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M-Audio
Audiophile USB & Behringer B2030A Studio Monitor Epilogue: Resurrection of an Audiophile In recent times, my interest in things audiophile has been resurrected thanks to regular discussions with a coworker who has been Yoda to my Luke Skywalker on matters pertaining to MP3 compression, headphone amps, and hard drive based MP3 players. Coincidentally, another friend has also seen the audio beast reemerge thanks to working on building a smokin’ system for his car and our discussions back and forth just egged us onwards for home audio. I even started a subscription to Stereophile magazine again J
First, as already mentioned, the influence from my coworker (yes, Yoda, I blame you for my descent into hi-fi hell once more) and friend. Second, I finally found some space to set up my hi-fi. For some years, I had no space for all of my electronics and computers. Things were located where space allowed and many items were just stored away in a closet or corner. But, I’ve finally been able to wrangle a spare bedroom to act as my home office and now my desktop computer and photography gear have their own space. When I first setup the home office, I had no audiophile pretensions because I figured most of my music listening would be done as background music through a Rotel integrated amp and cheap Energy bookshelf speakers, or via headphones and the Headsave Classic amp. However, as the audiophile in me rose Phoenix-like from the ashes of 1997, I took another look at my home office and had a crazy thought. If I reorganized the desk and bookshelves, I could setup my hi-fi, which consists of a Jurassic era Arcam Delta 70.2 CD player (Methuselah would be a young ‘un compared to this player), Sonic Frontiers SFL-1 pre-amp, Classe CA200 power amp, and Dynaudio Audience 8 speakers. Other pieces also include a Yamaha carousel CD changer (now starting to act up), a Nakamichi Cassette Deck 2, a Teac tuner, and a NAD power amp. Cables are a mish-mash of cost effective solutions bought over the years I’ve had the hi-fi. In setting up the big rig, I decided on a minimalist approach of just the CD player, pre-amp, power amp, and speakers. With the hi-fi setup again, it seemed kind of silly to continue to have the Rotel and Energy speakers connected to the computer, so I used them and the other pieces of gear to create a living room system. To obtain sound from the computer, I can either run a long run of interconnects to the pre-amp, or, when I purchase an outboard DAC to upgrade the CD player’s sound, I could run a coaxial S/PDIF cable from the computer’s motherboard into the DAC.
Alternatively, I could buy a PCI sound card that offers a bit-perfect digital output into the outboard DAC unit. Another option is to get a DAC with a USB port and connect the computer to the DAC via USB. Plenty of choices for the techno dweeb in all of us. After several hours of sweat, close to some tears, and very nearly some blood being let because I was trying to manhandle a large two-piece bookshelf on my own, I had my home office reconfigured. At first, I wanted a large two-piece bookshelf out of the room to provide some more space for the speakers, but my wife vetoed that idea because our youngest would take delight in pulling the books and magazines off of the shelves. And in hindsight, keeping the bookshelf in the room should actually make for better sound because all the books and magazines would help to diffuse the sound and break up the reflections. Room rearranged, hi-fi components setup, it was finally time to fire up the system for the first time in at least a couple of years. Given that the speakers were still not ideally placed and that everything was running cold, the sound was not that bad, or perhaps it had been so long, I couldn’t hear the difference. But give the components a week of warming up and burning in and the sound should improve nicely, and hopefully my ears will lose their brass tarnish and reveal some gold once more.
I’m a happy camper again because now the equipment is no longer in danger of being destroyed by my kids. I don’t have to worry that my speakers sitting on three spiked cones will teeter and totter whenever one of the kids brushes against them. Or if I turn off my amp and place a dustcover towel on top of it that one of the kids won’t turn it back on cook it to near death, both of which have occurred in the past. My home office is coming together as my refuge, but the kicker is that much of my day-to-day computer work does not take place in it. My desktop is my high-level digital editing machine and not my regular use computer. That role is assigned to my Toshiba P20 notebook that is located in another room. While it had some powered computer speakers hooked up to it, I didn’t find myself listening to the low quality output too often, so I packed the cheap speakers away. Was there a way that I could get some better sound for this computer that I find myself using so much? With such thoughts in mind, I began the search for accessories that would allow me to build another system around the notebook computer. As such, this article was originally supposed to be a review of the Echo Indigo IO PCMCIA sound card for notebook computers. Unfortunately, the Indigo IO sample I received was defective and over 48 hours of ownership; I tried to coax some life out of it, but failed.
