Slashdot Mirror
Dell To Make MP3 Home Stereo Component
ytsejam-ppc writes "C|Net has this story on a new MP3 player that will be part of your home stereo system, but use a connection to your PC to get MP3 files." $199 if bought with a PC configured with home networking capabilities and $249 if bought separately. Not bad, although I'm not seeing how much disk space, or what sort of UI you get.
There is (almost) always a degrade in quality due to compression. I few parts of the mp3 compression algorithms cause sound degrade at just about any frequency (as I recall, I may need to go back over the code).
Eh...
...A 20-foot stereo patch cord.
My computer is in my living room. My stereo is in my living room. For those who are still starving students, substitute "bedroom" for "livingroom" above.
Most of us who are geeky enough to use MP3s are geeky enough to either a) have our computer in the room in which we spend the most time - which probably also has our stereo, or b) have a spare computer kicking around which may already be in the stereo room.
I question whether a storage-less MP3-to-stereo device is aiming for a market that exists.
I play my mp3's using the UI of my choice on my linux box, send them straight out my ultra-cheap SB16 card from before the invention of the transistor, and using $10 worth of cables from Radio Shack, send them right into the back of my sound system. I don't see the need for a dedicated unit for this, unless your processor is too overtaxed to handle the mp3 decoding (in which case, you'd be better off spending the money on a new processor).
That withstanding, I think it's a cool idea, and definitely a positive move for the mp3 format. It will help people realize that it's just another medium, rather than a weapon of anarchy and mass destruction.
The Phono inputs go into a phono preamp before they are passed into the reciever's line ins. I've accidentally done the same thing and it does sound like crap. Note that *real* audiophiles use an external tube preamp for their precious vinyl :)
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver.
Yes, that would be very cool. It's importent that the computer retain control of things like seeking with the MP3 and selecting songs. I do not want to be stuck to some fucking playlist or a massive random play. I wrote a little program which attempts to learn your music lissening moods. It's not very reliable or stable, but it makes the point that ALL current mp3 players and sterios have uninspired crap for user interfaces. Anyway, if Joe Random Geek has the ability to write his/her own music user interface then we should see some cool shit in a few years, but if the corporations keep giving us the 3 button remote control because they are affraid to cornfuse their customers then we will be stuck with the crappy interfaces we have now.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
>The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap.
>Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?
Heh. Yah. I've heard MP3's that sounded 'fine,' even 'good' when you get into the 256K range. But since Napster doesn't have any actual meta information (you can't filter out MP3's made with the insanely bad Xing encoder, for instance), you can never tell what you're getting until it's already assaulting your ears.
I suspect that part of the reason Napster is so popular especially at college campuses is that the target market -- people who definitionally don't care to spend their liquid income on music -- have never owned, probably never HEARD, a proper music reproduction system. And so they believe the myth that "MP3's are CD-quality" because played back over 4" speakers out a $3.99 motherboard-mounted sound chipset, MP3's and CDROM-spun audio CD's _do_ sound about the same.
Not that everyone who hears a proper reference system will become a raving audiophile junkie and disavow anything but first-play virgin vinyl in an anechoic chamber with $35000 in speakers alone; many many people are content to hear their music in 'good enough' fidelity, and I'm not here to bash them for that by any means....
--
I wish that they had a picture of the unit, but what I am envisioning from the description is a box with little more than a 'off' switch and a display in front (it doesn't need either, but they are cheap, and would aid marketing at this price point - $250 w/o system purchase)
The real magic would be the 'back panel', standard output jacks to mate with a home stereo, which unfortunately will probably just be phono plugs and clamp-ons for bare speaker wire. It's really too bad, because believe me, if they added stereo 'balanced input' jacks, I might even suggest it some people I know. getting a decent balanced in to a computer, even one with a studio-style music card (not a Soundblaster) is pretty expensive.But that would make the device and I/O device, and I see no suggestion that it's anything but an output device.
