Shawn Kernes Blog

These days its really easy to listen to almost anything you want. Subscribe to Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Soundcloud, Tidal, Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, Nugs, Groovers (the list goes on-and-on)... and stream what you want, when you want it. Some of these services, like Tidal Masters, even provide high-resolution MQA streaming (which I personally think sounds really good). Nugs has even announced that they are bringing MQA to iOS devices. To me, the biggest downside to using digital streaming services (besides sound quality - since with high-resolution flac and mqa streaming the gap has basically closed) is that listening to music becomes less intentional. For the most part, people don't sit down and listen to an album anymore, they pop-on a digital mix of some sort - and either let it play in the background or skip around from song-to-song and artist-to-artist, often not letting an entire song play through - let alone an entire album. It wasn't that long ago that li...

Records get dirty. And dirty records hiss, click, and pop. The first thing that comes to mind for most people when they hear record cleaning are those diskwasher brushes and d4 fluid. The next thing people think about is usually something like the audioquest anti-static brush. Unfortunately, neither of those really clean the record. At best, they simply remove surface dust. For real cleaning, a wet solution is required. Some options include: 1. distilled water + wetting agent in tray of water with foam mat 2. fancy version of the above like the spin-clean 2. vacuum cleaner like the vpi 3. ultrasonic (cavitation) cleaner For the simplest and cheapest DIY solution, you can make due with the following: 1. 14 inch round cake pan (about 2 inches deep) 2. foam mat (from arts and crafts store) to cover the bottom of the pan 3. distilled water 4. a wetting agent (like photoflo, tergitol 15-s-7, or detergent (lubricant and fragrance free)) 5. paint pads (something lik...

I have been considering options for adding a disk transport to my audio system. There appear to be few good modern options at "reasonable" price points. standouts include: https://www.cambridgeaudio.com/usa/en/products/cx/cxc http://www.psaudio.com/products/directstream-memory-player/  (im not sure anyone would consider this a reasonable price point) there are also some great resources for choosing or modifying older models: http://lampizator.eu/LAMPIZATOR/TRANSPORT/CD_transport_DIY.html I'm thinking it would be really nice to play the DSD layer of SACD's through an external DAC, namely my Directstream DAC... Which, thanks to SACD copy protection, leaves me with only the Directstream Memory Player as a commercial out the box solution. I could go with something like an Oppo 205 which includes a really good DAC Chip, and power supply. It also happens to play MQA and work as a ROON endpoint... This would be a nice one box digital solution for my 2nd syst...