Whats your favourite type of audio?

[Dude111]

I see alot of people using 5.1 or 7.1 .. Thats all digital right?

I dont like that stuff,not natural sounding at all.... I prefer straight analogue

(Always have since I started listening to audio)

What do you like??

 

[Oyeve]

2.1 is the best IMO for music. Still kicking my vinyls. Nothing sounds better.

 

[jdoggg12]

2.1 is the best IMO for music. Still kicking my vinyls. Nothing sounds better.

Unless it's done in 5.1

http://dts-music.net/

 

[DigDog]

my fav audio is live.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I like live in places with good accoustics, or I like 2.1 or 5.1 depending on how the source material is recorded. I do love a the warm glow of a good tube amp, however, for recorded music, Im generally happy with a CD or a Bluray 5.1 audio mix. I also dont mind a decent mp3 rip.

Something like this gives lots of flexibility:
http://www.amazon.com/Raven-Refused-Steven-Wilson-Blu-ray/dp/B00AQB2AR4

 

[blackangst1]

DTS

 

[Oyeve]

Unless it's done in 5.1

http://dts-music.net/

Most of those were upmixed and not true 5.1. But good nonetheless.

 

[thesmokingman]

Binaural is always a blast to get into.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Also, Leslie speakers are awesome. My brother picked up a cheap old used Organ to tinker with since he got rid of his piano that was missing lots of keys. The thing has a fantastic warm sound. The leslie speaker in it is really cool.

 

[giantpandaman2]

I still pick up CD's and rip them. Pretty good balance between quality, portability, and usability.

It may sound blasphemous, but I rarely listen to my vinyls. Just plain too annoying to flip and switch when I'm doing other things.

 

[Humpy]

my fav audio is live.

I like how the sound at big outdoor concerts changes as the wind blows. It's one of my favorite things in life.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Dts hd

 

[s44]

live

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

live, especially when Im on the house mixer.

 

[purbeast0]

any HD soundtrack on a properly mixed bluray.

 

[biostud]

2.0 or 2.1

 

[Mike64]

Literally speaking, I guess I'd have to say my "favorite" would be 2.1 analog. But that's if we're talking "Platonic ideals", rather than reality.

As far as 2.0 vs 2.1 is concerned, I have an inherited pair of "Advent" Legacy II's, with which I can happily live without a subwoofer. (Especially since I live in an apartment with a decent-sized but by no means "large" living room (sonically speaking, as it is, the Legacy IIs are actually a bit big for the size and shape of the room). And while I do hate my upstairs neighbors for the amount of non-musical noise they make, I have nothing against my downstairs neighbors who would be the ones to suffer if I cranked up a sub.) For that matter, even my second/ary pair of much smaller/weaker Cambers aren't at all bad, given that I'm really not a "bass-head" where music's concerned and am totally uninterested in "serious" home theater audio. (I just don't watch enough movies to give it a second thought, much less worry about it.)

And as far as analog vs digital, it just isn't worth the expense first and foremost, or even the effort, to me to put together or maintain the kind of system that makes it worthwhile. As far as I'm concerned, except at the very highest end, digital playback blows analog completely out of the water (I am not after all one of the .0001% of humans with the hearing of a dolphin...) Indeed, I for one was absolutely delighted when, first, decent digital playback got cheap enough to be truly "affordable" and then continued to advance to the point where you actually kind of have to make somewhat of an effort to buy something that sounds appreciably crappy...

Not to mention that cost aside, it's been a really long time since I had to think about how heavily I was walking by my stereo, and I really have no great interest in starting all that and the related annoyances back up again... like having to remember to clean, and replace, needles, frequently re-balance tonearms, worry about how I"m storing my LPs, etc. Not to mention that I'd hate to give up being able to transfer music freely between playback devices, or being able to peruse my music collection without having to literally flip through box after box of vinyl (or worry about keeping it in alphabetical order so I can actually find what I'm looking for. Etc, etc, etc (and the longer I think back on the pre-digital era, the longer the list of "et ceteras" seems to get... )

 

[Deders]

When I had my Frankenstein 5.1 system using 2 almost identical Wharfedale mini all in 1 systems, a Denon CD player with only 1 working speaker for the Center channel, and a half price Logitech sub, I could use my X-FI to send music to all speakers with no loss in fidelity, and it was glorious (considering the whole lot only cost me £110).

Now I have a proper receiver, because it is all driven by one amp, it is more efficient for stereo music when just playing through the front 2 speakers and sub. So switching from stereo so it comes out of all, seems to lose a bit of fidelity. I believe this is common with many receivers.

I occasionally use Dolby Pro Logic II to expand the music in a pseudo surround way, but usually out of curiosity or just if I fancy a change as there is some phase wizardry going on to extract the centre vocals for the centre speaker etc. It's effective, but at the loss of fidelity. Using it just depends on what mood I'm in.

Been getting into surround recordings, some of which when done well are absolutely awesome. Pink Floyd performed their concerts in surround so technically it is the way it was supposed to be heard.

Steve Wilson from Porcupine Tree has been actively writing for surround systems so many of their albums will have surround bonus DVD's. He also does his own work, and has produced many of the Opeth albums in surround.

Trent Reznor has produced a few Nine Inch Nails songs in surround, most notably The Downward Spiral, and The Fragile.

Aerosmith's Toys in the attic has a decent surround version. Deep Purple's machine head, and Refused's The Shape of Punk to come.

Metallica's Black album is available in surround, makes good use of the rear speakers for sounds that would normally be melded in the mix as textures. Worth a listen if you like the album, but it was written for stereo initially so it won't have the same impact as ones that weren't.

Also found some Bowie effectively mixed in surround, as well as Zeppelin but from the little I've heard so far, it wasn't as effective.

I use Wasapi for windows playback, it tells my receiver exactly how many channels to expect, and what sampling rate each piece of media happens to be so the receiver can adapt accordingly without having to manually switch it if you don't want the interpolation artifacts that occur when playing back say 44.1 music at 48KHz which most DVD's play back at.

When I want the absolute best quality my system can provide, I use JRiver Media Centre to send the file itself over to my receiver over a network cable using DLNA. I've always found that Sony render music files, whether MP3 or lossless better than most MP3 players (some Sony MP3 players anyway) and I've found there is a noticeable improvement in SQ on my receiver when it deals with the file itself, completely bypassing windows.

Not all hardware decoders are created equally. For instance on the Wharfedale systems in my Frankenstein setup, if I made an MP3 CD and played that on it, it would sound fine. If I put those same files on a USB thumbstick in or an SD card and plugged that in, the files would be played back as if they had been encoded at 64kb/s. Just as an extreme example.