I also wouldn't immediately assume it's Ethernet or anything like that. It could be USB.
It's primary advantages (if I envision it correctly) are:
0) Fiddle free operation: i could (and have, in the course of helping people with home studios) create some of all of the advantages below without adding components, but I like hacking. And because it was important to get it 100%, I noticed how many apparent solutions weren't 100% for various reasons
1) Skip protection -- face it, HDDs are *slow* to change tracks. I doubt there's an IDE HDD around that can't be pushed to 20-30ms *worst case* track seeks. Don't bother checking your specs, NO ONE publishes worst case numbers, and even their 'typical' and 'capability' (best case) figures are unstandardized between manufacturers and suspect, technically, as savvy HDD review sites like Storage Review will happily show you, via exhaustive testing and comparisons. So when you're doing a few things at once, skips aren't unheard of, even at modest CPU loads. I rarely notice them, and they don't bother me, but they are there. A meg of buffer at the output device is cheap and easy anti-skip pretection.
2) Better sound reproduction -- Yeah, you could buy a better sound card, but as great as those can sound, a dedicated device can be better, especially when driving a stereo amp/speakers . I'm no sound snob personally, but I help a lot of home studio musicians, and the difference is easy to hear, even for me. Similarly, few PC speakers come close to a goo set of home stereo speakers. Even some $300 'big name' (you'd recognize it instantly) USB speakers I tested recently were very disappointing.
3) Device segregation: There are actually good reasons why a normal user mught be better off keeping a 'game style' (FMsynth/MIDI/WAV) card like a soundblaster as his primary audio device, rather than a killer studio-style card -- I have a friend who has separate semi-pro MIDI and digital audio cards, and a cheap Ensoniq for apps/surfing, so he doesn't have to power up his whole studio for normal computing. Such a set-up tends to create confusion in apps that expect a SB compatible, too. Sure, you could do this with USB speaker drivers, but see above re: those
4) Looks cool on shelf: don't knock it
5) allows full utilization of existing Home Entertainment components (which, in many houses doesn't revolve around the PC, as strange as that sounds) Unfortunately, this is merely a theoretical advantage. This product seems clearly targeted at the market that will buy first (computer users) and will probably not even talk to other home stereo components, aside from passing on the audio analog signals.
However, having said all that, I am utterly unmoved by this product, and I expect most users will be, too. What I'd like is a "digital entertainment station" - bidirectional, so it would be able to pipe me radio, TV, good balanced mike input etc. as well as piping my decompressing and D/A'ing mp3 (and WAV) stream to the speakers.
There is a market out there for this. Lots of companies sell this stuff for Beaucoup bucks. But Dell is going for a mass market portal model for revenue and expansion
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Check out www.mambox.com - It does all your asking, its portable, and its $199. Pretty sweet.
I have a p5-200 in a little case that has many gigs of mp3s on a couple of hard drives. it has a sb16, but could easily have some fancy schmancy newfangled sound board.
if you're goin to have to have a computer on which to store mp3s, why not play mp3s off that computer too? I'm lost.
It would be pretty sweet if it mounted like a stereo component, could be openned and modified similar to a computer rack component (or a stereo rack component if you really put some thought into it).
Probably doesn't need disk space if all it is doing is playing it, could be done over the network, but network traffic would interfere with operation, of course.
What would be cool is if it did more than MP3. MP3 loses some of the sound quality (still love it though). Perhaps there are other formats out there begging to be ported to this that could be added with some sort of bios flash or software/hardware modification?
Eh...
I've had this idea for a while, knew someone would eventually come along and do it. So here's my version of the dream component:
:) - Your kids will no longer each need their own copy of the same CD. This may require the server to restrict streaming the same song to two different clients simoultaneously to avoid any legal hassles.
(1) A CD player and software to allow you to rip & encode all your CDs just by popping them in and pressing one button. (CD player of course can also be used to play Plain Old CDS and MP3CDs)
(2) Digital output for modern amps would provide noise free sound and 190 kb/s encoding gives you decent enough quality.
