Pictures for the weekend

[Binky]

You'd be surprised, there are some really good in-ear monitors on the market. Golden-eared audiophile grade good.

 

Really?  Could you link to some?

-Glyph Reader

Aren't there fundametal problems related to the resonant frequency (although ideal speakers never resonate) of the moving parts (and the enclosure around/behind them)?

That is, a small speaker with a high resonant frequency will work well for playing high notes, and a large speaker with a low resonant frequency will work well for playing low notes.

Certainly in my experience, physically large drivers sound muddy, and physically small ones sound tinny.

How do you get a driver a few mm across to perform acceptably down at the 20Hz end of things?

 

[levi]

Small speaker don't propagate low frequencies very well at all.  That's why hifi speakers have at least a tweeter and a midrange, because the midrange handles the low notes and the tweeter the high.  But with a speaker so close to your ear canal, it can be well within the range that that crappy bass gets carried.  Take the headphone out of your ear though, and it reverts to a tinny little speaker.

I'm not sure who makes the really high-end stuff, as I'm not convinced I can tell enough of a difference, but I've heard Shure make some pretty high end kit where they have to send an engineer out to fit them to you.

 

[szr]

With the OMAP5, it'll act as a normal USB2 Port AND we'll offer an adapter to connect SATA as well to it.

By this do you mean some a regular USB2->eSATA adapter, or are you planning on connecting the extra USB3.0 specific lines to the OMAPs SATA pins and having a custom adapter spill them out? Because that would be just about as awesome as having an actual eSATA port, but I would wonder about what happens if a real USB3.0 device were plugged in.
That is the reason I was looking forward to the eSATA combo port, because it meant being able to get SATA speed transfers: a USB->eSATA adapter means regular old USB2.0 speeds so you may as well just use a USB2 external hard drive.

Our own custom adaptor.


We use the two additional lines of the USB 3.0 for the eSATA, so you get the full eSATA speeds.


If you connect an USB3 device, it will only find an USB2.0 host and work like that

So it's still effectively a USB/SATA combo port then, it just requires an adapter to use the latter. Awesome.

 

[rygD]

You'd be surprised, there are some really good in-ear monitors on the market. Golden-eared audiophile grade good.

 

Really?  Could you link to some?

-Glyph Reader

 http://theheadphonelist.com/headphone-list/

 

[Slacker]

You'd be surprised, there are some really good in-ear monitors on the market. Golden-eared audiophile grade good.

Aren't there fundametal problems related to the resonant frequency (although ideal speakers never resonate) of the moving parts (and the enclosure around/behind them)?


That is, a small speaker with a high resonant frequency will work well for playing high notes, and a large speaker with a low resonant frequency will work well for playing low notes.


Certainly in my experience, physically large drivers sound muddy, and physically small ones sound tinny.


How do you get a driver a few mm across to perform acceptably down at the 20Hz end of things?

Easy, my dear Watson . You seal off the ear canal with a rubber gasket and use it as a resonant chamber. By putting the driver right at the entrance of the sealed canal you can play deep, headblowing bass with a few milliwatts of output power, enabling really tiny drivers.

Really?  Could you link to some?

Well, for truly audiophile-grade you might take a look at Shure SE535, Etymotic ER4 or Grado GR10. These things compare quite favorably quality-wise with similarly priced traditional headphones.


For something more affordable, you might take a look at Sennheiser CX series.

 

[levi]

Easy, my dear Watson . You seal off the ear canal with a rubber gasket and use it as a resonant chamber. By putting the driver right at the entrance of the sealed canal you can play deep, headblowing bass with a few milliwatts of output power, enabling really tiny drivers.

I considered that, but then wondered what the resonant frequence of the ear canal is.  It's not exactly big, plus it's lined with nice warm soft hairy skin which isn't going to help you get any reflected standing waves set up.  Although big speaker cabs are filled with soft wadding to deaden reflections, so perhaps you don't need actual reflections to get a resonating chamber.  Still, small size = short wavelenght = high frequency resonances - I don't see the ear canal as a good resonator where tinny headphones are concerned.

 

[rygD]

I don't consider myself an audiophile, and I try to make purchase decisions based on getting the most for my money.  I prefer earbuds and such because they take up less space when I am carrying them and not using them.  Some tradeoffs are that they get beat up a little more (although I usually put them in their case when not in use) and they are more likely to get lost.  Keeping that in mind, I tend to go for less expensive options.  Generally speaking, cheap is cheap, and you probably won't get "OMFG AMAZING!!!1!" sound in my price range.  I know what sounds good to me, and most cheap ones I have purchased, even from the big names (possibly big due to marketing and not sound quality), have not been good enough.  I have found individual sets that sound good, but in my experience this hasn't been reflected across an entire brands products down here at the low end.  

I had to replace some that I had been happy with for a while late last year.  The old product had been "improved" after the version that I had.  Since I didn't want to spend money trying to find a good match for if those were better, so I read some reviews.  It seems that the improvements were made for the manufacturer not the customer, as is so often the case.  I kept looking and that is when I found the guide I linked above.  I am never content to stick to one source, so I narrowed it down based on my preferences and read as many other reviews as I could find and was extremely surprised that I like what I ended up with as much as I do.  NarMoo R1M was in my list, and was what I went with for various reasons (including use as a headset with the Pyra, so low profile right angle connector was a minor point in my decision...and they are red, which I normally don't like "but they are for the Pyra").  NarMoo as a company considered a lot of things that I like, and has done even more to improve their line for customers imo.  Their products are also pretty inexpensive, so keep them in mind if you decide to go with something like that.  Make sure you read about the different sound profiles of their offerings before buying, and make sure to get something that suits your tastes and the music you listen to.

