Other possibly than crosstalk, there isn’t much intrinsic difference between 1/8" and RCA. Any given 1/8" might or might not introduce more resistance than a given RCA connector. Your boombox might have had some other wiring issues.
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It also occurs to me that I was not doing a direct comparison between connectors, as the 1/8th inch was coming from the computer and the RCA from a pro level sound card. It didn’t occur to me back then that there was that much noticeable difference between DACs (as opposed to ADCs).
Yeah, I think you’ve identified the difference. Even better is an external sound card or DAC. Doesn’t have to be especially expensive, a $3 chip like the TE7022 can do most of the work in an external sound card that is good enough for most human beings.
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The drawback with 1/8" (3.5mm) audio connectors is that they usually come out of headphone amplification stages, so any noise you add at that stage gets amplified at the next stage. Line-level connections are better, but the jack doesn’t make much difference really.
If your music on your phone is lossy, there are Bluetooth protocols that can steam the file to a DAC and don’t introduce any further compression, but streaming lossless is out as BT doesn’t have the bandwidth. Still, who wastes phone storage on lossless audio? I says this as a person with everything ripped to FLAC. I also transcode to MP3 for portables. The drop in quality isn’t audible on the move.
Best connection you’ll get out of a phone is a digital dock, which has a high quality DAC that outputs a line-level signal.
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Those little Class-T amps are really good. They’re not powerful, but they have low distortion and good tone. My bedroom stereo is a tiny amp stuck to the back of a pair of floor-standing speakers I’ve had since college. The only caveat is that the wall warts that come with them tend to be utter shite, and they will get noisy or die in a couple of years. Replaced mine with a universal laptop power brick I had sitting around. (The wall wart was 24V, that supply outputs 20V but the amp sounds fine and runs cooler.)
I ran the power and audio cables under the carpet, hid an Airport Express out of sight and it really does look like a pair of speakers with no wires at all.
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You can connect a USB HDD full of music to the Touch to enable the built-in server. I used to have it on my bedroom speakers but found it was easier to just AirPlay to them.
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You need to add a tweeter to get frequencies above 10k, but the idea does work to get bass extension from small drivers. Bose 901s use this design. There will be peaks and valleys in the response so equalization is required (the 901s come with an EQ box.)
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But the Doppler effect is awful.
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I’ll say one thing, there’s nothing on the market that is a self-contained digital music player along the lines of an iPod in the form of a standard 19" hi-fi component. Plenty of digital players out there, but aside from something like the extremely expensive Sooloos system, none have their own storage. Most digital music players require a server of some sort.
I used to run my Squeezebox Touch with a USB hard drive and no server, but it was slow as hell. Someone needs to make a simple hi-fi player that can accept USB drives or SD cards.
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I sure do wish that enjoying a standalone stereo system was still a normal thing. I first caught the audio bug in the '60s (thank you SO MUCH cool-uncle Henry!), and have yet to shake off the fever. I’m amazed at the incredible progress in engineering and manufacturing over the past 50+ years, culminating in today’s near-flawless digital recording & mixing technology. Yet, paradoxically, now that recorded source material is as close to perfect as ever was hoped for, hardly anyone has the interest to listen to its full potential. Instead of marveling at this new standard for “high fidelity,” people today seem to love digital for its “high compression,” as though the quantity of MP3s that will fit in a phone matters more than how good a fine piece of music sounds in the living room. Makes me wanna weep.
Rob, take the plunge! Or at least test the waters…you wouldn’t limit yourself to only headphone concerts, would you? (Excepting maybe Snarky Puppy shows; -) Meet some stereo retailers, make friends, bring equipment home to audition. (Looks like Northern carries a few good lines – if they’ve got a Hegel H80 on the floor you’ll be delighted at what you hear.) Or maybe just tease yourself by spending an hour at Galaxie for a refresher course of what you’re missing.
At the very least…ditch those KLH cabinets! (They look to me like the speakers that came with the KLH 15 record changer system; they are Sears poncho, not real poncho. Plus, given their age, if the surrounds and/or spiders aren’t already dead, they will be soon.) Make a dramatic difference and listen to something like the Dali Zensor line ($400 for Zensor 1, $600 for Zensor 3) – the finest small sub-$1000 bookshelves I’ve heard in years. (Combine some Dalis with a Sonos Connect:Amp and your computer as a source, and you’ll have a very competent streaming system for a bit over $1K.) Or maybe Mark can hook you up with a pair of used Silverlines…
The entry fee can seem stiff – truly good sound starts between $2500 and $3000 – but quality non-China gear will last 10-15 years at least and your internal audio pleasure circuits will light up like a disco ball. (But even something like a mid-line Yamaha Aventage AV receiver and some Monitor Audio Bronze speakers will get you streaming full resolution very-decent-and-quite-big-sound for about $1,200.) Listen to Stevie Wonder – or better yet, Edgar Winter covering Stevie Wonder – and do yourself a favor!
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