Back to the retailer it went and while contemplating whether or not I wanted another replacement, I decided that the Indigo IO was not the best option for my particular setup. My Toshiba P20 has the PCMCIA slot on the right side of the base, right beside two of the four USB ports available on the P20. My setup requires all four USB ports and using the Indigo IO with headphones or outboard amps/speakers results in the two USB ports being blocked. The simple fix is buying a USB hub, which means even more of a mess of cables on the desktop. My other, much older notebook has the PCMCIA slot on the left side and this is a better setup, unfortunately, the Indigo IO never even peeped a sound when plugged into the old PII. For sure, getting a bum card straight off did not endear me to the Indigo IO despite the fine reviews it received from the magazines, Audio Ideas Guide and Stereophile. The inconvenience of it when used with the P20 just sealed the deal to look for an alternative. Before buying the Indigo IO, I was looking into good sounding PCI soundcards for the desktop and came across M-Audio as a promising source. M-Audio’s Audiophile 2496 looked promising for the desktop and for a bit more money, an external USB version is available (also comes in Firewire flavor too). I applied the money paid for the Indigo IO towards the M-Audio Audiophile USB sound card and also ordered the Behringer B2030A active studio monitors. M-Audio Audiophile USB The
Audiophile USB is about the size of a wireless router and provides
a ¼ inch headphone jack on the front with its own volume control.
Another volume control is provided to control the output jacks.
The rear provides an AC power socket for a wall wart type power supply, USB socket, RCA digital S/PDIF input and output, analog RCA input and output, and ¼ inch TRS input. When using the ¼ inch input sockets, the RCA input sockets are defeated. The Audiophile USB comes with a CD-R for the drivers and additional CD-Rs for some sample recording software.
The Audiophile USB is a device meant for use by recording engineers on the go; however, my use of the Audiophile USB is much more pedestrian. I simply want to get some decent sound for music playback out of my notebook system. I thought the Indigo IO would provide that need in a convenient and very portable device. Moving up to the Audiophile USB takes away from the portability aspect due to the need for AC power, but given that my P20 is a power hog that requires AC to run at its best, it’s not too much of an issue. For those interested in portability without AC power restrictions, the Firewire version of the Audiophile card can be bus-powered via the Firewire connection, but it must be with a computer that offers a 6-pin Firewire connection. As my P20 only has a 4-pin Firewire port, I would still have to use the AC adapter to power the Audiophile Firewire. I chose the USB version because USB is more universal and less finicky about hot-plugging devices than Firewire, which sounds like as much a pain in the ass as SCSI devices are. However, this compatibility benefit is potentially a hindrance, as I’ll describe further down. One of the potentials the Audiophile USB “seemed” to offer was the ability to connect an external CD or DVD player to utilize the 24/96 DAC. It has the inputs, so why wouldn’t I try them? Well, I did, but unfortunately, I got no sound from using either the analog or digital inputs. My best guess as to why the analog or digital inputs would not work is because of the requirement for a mixer, or maybe specialized recording software. I put the question to M-Audio’s tech support and they confirmed that the inputs are only active with recording software. Damn, I’m going to have to teach myself to become an amateur recording engineer to try and access the inputs J I was, however, able to get the output from the M-Audio working, which is my primary desire, so onwards we go. Sound
Quality through Headphones
My source was my desktop computer using Winamp to playback lossless FLAC files. The sound went through the M-Audio via its USB port, and I used the M-Audio’s output RCA jacks to feed the Headsave amp via a low-cost, but still okay Prisma cable (someday soon, I’ll have some good quality cables to use for these kinds of comparisons). I set the M-Audio for 24/96 output to maximize the quality. With the Grado SR100 headphones, I found no qualitative difference between the two headphone amps. Going back and forth, when I thought I heard something just ever so different, I found the other amp to offer the same quality. Wish I had more to say, but there just isn’t anymore to add other than that. The same applied when I used my Sennheiser HD580 headphones. Another