(3) Embedded Linux on a SansDisk and space for two 2.5" laptop drives would give you a nice quiet player. - and making it user upgradeable means you can double your players capacity every couple years. (A 10 GB drive for starters should allow for over 100 CDs)
(4) NTSC output for enhanced on screen menu based music selectoins and categorization. (No X server though as that would be overkill)
(5) Builtin streaming server for whole house music. (Assuming you have Cat 5 going to every room
(6) Enough RAM to cache the songs being played to HD access doesn't cause interrupts. (64 MB should be more than enough to allow local play + 5 streams at 190 kb/s)
(7) Front mounted USB port to allow download of MP3s to handheld devices.
(8) HTTP server for remote browsing of song selection with option to allow download/upload of files from remote source with module to sync file uploads to main CD database. (You may have to make this option a "hack" to allow yourself some protection from lawsuits that will probavly ensue anyway.)
(9) CDDB access as well as on screen/IR remote title entry for those not savvy enough to network the thing.
When someone builds one of these I'll be their first customer. - Anyone want to collaborate on making this the first open source and open design consumer product?
--Aaron Greenberg
Here's what I never understood: CD's aren't that good! In some ways, LP phonographs have better sound (they are analog). I would like to see a new audio format (say, on DVD discs) with the following:
-96khz sampling rate
-24 (or 32?) bit audio
-5.1 channel surround sound
-and would it hurt to include the Artist, Album and Track names in the table of contents, so they can be shown on computers/stereos playing the disc?
That, I think, would push any differences between the digitized sound and the original analog sound out of the range of human discrimination.
And, as a bonus - if we devote more data to sound quality, there is less total available recording time for an artist making an album. I would like to see a limit of say, 45 minutes. I think that would cut down on the number of crap fluff songs that artists put in their album nowadays because they feel like they need to fill the 74 minutes or just like to hear their voice.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
With this box you get your mp3 collection accessible from the same place as your stereo, without having your computer and monitor in the same room (produces noise and heat, looks ugly and reminds you about work that you need to do...). If my PC is placed in another room it's easier to ignore it even if I know it's involved.
Probably you get a remote control too...
this technology needs to be merged with something
like dragon "naturally speaking" or some other
voice recognition software so that we can lay in
bed and say "stereo, play some cd|some mix|some song" and for control volume.
hook it into something napster/gnutella-like (presuming it gets developed to where it treats the napster network as an extension of the local filesystem) and you never have to leave your bed.
I also disagree with people who say "that's too hard" and "people aren't smart enough to do that." We aren't talking about anything hard here, popping in a sound card and ethernet, and a small linux distro. If someone put together a little pamphlet on it, it would be easier than assembling a swing set.
Eh...
FWIW, pro studios have been using a 96/24 format for the past few years, and some DVD audio specs on the drafting board want to use that same scheme.
That pushes the amount of data/time up to something like 320% of standard CD audio (for stereo -- 5.1 would triple THAT), but the fidelity is, as you say, getting into the realm where we're pushing the limits of physics for humans to perceive the granularity.
I once saw it demonstrated that in 32 bits, you have the resolution to capture everything from explosion-style-shock-wave-air-compression on down to the quantum jiggling of molecules due to heat, with a lot left over. 24 bit is just about right to capture the subset of that range that's audible to the human eardrum.
--
I had the rommate problem, the gizmos problem et al.
But the only thing that could slow our network down was another roommate's win95 machine. he originaly had it in a network set up by his father at home. The moron and his dad decided that they needed to set <sp>netbeui</sp> to ping everyone on the network every second.
We couldn't figure out why our 100Mb/s network sucked so bad until we scanned and noticed that one machine in sleep mode made up 94% of all traffic. We fixed that problem quite easily, disconnect the cable.
Just another reason why this plan may not work.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
What's slick about MP3 Server Box is the number of ways you can control music playback, IR Remote, Command Line, multiple GUI clients, Windows clients, and my favorite the CGI client. Lets me control from any system w/browser on my home network.
>At least one implementation of an FTP server is freely available on every OS I can think of.
True, FTP is on (practically) every OS. But it's not designed for streaming traffic. I don't think SMB wasn't designed for streaming either, but it was adapted to it. SMB doesn't come built into every OS but it does come built into one that FTP is not included in -> Windows.
When Dell started this idea and they had to ask the inevitable question "What network protocol do we use? FTP, a standard but it would require special software for windows users, or SMB, not a standard but would require no extra software for windows users?" What do you think they would choose? What would you choose in their shoes, honestly?
The only good news in this rant is that thanks to an ingenious program (I'm not a developer, nor do I have anything to do with project) called Samba SMB is available to all of the Unices. I know Macs have some implementation of SMB (I don't know what it's called).
So that pretty much takes care of Dell's problem. That is if they even bothered to care about non-windows users and I would be truly surprised if they did.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
>I don't think SMB wasn't designed
FIX:
I don't think SMB was designed...
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap
</WHINE>
What's your point? Are you stating for the record that MP3 does not provide the absolute best audio fidelity available?
No shit.
MP3 serves it's purpose. It provides a perfectly acceptable listening experience for the rest of us non-anal-retentive people who carry MP3mans or play music on our PC while we work or play. It has good sound quality that any layman is hard pressed to distinguish from CD. And the 128Kbps bitrate gives an excellent tradeoff between quality and file size.
And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)
Ah, well. I know there's no point arguing with one of these luddite zealots.
The idea is to make your MP3 CD's bootable with Linux and a built-in player. Then you only depend on a computer when you bring your MP3 CD's, it does not matter what is installed on that computer.
--
This is just a SoundBlaster Live with an extra chip that can decode MP3 in hardware and save less than 5% of the overall CPU load. Not much point, especially as it is then specific to a certain audio file format.
Audio decompression is no longer demanding enough relative to modern CPUs to make this worthwhile. An SBlive and a reciever with a digital in is all you really need.
I'm seeing a lot of "Why not just run a cable from your computer?" posts.
A few points:
-- The average sound card in a computer is crap. Complete and utter garbage when it comes to the fidelity of the audio outputs and the quality of the DACs.
-- You can buy high-end sound cards with much better DACs and outputs, but they're going to cost much more than $199, because of all the extra foo that usually goes into such a card, wavetable synths, PCI chipsets, etc etc.
-- The inside of your computer is one of the electrically noisiest places you have access to (apart from about a foot from your car's distributor...). Your sound card picks up modifications to the signal from this, sometimes as overt as audible noise, sometimes just as subtle changes to the frequency response.
-- Moving the decoder and DACs offboard allows them to be shielded from the above noise, as well as keeps your analog run to the shortest possible. Unless your stereo amp is 12" from your computer, you're running cables that are too long for the best possible sound. You're also probably running some $1.99 Radio Shack 1/8"<->RCA cable, instead of a short run of something good like Monster Cable. Keeping the signal digital as long as possible minimizes analog loss. (Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....)
-- You can offload the cycles from your CPU with an outboard box. Nobody's running into CPU crunches with current decoders, it's true, but, hey, that's more distributed.net keys for Team Slashdot, right?
Of course, in case you can't tell, I'm all into extreme fidelity, so I don't understand AT ALL why anyone would want to listen to MP3's as their primary source of music. (*shudder) But I'm just elitist that way, don't mind me....
--
This thing looks pretty spiff. A self-contained component MP3 jukebox with ethernet. Supposedly has Linux & MacOS software coming.
I like the idea behind the Dell thing if it doesn't require its own storage. The last thing I need it a dozen 30GB drives all over the house.
The main reason MP3 was developed was for portability. