Juha
17-02-2012, 17:44
I have a house in a small village in southern France. 25 kilometers to the Mediterranean near the Spanish border. I spend winter months here to escape snow and cold of northern Europe (Estonia and Finland). All my work is done on Internet. French net connection is good.
This year I thought that it would be ok to work here for 3 months without decent sound equipment. I have spare stuff at home, but did not bring anything. Just two laptops for my work.
It is a good experiment to start from zero. How can I get tolerable sound at a reasonable cost? This is not Paris, this is French countryside. So ebay.fr would be my source for equipment.
After two 4 hours sessions on ebay.fr I found speakers. 200 km drive to get them.
The speakers are Elipson Orphelie 93 cm tall floorstanders. They have two identical 13 cm Monacor SPH-135/AD units and an Elipson stamped tweeter. This Monacor model is known as LS3/5A woofer replacement.
I have good memories of Luxman equipment from the 80’s. Several hours on ebay.fr and a Luxman L-190 integrated amp was mine. This is late 80’s Duo-Beta, 40 watts.
This is normal stuff, but here it gets more difficult. How to get good sound playing music with computers? Connecting a cable on the computer audio output would be not good enough. So I needed a DAC or an USB converter.
Here is something French (http://www.audiophonics.fr/audiophonics-uct27-103-carte-son-stereo-spdif-usb-p-5877.html)
http://kuninga.com/audiophonics.jpg
This unit costs only 13 GBP, it has a Burr-Brown chip. I found a story on the net that members of a Finnish high-end audio site liked it so much that they made a group purchase of 100 units.
Being a computer person this next story was hard to accept. I installed Foobar2000 and the WSAPI driver. A bit is a bit and all USB connections are the same. Not at all. Both my laptops (Dell and Acer) had severe sound distortion issues. They sounded terrible. Better USB cable? Well this small DAC has its own 5 cm cable. I tried an old Pentium 4 Asus desktop. Good sound, as good as Squeezebox Touch at home.
The moral of the story is that in computer audio you have to test with many computers.
Total cost 166 GBP.
Test music: Steely Dan Aja, the Beatles Abbey Road, Paradise Radio 192 kbps stream.
http://kuninga.com/stereo.jpg
This year I thought that it would be ok to work here for 3 months without decent sound equipment. I have spare stuff at home, but did not bring anything. Just two laptops for my work.
It is a good experiment to start from zero. How can I get tolerable sound at a reasonable cost? This is not Paris, this is French countryside. So ebay.fr would be my source for equipment.
After two 4 hours sessions on ebay.fr I found speakers. 200 km drive to get them.
The speakers are Elipson Orphelie 93 cm tall floorstanders. They have two identical 13 cm Monacor SPH-135/AD units and an Elipson stamped tweeter. This Monacor model is known as LS3/5A woofer replacement.
I have good memories of Luxman equipment from the 80’s. Several hours on ebay.fr and a Luxman L-190 integrated amp was mine. This is late 80’s Duo-Beta, 40 watts.
This is normal stuff, but here it gets more difficult. How to get good sound playing music with computers? Connecting a cable on the computer audio output would be not good enough. So I needed a DAC or an USB converter.
Here is something French (http://www.audiophonics.fr/audiophonics-uct27-103-carte-son-stereo-spdif-usb-p-5877.html)
http://kuninga.com/audiophonics.jpg
This unit costs only 13 GBP, it has a Burr-Brown chip. I found a story on the net that members of a Finnish high-end audio site liked it so much that they made a group purchase of 100 units.
Being a computer person this next story was hard to accept. I installed Foobar2000 and the WSAPI driver. A bit is a bit and all USB connections are the same. Not at all. Both my laptops (Dell and Acer) had severe sound distortion issues. They sounded terrible. Better USB cable? Well this small DAC has its own 5 cm cable. I tried an old Pentium 4 Asus desktop. Good sound, as good as Squeezebox Touch at home.
The moral of the story is that in computer audio you have to test with many computers.
Total cost 166 GBP.
Test music: Steely Dan Aja, the Beatles Abbey Road, Paradise Radio 192 kbps stream.
http://kuninga.com/stereo.jpg