Opinion via Headphones My friend indicated that while his Sennheiser HD600 cans definitely benefited from being driven by a dedicated headphone amp, he was concerned about the top-end response being more forward than he was use to and contributing to much earlier listening fatigue. His test CD was a Diana Krall one that he is very familiar thanks to many listening sessions over a couple of weeks since getting his HD600 cans. After expressing such concerns he connected the Headsave amp directly to his own CD player for a comparison and he found the sound to be better. The high frequency concerns disappeared and he just expressed regret that his own headphone amp was still on order from Xin (the Super Macro 3) at the time of our session. We speculated that the initial lower quality high frequency presentation could be due to any number of things in the audio chain, from the DVD-R drive in the notebook, to the M-Audio, to internal fan noise from the notebook. Sound
Quality via the Hi-Fi I wasn’t able to discern any meaningful differences between the two, so I’m satisfied that my desktop can be a serviceable source component if I desired to use it as such into my hi-fi. Nitpicks The Audiophile USB has analog and digital inputs, but there’s no selector control on the front of the USB. Instead, one has to go into the software control panel to activate the various inputs and outputs. For a supposedly pro device, or even as just a regular sound device, it’s unfortunate that one cannot easily use a switch to select inputs, but since the inputs can only be used with recording software, it makes the need for a physical selector switch rather moot. I suppose the above nitpicks can be explained off as being built to a price point. Another limitation of the Audiophile USB is the inability to enjoy full 24/96 quality for all four inputs and outputs because of the bandwidth limitations of the USB 1.1 connection. I don’t know if USB 2.0 offers an improvement in this regard, but I would think that Firewire would. Even if the digital input worked as I had hoped, you can have the input coming in at 24/96, but you wouldn’t be able to output it at 24/96. The more inputs and outputs you select, the M-Audio Control Panel will deselect the 24-bit option and reduce it to 16-bit quality. Same for the 96 KHz setting, the more I/O’s activated, the unit kicks it down to 48 KHz as a maximum setting. The last nitpick is about the drivers. The XP drivers are from 2003 and I question whether they’re still stable and appropriate because Winamp, my primary application for playback of FLAC files has crashed at times when the M-Audio is on. Windows Media Player also has fits every now and then and both WMP and Winamp require me to shut down the M-Audio and then power up again. I notice that Max OS X users have had regular driver updates right up to 2005. Rather than it being a sign of M-Audio being on the ball with updates, it indicates that the driver was not very good to begin with. I’m also annoyed with Windows always asking me to install the driver for the M-Audio when I turn it on...but…the drivers are already installed? This is boneheaded and M-Audio should update their Windows driver to current standards, especially after the major Service Pack 2 upgrade. If I had done a bit more research into the Audiophile USB, I’m not certain I would purchase it again. I’d be more inclined to go for the Audiophile Firewire version. For those that do not need the flexibility of the Audiophile USB, M-Audio has a more compact device called the Transit, which is USB bus-powered and has I/O on 1/8 inch jacks. However, it doesn’t have its own volume control, so one must always go into the computer to control the output level, not a deal breaker, but not convenient either. The Transit also requires a minimum of a Pentium III to output the highest quality 24/96 signal, which leaves it out as a consideration with my other, much older notebook computer. For my primary intended purposes, the Audiophile USB works fairly well to output a 24/96 signal for headphone, or hi-fi listening. It’s probably not the kind of device that other audio nuts would think about or consider and frankly, if someone were to ask me, I’d suggest the Firewire version for the possibility of greater bandwidth to allow higher quality settings for the digital and analog I/O’s. Behringer B2030A Studio Monitor Speakers
