By Peter Daley

There are large numbers of people who have moved to the Sunshine Coast and would like to have some sort of contact or information with their previous home. Well a good way to do this is to use Internet radio to listen to the local radio from your previous location in Australia or from Overseas.

You don’t need a short wave radio to do this, or have to worry about weather conditions interfering with your reception. Plus you can have moved from pretty well anywhere in the world, and listen to your favourite radio station on your computer or wirelessly throughout your house. Be aware, depending on the download bit rate of the radio stream, it will come down at around 20 to 60 meg an hour. So you need a good download limit if you’re going to listen for hours!

The easiest and least expensive way to do this is to simple use your broadband Internet connection to stream down the signal. In Australia you can find the major city FM radio stations signals here.

http://www.1radio.com.au

This site is very easy to use. It’s divided up into three sections, and hardly needs any skill to get it working. Click on the tab for the city. This lists the stations available. Click in the station you want to play. Once you do this, the station’s web address appears above. This is provided if you wish to go to the radio station’s web address and find more info. The radio playback is built into the page. If you look to the top of the page, you will find the radio signal is now being buffered and downloading. It may take 30 to 60 seconds before the music will start to play.

Wireless option 1

If you want to stream this to your FM radio you have in the house, you can purchase an FM wireless transmitter that you plug into the speaker output of your computer. This sends the signal out at a set FM frequency throughout the house. These are often sold as accessories to you MP3 players so you can play the MP3 player music through your FM radio in your car. All you need to do is to tune the FM radios you already have in the house, to that frequency, and you can then listen to the Internet broadcast anywhere wirelessly in the house.

Wireless option 2

There are now a few dedicated Internet wireless devices that you can purchase from local suppliers Leading Edge Electronics (Device info http://www.reciva.com) or Dick Smith Electronics (Device info http://www.sagem-communications.com/ They work independently of your computer and look like a transistor radio, plus have normal clock radio functions. You simply plug these devices into the broadband connection and they will stream the signal, no computer necessary. They both have thousands of pre-programmed Internet stations, plus you can add more. Both these devices can work wirelessly, so you may also have the added expense of having to install a wireless router onto your broadband modem, if you don’t already have one.

The sound quality of these devices is good, but the Slimdevices models are considered to be HiFi quality. http://www.slimdevices.com

I personally like to tune into the ABC radio at http://www.abc.net.au. Here you can tune into any of the nation wide ABC radio stations, national, Classical, Jazz, Pop and Country. I chill out listening to the Classic Drive on ABC Classic FM in the evening.

© Peter Daley 2009

by Peter Daley

The playback of music in the home is being revolutionized. Forget about using disk based media CDs or LPs for music playback, network music players are the future. These devices let you listen to streamed music from the Internet, or to play back copies of your music CDs or LPs, stored on your personal computer, into your HiFi system. There devices plug into your broadband Internet connection and will stream the music of your taste directly from the Internet, into your home and business.

If you use a network music player for Internet streaming music playback, you don’t need to have a computer turned on. These devices will stream the music straight from your Internet connected broadband modem into your home or business sound system. The music will stream down the Internet at about 40 to 60 meg per hour on fast broadband connections, so you need a good download limit on your Internet service.

There are lots of companies starting to produce network music players, http://www.slimdevices.com/, http://www.netgear.com or http://www.linksys.com, are a few. Slim Devices seem to have very good reviews at present. Slim Devices make two models of network music players, Sqeezebox and Transporter, and they work on all operating systems, Linux, Windows & Apple Mac!

The squeeze box sells for US$249, while the Transporter, due for release in September, is the Audiophile version, and is a no holds barred assault on producing the best sound possible. It will costs US$1999.

Other companies have network music players models under US$100. As with all technology, they will become more feature rich and powerful, and prices will drop with more competition as manufactures vie for market share.

Plug a network music players into your broadband Internet connection, and directly connect it to your computer speakers or home stereo. Being able to play back the music through a good home stereo system makes a tremendous difference to the musical enjoyment.

You can also program the network music players to stream music directly from your favourite Internet radio station, or sites like http://www.pandora.com/. or http://www.rhapsody.com/If you join Pandora or Rhapsody you can customize your network music playback so it will stream your style and taste in music through your home or business stereo system.

No more waiting for the song you like to play on the radio. Not only that, they can send it wirelessly, into different rooms!

With these network music players, you can also copy your CD or LP music collection onto your personal computer, and send them directly through your network music player, into you stereo system. No more changing CDs!

Plus there is now technology that can be used to create better sounding music from your original CDs or SACDs. Yes you heard me correctly. More on this in my next article. Incorporate this with a network music player and you will get unprecedented sound quality!

If you're an audiophile, home theatre enthusiast, or just love listening to music or watching movies, come along to SCCC Inc. and find out how this all works.

(c) 2007 Peter Daley

By Peter Daley

The audio CD is outdated! A lot of Hi-Fi enthusiasts where very disappointed when the audio CD arrived. There had been a hyped expectation that it would revolutionize the playback of high quality sound. Yes, it was convenient, but to anyone with a half decent turntable and Hi-Fi system it was a backward step in sound quality. It just didn't have the warmth or musicality of the Long Play (LP) vinyl record.

Sony, one of the developers of the CD technology listened to all the complaints about the poor sound and went back to the drawing board and developed the “Super Audio Compact Disk” (SA-CD). Yes, there is now a super audio compact disk. But you say, “I thought CDs where super audio?” Poor misinformed souls, you listened to all the sales hype!

CDs are a digitally recorded format. It takes a sample of the analog sound at 44,100 times a sec. This is then recorded onto the compact disk. When the audio CD is played back all these samples are put together to create the original sound. Like having a graph with dots on it representing all the sound samples. Then joining all the progressive sampled dots together with a pencil and saying that will be a pretty good approximation of the original sound wave.

Well SA-CD takes 2,822,400 samples per sec, so in theory it should more closely represent the original sound than that of the humble audio CD. (The old Long play vinyl record (LP) is strangely classed as outdated technology even though it has an infinite number of sound samples per second.)

Yes, SA-CD does improve the sound quality. It has extended frequency response to 50Khz (CD has 20Khz) and more dynamic headroom to 113db (CD is 100db). Also, ordinary CDs played back on a SA-CD player will generally sound better. There is still a strong debate amongst Hi-Fi enthusiast's, as to whether SA-CD is as good as the LP!

SA_CDs will play back on an ordinary CD player, but to get the best sound you will need to purchase a dedicated SA-CD player. SA-CD disks are also multi channel sound encoded, so you can playback the music performances in 5.1 surround sound, if you have a surround sound stereo equipment. Sony intends to incorporate an SA-CD player into the new Sony Play Station, to be released later this year.

Some local businesses can supply dedicated SA-CD players. (If you are going to purchase a SA-CD player, get on the Internet and read reviews before making a decision.)

You will find more info about the SA-CD at http://www.sa-cd.net plus personal reviews of the latest SA-CD releases,latest news, and places on the Internet to purchase the SA-CD disks.

(c) 2007 Peter Daley

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