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DhakaAudiophile, Baily Road, Dhaka (2026)

15/06/2016

Today's Jazz Recipe-Norah Jones-Come Away With Me:

Imagine the voice of a husky Eva Cassidy, or Macy Gray after deep-tissue massage, singing to you in an empty bar late at night. That's Norah Jones on her debut album, Come Away With Me. Though released on Blue Note, it's not quite jazz. It's a set of country-blues ballads more reminiscent of 'Eric Clapton Unplugged'.
Come Away With Me acknowledges its roots in tracks by country music's Hank Williams and J.D.Loudermilk. Hank's "Cold Cold Heart" is delicately jazz-flavoured, with skeletal instrumentation, a syncopated bass riff and Norah's voice the texture of suede; while J.D. Loudermilk's "Turn Me On" reveals a grittier edge.
Most of the other numbers here were written by Norah and her posse, and feature her light touch on piano. "Feelin' the Same Way" and "Lonestar" by Norah's bassist boyfriend, Lee Alexander, have simple melodic lines and lyrics which don't warrant scrutiny, but the subtle and sensitive vocal performances elevate them. Tom Waits could be hiding in the shadows in the best song on the album, "I've Got to See You Again" by guitarist Jesse Harris. Here, the combination of Norah's controlled vocals and strains of mournful gypsy jazz violin evoke a dark mood which turns to nostalgia in "Painter Song" with its folky accordion and Fairground Attraction-style rhythm section.
As Norah and producer Arif Mardin were switching out the lights in the recording studio, waving goodbye to the band and heading for the bar, they must have realised 'Dammit, we didn't record any jazz!' That would explain the last track on the album - 'The Nearness of You'. It's an intimate cocktail lounge portrait of the jazz standard, with a soulful edge; just Norah accompanying herself on piano - simple but tasteful.
If you're looking for out-and-out jazz you'll be disappointed with Come Away With Me. It doesn't swing, it sways. But Norah has such a feel for the music that she can make her voice soar and carry you with her, then deposit you gently back in your living room. The bare bones instrumentation is a perfect vehicle for her, and her timing and feel are just right. Try it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oGfBk3DZ-Q

17/01/2016

The Laws of Physics cannot be changed: All the myths about expensive audio cable:

Exotic Cable companies often take advantage of the fact that the vast majority of audiophiles and professional reviewers do not have a degree in electrical engineering. While you don’t need an electrical engineering degree to enjoy this hobby, it allows you to tell the difference between real science and pseudo-science, between reality and myth, in this industry. Pseudo-science is taking a grounded and provable scientific principle but manipulating it into a nonsensical form that is not verifiable.

The common audiophile is constantly and desperately looking for ways to improve and tweak the fidelity of their audio systems, and they want to believe in the promise of groundbreaking improvements, even when they are not scientifically sound. Thus, the power of suggestion is very strong and many exotic cable manufacturers know this all too well. As you know, this isn’t dissimilar to the workout supplements industry.

Electronics and Electrical Engineering theory is often intimidating to untrained individuals, similar to how bodybuilding may be intimidating to someone that has never worked out with weights before.

What many exotic cable manufacturers do is start off with a real engineering premise and stretch them beyond what would even be considered believable as Star Trek physics, hence the pseudoscience is born. Some of their theories are even more cockeyed than a looney tunes episode in that they don’t even correctly identify how the phenomenon works.

17/01/2016

Today's Indie POP Recipe: Ellie Goulding: Delirium: gimlet-eyed mainstream pop with few surprises !!!

There comes a point in every artist’s life when they decide their career has thus far taken too linear and undeviating a path. The moment has come to shake things up, to do something radically different. Some simply spring their new approach on their audience. Others offer fans fair warning. So it is with Ellie Goulding, who felt obliged to issue an accompanying statement when the release of her third album was announced back in September. “Part of me views this album as an experiment – to make a big pop album,” she said. “I made a conscious decision that I wanted it to be on another level.”