As already mentioned, I have an NAD power amp available that could provide power to speakers and while I did work out a setup that included this amp and my bookshelf Energy XL150 speakers, it just became too unwieldy where I have the notebook located. After trying out and then deciding that using the old NAD amp and Energy speakers was too much of a hassle, I looked for higher quality active speakers. It dawned on me that professionally oriented studio monitors should do the trick because of the similarities of listening in the near field whether one is in front of a mixing board or a computer. Passive speakers are what most people come across or think about when speakers come to mind. Passive speakers require an external amplifier to power them whereas active speakers have built-in amplification that requires AC power and a volume-controllable line signal in from a source component. You pay more for a comparable active speaker versus a passive speaker, but you save on not having to buy a separate amp and on space requirements for that amp. Active speakers can also be hauled around and setup with less fuss. The question was, which studio monitor to buy for a modest home computer system. If I had the money, Genelec would be nice, but we’re talking almost $1000 for the cheapest speakers with the better ones going into two and three thousand dollars per pair. Definite audiophile pricing territory, but I needed to reach a wee bit lower in price. Why go the trouble of finding better active speakers when so many are available and can be bought in so many outlets including grocery stores? The sound from them is thin with bass (if any) that thumps rather than being tuneful. They are not conducive to long listening sessions and I find myself not bothering to listen to music through them anymore. This is exactly what Gerard Resjkind of Ultra High Fidelity magazine stated would happen if a person were forced to listen to music through mass-market audio components. With a tip of the hat to Mr. Resjkind, I sought to alleviate this deficiency by improving the audio capabilities of the notebook system. Perusing the Oakwood Broadcast website for studio monitors got me onto Behringer and after finding and reading a couple of reviews, they seemed to be the right mix of size, quality, and price. Behringer makes passive and active versions of their two studio monitors, and of course I chose the active models, but at double the price of the passive versions. Behringer the company is also the name of the founder, who was once a poor starving student in Germany, never able to afford any good recording equipment. So he decided that once he had the means to do so, he would create a company that designed and sold cost effective, yet still high quality pro sound equipment to cost conscious musicians and recording engineers. The model that caught my eye for being considered good for sound quality and price consideration were the Behringer B2030A. I also considered the Behringer B2031A, which are larger and modestly more expensive, but offered one great feature of Auto-on, so that one could leave the speakers on all the time, but the speaker would only be “on” when a signal is detected. This makes for greater convenience than having to reach over the top and behind to power on each speaker. However, after much thought to the space constraints I faced with the notebook system, I decided to live with the inconvenience and buy the smaller B2030A’s instead.
I “knew” the dimensions of the speakers from the specs available online, but I’m pretty poor at taking written physical dimensions and imagining their real size, hence my surprise at how big the B2030’s really are. I can, however, imagine how shocked I would have been if I had ordered the larger B2031’s J Basic setup is pretty simple and straightforward. Place the speakers in your desired location; connect the speakers to a pre-amp or volume controllable source component via XLR, or ¼ inch TRS cables; plug in the power cords for the speakers; power up the pre-amp or source; then power up the speakers.
There is also an output setting to adjust how loud the speaker will go depending on your source. Some amps or mixer boards may offer more or less output, so the B2030’s offer the ability to tune that as well. I set them to the nominal 0 db setting. In fact, most of my listening was with the settings at their nominal levels in order to get a sense of a speaker on their own. Primary intended use is with the B2030’s receiving a signal from the M-Audio Audiophile USB sound card with lossless music source files coming from the computer’s hard drive. Original setup had the speakers placed on either side of my dual CRT monitors (the Behringers’ are shielded, so there’s no concern). It meant that the speakers were closer to me than I’d desire, but there isn’t much real estate available for me to play with and again, studio monitors are generally meant to be listened to in the near-field position. The initial quick listening session after only a couple of hours of break-in, indicated a fast and nimble speaker. Bass response was definitely not the same as the Dynaudio speakers that has specs going down deeper than the B2030’s, which is as expected of the larger speaker. That isn’t to say that the B2030’s lacked bass, but that it was not of the same amount or energy for certain tracks of music.
