the most enjoyable sound in your life, and moving away from "in-the-head" sound of headphones can increase the focus applied to work at these desks, whether at home or in a traditional office. In this episode, Darren and Duncan explain why fidelity and soundstage need not be sacrificed on the desktop, and offer a path for setup of a stereo system that will make you look forward to sitting down and getting some work done.

Elements like boundary interaction, surface coupling, toe-in, speaker width and rake all come into the equation and are perhaps more prone to fine adjustment rewards than a larger system. The guys go through each element and also offer a number of great setups and desk-appropriate speakers they've heard for the task of achieving a rewarding desk audio system.

Earlier in the episode, Darren talks about his latest phono preamplifier being chosen as Stereophile's Analog Component Of The Year, and at the end, the album recommendation of the week is revealed which features a French pianist playing Middle Eastern jazz with a sizzling group of Israeli players.

This podcast is powered by CommonGround Cables Whisper power cable. Read customer reviews and order your own at www.commongroundcables.com.

Find all of our album recommendations in one place, at www.thehifipodcast.net.

After a visit to chez Tweak to hear the always-improving desktop system, Darren decided to push Duncan into a project the best way he knew how: by giving him a pair of Seas Excel tweeters and posing the question, "what if you had state-of-the-art soft domes in that thing?" Talking, of course, about Duncan's improbably excellent 2-day speaker project, and in this episode the guys talk about the next possible iteration of the silly little first-order gems. Listener questions are answered, a blind study on network switches is shared, and the album of the week ventures into Brazilian tradition. This podcast is powered by CommonGround Cables Whisper power cable. Read customer reviews and order your own at www.commongroundcables.com. Find all of our album recommendations in one place, at www.thehifipodcast.net.

In this episode, Darren and Duncan trade stories related to audio that are either funny, uncomfortable or just plain unexpected. A great listener question about where to go after a component breaks is answered, and the album of the week was chosen in part because Duncan could not get the songs out of his head. This podcast is powered by CommonGround Cables Whisper power cable. Read customer reviews and order your own at www.commongroundcables.com. Find all of our album recommendations in one place, at www.thehifipodcast.net.