A big pop album obviously marks a revolutionary departure for the multi-platinum singer, whose previous releases famously carved out their own, hugely challenging musical niche somewhere between black metal, punishing atonal electronics and free improvisation. The dramatic nature of the change between Delirium and its predecessors, Lights and Halcyon, is starkly illuminated by Goulding’s choice of musical partners. In come pop songwriting behemoths such as Greg Kurstin and Ryan Tedder, clearly a major shift from the past, when she collaborated with names including Biff Stannard, best known for his work with fearsome Japanese-noise artists the Spice Girls, and the self-styled Gruppenführer of True Fu***ng Satanic Metal, Calvin “Baphomet” Harris. And Greg Kurstin and Ryan Tedder. Evidently, everything has changed beyond recognition.

But leaving aside the pressing question of precisely what kind of music Ellie Goulding thinks she has been making for the past six years, it’s hard to argue with her description of Delirium. It is indeed a pop album, and it is indeed big: 16 tracks in its standard edition, a staggering 25 tracks and 90 minutes in its deluxe format – longer than Prince’s Sign O’ the Times, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde or indeed Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans – with a certain grandiosity signalled by its introduction, which goes heavy on the operatic vocals. It takes as its starting point Goulding’s two most memorable hits to date: her EDM-inspired 2013 chart-topper Burn and the Max Martin-produced Love Me Like You Do, the latter a song that even a dedicated abhorrer of pop – self-styled Gruppenführer of True Fu***ng Satanic Metal, Calvin “Baphomet” Harris, for example – might be forced to agree is an extremely elegant illustration of the blue-chip songwriter-for-hire’s art. Indeed, so keen are Goulding and her team to replicate Love Me Like You Do’s impact that a track here called Something in the Way You Move has a virtually identical chorus.

You can see how this happened, but including a song that audibly rips off Love Me Like You Do on the same album that features Love Me Like You Do feels a little careless, and elsewhere Delirium isn’t a careless album at all. It’s punchily produced, and filled with smart, nagging little touches: the Police-like guitar figure that weaves through On My Mind, or Holding on for Life’s charming combination of faux-gospel chorus and the kind of jubilant piano line found on old house tracks.

It also does absolutely everything you might expect a mainstream pop album in 2015 to do, to the extent that you start feeling as if there might have been some kind of checklist in the studio: knowing musical reference to Uptown Funk? Tick. Certainly no one’s going to complain that there aren’t enough vogueish influences from 90s dance music, including yet another bassline inspired by Robin S’s Show Me Love on Don’t Need Nobody, and what sounds like a shiny update of UK garage on Devotion. We Can’t Move to This, meanwhile, features both a winding sample of cut-up vocals in the image of MK’s remix of the Nightcrawlers’ Push the Feeling On (she has already employed MK to remix On My Mind) and a nod to Major Lazer’s pop take on dancehall and moombahton in its beat. The taut, new wave-inspired pop-rock of Around U and Lost and Found’s saga of small-town escape and glossy 80s AOR chorus suggest Goulding has been keeping watch on Taylor Swift’s path to global domination, and perhaps her headline-grabbing habit of writing songs about her high-profile love life, too. Goulding was recently forced to deny that her single On My Mind constituted an answer record to Ed Sheeran’s Don’t, a heartbroken number apparently about her. You can see why people thought that – “you wanted my heart but I just liked your tattoos” suggest the lyrics, before offering the winning get-out clause: look, I was a bit pi**ed, alright? – and the ensuing debate can’t exactly have hurt either’s sales.

When the production and the songwriting coalesce, you would have a hard time arguing that Delirium isn’t a winning example of gimlet-eyed mainstream pop: while nothing else approaches the classiness of Love Me Like You Do, the sugary rushes of Holding on for Life and Around U are hard to resist. But there’s an awful lot of it, and the less distinguished moments begin to blur. In fairness, you could imagine virtually everything here on Radio 1, but too much sounds like the stuff you hear on Radio 1 and then struggle to remember a thing about the second it’s over. In fact, you could have said the same thing about its two predecessors: contrary to its curious advance billing, Delirium feels like more of the same.