However, play a track with some real bass wallop, such as the opening overture on the Hero soundtrack and the B2030’s will give you a good measure of that bass impact. With the Hero track played back credibly, I tried Sister Drum by Chinese singer Dadawa and Chinese composer Zhu Zhe Qin. I know this track has “really” deep bass extension when played back on a high-end, full-range speaker and has incredible bass dynamics; unfortunately, I didn’t get the same impact from the B2030’s, as I recall the Genesis 500’s providing (the first time I heard Sister Drum and the reason why I rushed out to find the CD for myself). There is of course a small matter of something like $25,000 separating the Genesis 500 speakers and the Behringer B2030A’s J A review I read before purchase led me to believe that I should expect an elevated top-end, or an emphasis in the high frequencies. It seemed to make sense since these are studio monitors that are suppose to reveal details in a recording mix. However, my listening did not have me reach behind to lessen the tweeter output. In fact, I found the B2030’s to be pretty well mannered in the high frequencies, and this was without much break-in at all. Not as sweet in the top-end like the Dynaudio’s with their cloth dome tweeters, but not at all harsh as I’ve heard other metal dome tweeters sound, including my former B&W DM640s. With active amplification powering the drivers, I had expected the speaker to be “fast,” that is that details would emerge without sounding like they were tied to an anchor as can sometimes occur with large speakers. It does make me wonder if perhaps the ideal system would be very high quality mini-monitors mated to an external subwoofer? In theory you get the both of both worlds, but in reality, such audio nirvana can be difficult, or very expensive to achieve. Witness the efforts speaker designers have endured to try and credibly mate fast ribbon or electrostatic speakers with bass woofers. The best efforts seem to lead to separate enclosures for the mid-range and tweeter drivers with the troublesome bass enclosure banished to the corners, as seen in Arnie Nudell’s monstrous efforts with Infinity and Genesis, and some old Gayle Sanders’ designs at Martin Logan. Speed and response of nimble sound transducers such as ribbons or electrostatic panels are greater than passively driven woofers and the better efforts in which both ribbon and woofer live together in the same enclosure, have sometimes required the woofers to be actively driven by their amp, to try and get some more speed. Genesis speakers, for example, use servo-driven woofers powered by their own custom amp. Anyway, that was a bit of a digression to talk about speakers costing tens of thousands of dollars whereas the Behringer B2030A’s can be bought for under CAN $400. The passive version of the B2030A, known as the B2030P, can be bought for under $200 and frankly, if I had known about them last year when I bought the Energy speakers, I’d have very quickly gone with them because the Energy speakers aren’t in the same class despite being in the same price range. My original setup with the computer system wasn’t ideal for the speakers, as I found that my ears were only about three feet away from the speaker. This is just too close to allow the speakers to image properly and disappear.
On some rock music, I’ll get a centered image for the singer, but find that almost everything else is firing directly from the speakers. It’s somewhat disconcerting to hear such extreme left/right imaging (or lack of) and if the music is being pummeled through distortion generators, it just makes for an even more grating experience. Matthew Sweet is one such guilty party. Sweet has written some good, catchy tunes in his career and he’s one of those writers/singers who seem to do 90 percent of the work in the recording studio, from singing, to playing most of the instruments, to producing. But, he really seems to like fuzzy and distorted guitar sounds. Lenny Kravitz is another multi-talented singer/writer/musician who goes a bit overboard with the distortion generators. What I’m getting at is that I expect my speakers to disappear when I listen to music seriously and that generally means that the imaging has to be tightly centered with good depth and sound staging. It’s great to have the sound stage go beyond the speakers, but you need good speakers and well-recorded music for that to happen (Q Sound and other audio tricks excepted). The B2030’s, despite being studio monitors and expected to be heard in near-field positions, still presented a discombobulated imaging in that while I had some centered imaging, a lot of the sound was easily discerned as coming straight from the speakers. I needed another setup. I reorganized my desk and pushed the speakers father back. Ideally, I’d like at least five-feet from the speaker front to my ear for good coherence. Unfortunately, final setup will still have the speakers closer than I’d like and I’m still experimenting a bit. I’m getting closer to where I want to go with the B2030’s, but my particular desktop restricts what I can do. My desk is a corner style unit with the computer monitors in the corner section with extensions on either side of the corner. The speakers are placed as far away as possible on those extensions, but placement is definitely not traditional. At this time, I have the speakers toed in severely, resulting