Sorry for the advertisement sounding post.  As long as they don't change in ways I dislike I will probably buy from them again in the future.

 

[Xcl4m4t10n]

I hope that Pyra have a good pair of speakers but most important to me, a pretty good headphones/jack out port. Is there any tech spec about it that i must read?

 

[szr]

The eSATA port could really have been used to provide a CFast slot instead.

Oh wow, I did not know that, never heard of CFast. I'd kind of assumed CompactFlash was dead. I spent weeks tracking down a CF card for my mom's embroidery machine few years ago, one that wouldn't cost a bajillion dollars. Obviously not "dead", but seemed like they were on the way out.

I have a RetroUSB NES PowerPak cart that uses CF. I got it couple years ago and didn't have any problem finding a store selling CF cards and for a good price, but that might have changed.

 

[rygD]

I bought a few CF cards last year, and had no trouble finding them.  I am pretty sure they are still widely in use with networking equipment.  What I did have a problem finding was an affordable that met my specific requirements.  I have forgotten what those are, but I needed a fairly ancient low capacity one that was somehow physically different internally.  If someone knows what I mean by that last bit please refresh my memory and help me understand why the newer ones that are still supposedly the same type of card would not also work.  It wasn't just due to the capacity.  Anyway, I paid a lot more than I wanted to (by today's typical prices for flash storage capacity) and got the driver loaded so that I can use more recent ones.

While looking into what would work for me I found out that a lot of them, even from somewhat reputable sources, might not be manufactured by the company marked as the manufacturer on the label.  What I mean is that there are companies pumping out low quality, inferior cards and labeling and packaging them with very official looking fake SanDisk or whatever stuff so that they can get a cut of the market.  The only way this hurts them is that they might have to invest a bit more in different package/label designs.  At the time someone gave me a Cisco CF card since all of mine were SanDisk, however it didn't work because it was also too big.  I did find a guide to identify fake and real one and mine are all supposedly real.

I think what WizardStan was getting at is that CF is much more expensive than SD and others.  To solve the problem he should have bought her one of those sewing machines you can connect to a Game Boy Color.  Even if it wasn't what she needed he could slip an EverDrive in it and she would be too busy playing games to notice. 

 

[thatgui]

I take this to the extreme and say Compact Flash already has moved out of the mainstream consumer market into a niché and will soon be moving into the "exotic" category (try finding a cf card with a capacity bigger then 100GB for a price around 100€).

 

[spud42]

You'd be surprised, there are some really good in-ear monitors on the market. Golden-eared audiophile grade good.

 

Really?  Could you link to some?

-Glyph Reader

Aren't there fundametal problems related to the resonant frequency (although ideal speakers never resonate) of the moving parts (and the enclosure around/behind them)?

That is, a small speaker with a high resonant frequency will work well for playing high notes, and a large speaker with a low resonant frequency will work well for playing low notes.

Certainly in my experience, physically large drivers sound muddy, and physically small ones sound tinny.

How do you get a driver a few mm across to perform acceptably down at the 20Hz end of things?

https://youtu.be/c3ai3PUoamw

quite expensive.... but supposed to be good pro level..

 

[_wb_]

Nice to have a future-proof USB3 port, even though the currently only CPU board can't handle it. It will lead to confusion though, with people expecting USB3 speeds and only getting USB2.

Is there a way to include a USB3 hub on the CPU board so both the micro-USB3 and the full-size USB3 port can actually achieve USB3 speeds? (though not both at the same time, since there would of course still be only one connection to the OMAP5)

That would be the most awesome solution, but I guess it is not possible to do something like that...

A black USB3 port would solve this issue. Anyway I don't want a flashy blue port on my Pyra just to show that there is USB3. It's useless, bling-bling and ugly.

I don't care about blue or black (æsthetically black would probably be better), but it being blue is part of the standard so it may be hard to find the component in any other color.

Yeah... A year makes quite a difference. By now, full-size SD-Card slots don't look preferable anymore, either - microSD is everywhere...

MicroSD cards can be used in a full-size SD card slot via an adapter. Using a micro-SD slot to read a full sized SD card on the other hand...

Spoiler

Spoiler

But yeah, keep the standard SD card slots for Pyra please.

You can just as well just use a USB SD-card reader if you're fine with having stuff sticking out. Or just a USB stick or an external hard drive. The point is that we want easily swappable physically 'internal' storage options. Standard SD slots offer strictly more options than microSD.

 

[levi]

I bought a few CF cards last year, and had no trouble finding them.  I am pretty sure they are still widely in use with networking equipment.  What I did have a problem finding was an affordable that met my specific requirements.  I have forgotten what those are, but I needed a fairly ancient low capacity one that was somehow physically different internally.  If someone knows what I mean by that last bit please refresh my memory and help me understand why the newer ones that are still supposedly the same type of card would not also work.  It wasn't just due to the capacity.

I recall the switch to UDMA in CF3.0 (2004) broke a few things that relied on PIO transfers.  It was still relatively easy to buy decent UDMA cards that also supported PIO mode at the time though, but if you cut corners it was easy to find cards that didn't.  They've speeded up UDMA since then, but there's been no more massive changes to the core CF spec as far as I can tell.  CFast is something else in a similar size body but with a different connector on the end as far as I can tell, so that's unlikely to be mixed up with CF.

 

[PowerGod]

I'm just happy if the USB 2.0 is also 1.0/1 compatible, so I will not have the need to use some HUB for just the mouse

 

[fusion_power]

I'm just happy if the USB 2.0 is also 1.0/1 compatible, so I will not have the need to use some HUB for just the mouse

Oh yes, that's indeed a small but actually important qualitiy of life improvement.