16/12/2015

Today's R&B Recipe: The Queen is not Dead: Back To Black:
Amy Winehouse:
"They tried to make me go to rehab," wails Amy Winehouse on the opening track and first single from her second album Back to Black. It's not typical pop song fodder, but Winehouse isn't a typical pop singer. If she winds up as popular in the U.S. as she is at home in the UK, it'll be despite her reluctance to embrace the monotonous realities of promotional mechanics. Oh, she'll talk, but there's no guarantee what she'll say. (Our favorite is her heckling of Bono at last year's Q Awards: "Shut up, I don't give a f**k!") She'll be scheduled to perform, but there's no guarantee what she'll do, or even if she'll make it through the show. And she'll sing about her problems, but she won't give a s**t what you think of them.
If this makes Winehouse read a little like Lily Allen, that's not far off the mark. Both are larger-than-life singers who've found perfect vehicles for their outsized personalities. In Allen's case, it's a cocktail of pop, reggae, and hip-hop, with a cigarette in hand; for Winehouse, it's soul, jazz, and blues with a bottle of booze. Both pay tribute to their influences, with Winehouse's lyrics featuring shout-outs to Ray Charles, Donny Hathaway, and Slick Rick, and the two even share a producer: Mark Ronson, who's also worked with everyone from Sean Paul and Macy Gray to Ghostface and Rhymefest.
But Winehouse is anything but a Lily Allen doppelgänger. After all, soul and jazz music are typically considered the province of grownups, and while Winehouse could be accused of slipping on these styles like costumes, she imbues her music with a surprisingly genuine soulfulness.
Ronson's sneaky production provides most of the album's wit: The old school backdrop to "Me & Mr. Jones" is especially winking against couplets like "What kind of f**kery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig." But Winehouse's zingers (in that same song she tells her subject "'side from Sammy you're my best black Jew") and profane interjections (the title track begins "He left no time to regret/ Kept his dick wet") are only an occasional thing as she travels a well-worn lyrical path to both clinical and romantic rehabilitation.
Songs like "Love Is a Losing Game" are full of regret, even if Winehouse refuses to wallow entirely in self-pity. However, as one might expect following the declaration of "Rehab", Winehouse does spend much of Back to Black on the defensive, trying to explain why she's stayed with the same guy who's done her wrong, or, in the case of "Wake Up Alone", why her ex gives her the night sweats ("I drip for him tonight," Winehouse less delicately puts it).
It's one of the eternal themes of soul music, here spiced up with post-modern production where less forceful personalities might have gone with strictly retro emulation. The references to girl groups, northern soul, and ska are there, but no one would confuse these approximations (split evenly between Ronson and Salaam Remi, who produced Winehouse's since-disowned debut) with the real thing.
Fortunately, Winehouse has been blessed by a brassy voice that can transform even mundane sentiments into powerful statements. She may be heartbroken, but she uses that ache, twisting the emotional scars to suit her songs-- and if she often seems like the masochistic recipient of each knife twist, so be it. It's not until the album's final track, "He Can Only Hold Her", that Winehouse finally switches from first person to third, the "I"s and "me"s giving way to "he"s and "she"s, suggesting that she's finally become an objective observer, able to see her personal issues for what they are. "He tries to pacify her, 'cause what's inside never dies," she sings, and we can only assume from this new vantage that Winehouse has moved on.

20/09/2015

Today's Jazz Recipe-Norah Jones-"Not Too Late":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiTlOsI4IRc

Norah Jones tends to polarise opinion among music listeners. Depending on your point of view, she is either the heavenly-voiced queen of sophisticated, chilled-out modern jazz or a bland, soulless dinner party soundtrack for people who don’t really like music, little more than a canny selector of cover versions with a famous sire in the shape of legendary sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar.

To someone who has historically erred towards the latter camp, Not Too Late comes as a pleasant surprise. Ms Jones, though scarcely original and sometimes laid-back to the point of supine disinterest, has delivered an album of range and quality which goes some way towards establishing her as more than just a proficient interpreter of the work of others.

Not Too Late’s 13 tracks, all either written or co-written by the artist herself, meander engagingly across a variety of styles, although the vibe is predictably mellow throughout. “My Dear Country” sounds like a modern-day Billie Holiday, “Broken” employs brooding strings to winning effect and the title track is a simple, elegant piano-led ballad which is pretty without lurching into the cloying sentimentality of the Texan’s earlier recordings.

Musically, the album is tastefully understated, with occasional lap steel and banjo adding country-folk textures and an exuberantly sleazy trumpet solo lending real character to the gambolling New Orleans-style stomp of “Sinkin’Soon”. On the downside, Jones’s crystalline, silk glove of a voice remains angelic yet anonymous, and her lyrics, while hinting at political protest on “My Dear Country” seem unlikely to rival Dylan or Cohen for poetic gravitas in the foreseeable future.