in them pointing more forward than my seating position which allows for a strong centered image, decent soundstage height, but I still have some coherence issues, as the speaker placement does not allow them to just disappear. Critical listening to the B2030’s was with them sitting on top of the Dynaudio speakers, so that they were presenting music in a traditional setup. In order to be able to go back and forth between the regular hi-fi and the monitors, I sourced them differently. The Behringer speakers were sourced by my computer outputting lossless music files via the M-Audio Audiophile USB. The Dynaudio speakers were powered by the Classe amp, connected to the Sonic Frontiers pre-amp, and sourced by the Arcam CD player. While it’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison, I felt the M-Audio output was of similar quality to the CD player. I referenced the volume for both setups with a Radio Shack sound level meter. The Behringers are definitely lighter in presentation and a little more open in the top end thanks to the metal dome tweeter. Clarity was better than the Dynaudio speakers. I felt that instead of the music being somewhat congealed into a mass, the Behringers gave a better sense of individual separation of instruments. The biggest difference was in bass output and dynamics where the small Behringers could not match the larger Dynaudio speakers powered by a decent 200-watt amplifier. Not only was the Hero overture played back with greater bass impact, so too was the sense of unrestrained power when the music demanded it whereas the Behringers seemed to hold back the expressive demands of the music. While I listened at a pretty decent sound level (1 KHz tone referenced to 80 db on the sound level meter) for my small room, I never saw the clipping light come on for the Behringer speakers, so I have to assume the restraint is part and parcel of the design. Listening to Etta James singing At Last from the Northern Exposure soundtrack gave me an imaginary sense that Ms. James was Aretha Franklin-sized through the Dynaudios. The lady has chops and I can feel it through the larger speakers. Via the Behringers. Ms. James seemed to shrink to Gladys Knight proportions. The low frequency weight being absent and giving Ms. James a very light and quick tone. She might even have shrunk down to Diana Ross proportions J Which presentation is right? Can’t say since I hardly go to live concerts, so I lack a sense of reference to suggest which is “more” correct. Can I be a coward and say I liked aspects of both presentations? The clarity that the Behringers offer is addictive and ideally, I’d like that mated to the low frequency impact, power, and dynamics offered by the Dynaudio/Classe combination. The speakers are also pretty honest in letting me hear how crappy some rock/pop recordings are, as they should given their studio pretensions. Nitpicks I have no qualms about the build quality and weight isn’t an issue, but placement of the controls at the back is inconvenient. While it makes for a clean and elegant front with only a green power-on LED and a red clipping LED indicator, it’s a hassle to always have to reach back to dial in some settings. It doesn’t make sense to me that studio monitors meant to sit on top of a mixing board shouldn’t have the controls on the front for the engineer to quickly dial in. Even if the idea is that once the speakers have been setup optimally in their location and never have to dialed in again, it still doesn’t make sense that the listener should always have to reach around back, or walk around the mixing board to adjust the controls until the right balance has been reached. It would also have been really nice to have the power switch on the front too. The power and signal connections are also inconvenient for my setup. There’s a metal protrusion at the back of the speaker that houses the amps and circuitry with the power and signal connections coming in at the bottom of this protrusion. Instead of a horizontal orientation, the B2030’s have vertically oriented connections. Due to my having to use adapters with my interconnect cables, there isn’t enough clearance for the connection, so I’ve had to raise the speakers off of the desktop. This vertical orientation also doesn’t make sense for speakers meant to be used on top of a mixing board, but if I were to mount them on dedicated speaker stands, the vertical orientation would be very welcome. However, this won’t be my intended usage, so it just becomes another pain in the rear for me. I may eventually get some short tiptoe cones to use with the speakers to provide the needed clearance, as well as to de-couple the speakers from the desk. Conclusion Of the two products I ordered in, I’m quite happy with the quality offered by the Behringer B2030A studio monitors. For $400, they’re right in line with higher-end models of multimedia speakers available in computer shops. However, these are real speakers meant for use as recording monitors. As such, their build and sound quality are better than multimedia speakers. While small for audio speakers, they are quite large for use as computer speakers and my original intended use with my notebook computer has gone by the wayside. They now reside in my office with my desktop system. As with the M-Audio product, I’m not sure just how much interest readers of this website will have in such speakers, because of