Steve Van Zandt's Top 10

There is something very unappealing about recommendation technology. Amazon’s is almost patronising in its banality and does anyone find iTunes’ Genius feature useful? I would always take suggestions from friends and colleagues far more seriously than any generated by algorithms. If sites have to use music search engines they should at the very least be used in addition to peer recommendations.
Recommendations from friends has always been the main way I buy new music and for most music lovers, I reckon it’s the same.

That’s why we’ve started to ask our Music Club artists and Fellows for Top 10s. Everyone within the Society of Sound is there because they love music and they care about how thing sound so who better to ask about personal top 10 tracks.

Some of the recommendations won’t have 10 tracks, some will be albums, some songs, some may just sound weird – but they sound that way for a reason.
To start with we’d like to share two very different sets of music. That of Steve Van Zandt is a vinyl selection preferably to be listened to on mono while classical prodigy Benjamin Grosvenor’s list is a set of beautiful classical recordings.

LITTLE STEVEN'S TOP 10 VINYL

1. 12 X 5 ( ROLLING STONES)
2. BACK TO MONO (PHIL SPECTOR)
3. MY GENERATION (THE WHO)
4. WITH THE BEATLES (BEATLES)
5. HAVING A RAVE UP (YARDBIRDS)
6. THE KINK KONTROVERSY (KINKS)
7. BEST OF... (MUDDY WATERS)
8. END OF THE CENTURY (RAMONES)
9. BECK OLA (JEFF BECK GROUP)
10. TURN TURN TURN (BYRDS)

(All in mono of course!)

Let us know what you think or even better give us a list of your own here...

Get the best out of your hi-fi

Buying the right equipment will certainly get you part way along the road to good sound, but there’s lots of other stuff you can do once your new kit is in place. Tech Radar has a feature detailing 10 ways to improve the sound of your hi-fi without breaking the bank – or even without spending any money at all.

Yes, this old chestnut has been dragged out once again, but it still makes interesting reading if you haven’t tweaked your hi-fi in a while. Top tips include getting better cables or cleaning the ones you have, buying an equipment rack, letting your kit warm up before listening and, one we especially like, setting your speakers up properly.

Now while Audio Critic issue 26 doesn’t agree with many of these tips, there’s no denying that setting up your speakers properly is vital to achieving good sound quality. We have some advice on basic speaker placement here, and some more details on fine tuning them here.

A new idea for (im)personal stereo

We’ve probably all experienced the current trend among younger music lovers to play their favourite tunes out loud for the world, or at least the rest of the bus, to share their enjoyment. As this is normally from the speakers of a mobile phone, its not the best sonic experience, even if you do approve of the choice in music!

That’s why we’re not so sure how we feel this story we read on the Times Technology Blog. The Orbitsound T3 connects to your portable MP3 player just as you would headphones, but then creates a bubble of sound around your head, providing what is claimed to be proper stereo!

The claims for the technology are pretty interesting: the T3 apparently creates a personal sound bubble, uses your own body to reinforce the sound, and also has an ‘infinite stereo sweetspot’.

But, while the idea of the Orbitsound T3 offering apparently better sounding ‘personal’ stereo sound is appealing, does this mean that added to all those people who music you can hear on the phones, you’ll also have to listen to people’s Apple iPod as well!

And anyway, what’s wrong with headphones!

Apple Lossless Confusion

There’s a lot of confusion about audio encoding, and how to get the best out of your digital music. Obviously we at B&W are keen to promote the benefits of lossless encoding, especially with our Music Club and Zeppelin iPod speaker system.

However, confusion abounds about how to get lossless versions of your music onto your iPod, as is clear from this thread on the What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision forums.

Unfortunately for people who have already ripped their record collection at a lower bit rate – even say 320kbps – you’ll need to re-rip your CD collection if you are looking to upgrade the sound. Just reformatting your music in Apple Lossless won’t make any difference.

The good news is that the effort will be well worth it: it will sound a lot better and with the cost of hard drive space dropping by the day it will only cost you time to do it!

For a quick guide how to set up iTunes for lossless encoding click here.

Is Blu-Ray the saviour of high-quality stereo?

It’s been known for a while that Neil Young’s long-awaited Archives is going to be released on Blu-ray. But now that Amazon in the US is taking pre-release orders it got us thinking about Blu-ray as an audio format. There’s very little music currently available on the new format, and much of that is surround sound mixes of Jazz and live events.

But Neil is apparently in its for the sound quality, as he told reporters at the launch earlier this year. "I thought DVD would be good enough, but you couldn't navigate around materials whilst listening to the music, and I thought that that's what my fans would want to do. Also we were defeated by technology with the sound. Now with Java you can listen in the best possible quality that we have today.

Hi Fi Writer has an interesting take on the Blu-ray question, asking when all those lovely high-resolution DVD-Audio and SACD discs will come out on Blu-ray, where developments such as Dolby True HD are working wonders for surround sound. We want the same for stereo, don’t you?

Computer Games: The Future of Surround Sound?

Computer games were once just for kids; many of those kids are in their 30s and 40s now, and many of them are still playing games. But as we get older, we get more demanding, and not just for the complexity and realism in the game play, but the way a game looks and feels, and, especially relevant here, how it sounds.
Recently Guitar Hero and Metallica hit the headlines, because the game offered a less compressed version of the Death Magnetic album than the CD release. But with amazing sound track licensing in the likes of Grand Theft Auto, which has an Iggy Pop hosted ‘radio station’ and DTS and Dolby in-game surround sound processing, games are getting closer to film with each passing year – and are more in need of decent surround sound system than ever!
What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision has just put together its five most cinematic games, and it got us thinking. What if the games console became the source component of choice for Home Theatre in the future? The Sony PS3 is the world’s most popular Blu-ray player, but would you consider using a console as your main source, even if you didn’t play games?

How Many Speakers?

After listening to the podcast discussion about surround sound in the Lab it got us wondering just how many speakers is enough for Home Theatre. The standard is obviously 5.1, with five speakers and a dedicated subwoofer. But we recently supplied speakers and amplification for a What Hi-Fi? demonstration at the Stuff Live Show for a 7.2 system, and looking at the specifications on most surround sound receivers we wondered whether you used 5.1, 6.1, 7.2 or any other multiples of speakers. Let us know.