Overall, although the album still contains a little too much inconsequential mid-tempo crooning to inspire a full conversion of the sceptics, Jones has nevertheless made an encouraging step forward in her artistic development, expanding her palette just enough to become more interesting without taking the risk of alienating the conservative coffee-table hordes who made her name. This music won’t change the world, but neither does it deserve to be cast from it as some of the singer’s most venomous detractors unjustly suggest.

20/09/2015

Treat your home theater like a real theater:

Modern AVR’s include all kinds of wizardry for speaker setup, positioning and room equalization. Anyone in the know will tell you that room EQ hardware and software should be a last resort. Correct acoustical treatments will pay much bigger dividends.
If you are like many people, you have recently upgraded your home theater, or you’re getting ready to do so. During this process you’ve likely learned that the speakers in the TV are sub-par and you should upgrade your audio experience to include an external sound system. This has become common practice and common knowledge. What you haven’t learned, and which is probably even more important, is how to upgrade the room itself.
One of the things people overlook when trying to make a home theater, is that a real theater pays a lot of attention to the design and treatment of the theater environment. They have good left-right design symmetry (see the diagram for a sample home theater layout). A good theater also has acoustically treated the space so that people can hear everything that is happening, from anywhere in the theater. This article will teach you some of the tricks of getting that great big theater soundstage into your home theater.

Bass Traps – the low-down solution.
Low frequency problems are common to almost any room, regardless of size. The good news is that, most of the time, the solution is simple: put bass traps in the corners of the room. This is one place where it pays to put a little extra in the budget. Corners are defined as the intersection of two or more surfaces. There are not just corners at the end of each wall, but also along the floor and ceiling where the walls intersect them. The more corner you cover with a good trap, the better bass response you get – it’s that simple. Bass loves the corners, and by putting bass traps there, you keep the bass crisp and natural. If bass frequencies are allowed to build in the corners, it causes the bass frequencies to become muddy and undefined – trap them. New research shows you can eliminate bass traps by using multiple subwoofers.

Diffusers – put life back into your space.
The steps we have taken up to this point have been using absorption to control excess energy that can have an adverse effect on the listening environment. We have removed the unwanted direct reflections and we have tamed the bass, but there is something more we can do to give life to this room – diffusion.

Diffusion will give us something we couldn’t attain through absorption - a sense of open space. Even after treating with absorbers, there are still areas of the room where sound waves will sit, because your room is a fixed box with fixed speakers. Diffusers scatter the energy, creating ambiance with residual energy, like sitting quietly in a forest – the energy around you being directionless, omni-present, and spacious. This simple step does not remove energy from your room, but redistributes it into a soundscape that can make you forget you are in a room at all.

11/09/2015

Myth Buster- Sealed vs ported subwoofer :

Unfortunately, there are a lot of popular misconceptions out there: you might hear some folks say that ported subwoofers are no good for music, and are only useful for delivering big sound effects, or conversely that sealed subwoofers are “musical”, but lack the depth to deliver the bass called for in today’s blockbusters. While some subwoofers may certainly fit these stereotypes, the truth is considerably more complex. Ultimately, sound quality is far more a function of good engineering and choosing the right tool for the job rather than a question of sealed vs ported. Nonetheless, each alignment does come with specific strengths and weaknesses, the balance of which may make one type more suitable to your situation than the other.

Sealed Subwoofers:

The simplest type of subwoofer to design and construct, sealed subwoofers consist of a driver, an enclosure, and an amplifier; the driver is responsible for 100% of the system’s output.
Overall system performance is a function of the driver’s Thiele/Small parameters and enclosure volume, which together will determine system Q and the system’s resonant frequency. Below the resonant frequency, sealed subwoofers typically feature a shallow roll-off of 12dB/octave, which also corresponds with relatively low levels of group delay and ringing in the deep bass.

Ported Subwoofers:

Where sealed subwoofers are relatively simple devices, ported subwoofers add a bit of complication to the mixture, i.e. the port. On the upside, porting augments system output at the vent’s resonant frequency, which extends the subwoofer’s response and allows for substantially more output capability at the tuning point relative to a comparable sealed subwoofer.

However, below the tuning frequency, the driver is no longer loaded by the enclosure, and acts as if it is in free air. This results in a much steeper roll off rate of 24dB/octave relative to the 12dB/octave slope typical of sealed subwoofers; as a consequence, group delay is typically higher in ported models. In addition, below the tuning frequency, the woofer is in danger of over-excursion without appropriate filters for protection, which can further exacerbate problems related to group delay. Of course, like sealed subwoofers, many different response profiles are possible by varying enclosure size as well as port length vs diameter (larger enclosures and longer ports result in lower tuning points). It should also be noted that ported enclosures are typically much larger than their sealed counterparts.

Bottom Line:

Relative to their sealed cousins, ported subwoofers typically offer better low-end extension as well as greater output around their tuning point. However, there is no free lunch; deeply-tuned ported subwoofers tend to be quite large, making them less décor friendly as well as reducing placement options. Further, while ported subwoofers have a big output advantage down to their tuning point, below tune, frequency response drops off steeply while driver excursion goes off the charts. While most commercial subwoofers employ filters to protect the driver from over-excursion, this usually results in an even steeper low end roll off, and consequently problems with group delay and ringing.

10/09/2015

Today's DIY recipe :
Since more home theater speaker buyers watch movies than listen to music, I'll start there.
It's hardly an overstatement to claim movie-oriented home theater systems succeed or fail based on their center channel's performance and sound quality. The center speaker delivers virtually all the dialog and it can, depending on the mix, convey upward of 80 percent of a movie's soundtrack. The center speaker has a big job.
So invest 30 percent of your 5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 system budget on the center speaker, the Center Centric HT approach. As always, when it comes to sound quality, size matters. Bigger centers tend to sound better than small ones.
As a DIY Hobbyist this is my recent project - Code name: Dark Knight. Thanks to Gigabass Audio for making this exceptional Center Speaker. i have used it with Emotiva XMC 1 Processor & Emotiva XPA-5 Power Amplifier.

For Details: https://consolebd.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/code-name-dark-knight/

10/09/2015

Greetings Bangladesh:

If you are reading this then you have some interest in audio or you are an audiophile in heart, you are a rich man/woman or a man/woman with small budget, the good news is this a professional service for audio geek or who wants to DIY. All inquiry about audio or advice here will be totally free. so start asking about home theater, music or which jazz album to listen...hit us anytime.

10/09/2015

What the hell is "DIY" :
DIY Audio means "do it yourself" audio. Rather than buying a piece of possibly expensive audio equipment, such as a high-end audio amplifier or speaker, the person practicing DIY Audio will make it him/herself. Alternatively, a DIYer may take an existing manufactured item of vintage era and update or modify it. The benefits of doing so include the satisfaction of creating something enjoyable, the possibility that the equipment made or updated is of higher quality than commercially available products and the pleasure of creating a custom-made device for which no exact equivalent is marketed. Other motivations for DIY audio can include getting audio components at a lower cost, the entertainment of using the item, and being able to ensure quality of workmanship.

10/09/2015

World's Finest Loudspeaker:
For some, the passion for music can go to "extremes." However, what is extreme to one music lover seems sensible to another. To those who enjoy movies, an entire room (not to mention the cost), can be devoted to have the "theater experience" at home.
To the music lover, the MG20.1 is the best and most cost effective way to have the "concert experience" at home.The MG20.1 has wide dynamic range and deep bass response, but what separates the MG20.1 from all other assaults on "state-of-the-art" is resolving power.
Jonathan Valin, of Fi Magazine, said in December, 1998, Volume 3, Issue 12,
"So what have we got here? A big planar speaker that throws the widest, deepest, tallest, most coherent soundfield I've heard from a hi-fi system, filled with the most naturally-sized instruments I've heard from a hi-fi system, with the sweetest, most natural timbres I've heard from a hi-fi system, the finest dynamic nuance I've heard from a hi-fi system (particularly in the treble), and the most natural illusion of instrumental "action" I've heard from a hi-fi system. What we've got here, in sum, is "realistic reproduction" in the highest sense of the phrase, in the sense I spoke of earlier, the virtual duplication of instruments and voices rather than mere analogs of certain aspects of their sound....While it's hard to call anything that costs over ten grand a bargain, I can tell you this; if it were my money, and I were shopping for the very best, these are the speakers I'd buy."
The MG20.1 has optional bi-amplification and bi-wire capability.

For Details: http://www.magnepan.com/model_MG_201

DhakaAudiophile

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