their rather specialized nature and it does make for some difficulty in demo’ing them before purchase because they come from Germany, but blind as I was in ordering them in, I’m satisfied with their sound. It does however; make me wonder just how good the really expensive studio monitors are from Genelec J The other product, the M-Audio Audiophile USB external sound card, I’m a little less enthusiastic about, however, if all you want is a portable sound card to output some 24-bit, 96 KHz files out to your hi-fi or speakers, then it’s an acceptable device to consider. It’s nice to have a sound card and a decent quality headphone amp, in a relatively portable device. It’s just too bad that it could not be used as a DAC for external devices without using some recording software. I make no mention of its recording abilities because I know nothing about recording and will never make use of the Audiophile USB for such purposes. The Echo Indigo card is still something that I’d suggest considering, so long as you can get a good working sample. And if you have P III system or newer, I’d also consider the low cost M-Audio Transit outboard soundcard. For more money there is also Headroom’s Bithead headphone amp, which upon initial read sounds really promising. It can be battery or bus-powered and it uses a USB connection to channel the sound from the computer to the Bithead, which then powers the headphones. It doesn’t need to be used with a computer all the time either, as you can use it as a standalone portable headphone amp. It costs US $200 in its regular version and about $265 for its upgraded version. It’s intriguing enough that I just might have to try it someday J Despite the nitpicks, I've found that when working on something with the desktop and the music is playing, I'll stop my work and just kick back and listen to the music. Not much more has to be said than that. Oakwood
Broadcast Inc. While I could make all of the purchases for nominally lower prices from US retailers, once the exchange rate conversion, S&H over the border, and taxes are applied, the deal that once was, is no longer anything special. Plus if there are ever any problems, you’ve got border hassles to deal with. Finding a Canadian retailer that could offer competitive prices is always my first choice of making audio or photographic purchases and I was quite happy to have found Oakwood as an outlet that seemed to offer very good pricing on a variety of products that interested me. As a pro sound outlet, one would not think that an audiophile could find much of interest, but Oakwood sells computer sound cards, high quality studio monitors that would rival audiophile quality speakers, and audiophile approved headphones, amongst other products. They were very good to deal with when the Echo Indigo soundcard went bust and I was more than happy to continue making purchases from them. Being out of province, I also saved on provincial sales taxes and deliveries are made via overnight courier, which is very nice. If Oakwood offers a sound accessory or product you’re interested in, I recommend you check them out before you finalize where to buy from. Tip, sign-up at their website and notice how the prices get even better J |
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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Because
of the room’s rather tight parameters now that the hi-fi has been
setup again, my listening position is quite close and definitely
near-field listening. I don’t mind this because back in the days
when I was listening regularly and seriously, I found that I preferred
to be closer to the speakers for greater immediacy and to minimize
reflections.
When
it worked, however briefly, I was hearing some pretty good sound
and there was more than enough juice to power my hungry Sennheiser
HD580 headphones. Alas, the Indigo IO rarely lasted more than a
few minutes before its heart started to flicker, which resulted
in some rude snap, crackle, and pop sounds from the headphones or
speakers.
With
the purchase of the M-Audio sound card, I needed to look at what
speaker options to use with the potentially higher quality sound.
It would seem quite silly to have spent a chunk of coin on a better
sound card only to feed that higher quality signal into cheap multimedia
speakers.
Smaller
is relative though because the B2030’s are still larger than I had
expected them to be and they’re also quite heavy beasts for smallish
speakers thanks to the two amps per speaker. The speakers are large
enough that I’ve decided not to use them with my notebook-based
system and I will keep them in the main office for use with the
desktop computer. 
At
the back of the B2030’s are three control settings to adjust the
tweeter, woofer, and room adjustment. The first two are self-explanatory,
but the second is interesting because it would allow you to tune
the speaker to your room or speaker placement. E.g. placed in the
open with plenty of space around the speaker, or placed tight against
a wall or corner, which would affect the sound, especially the bass
response.
The
difference I’m talking about is that the Dynaudio’s seem to have
a slightly elevated bass response in my room in certain regions,
so listening to something like Dick Dale’s Misirlou gives Dale’s
Fender guitar more low frequency energy, whereas the B2030’s offer
a lighter and what I’d consider to be more neutral rendition of
the track.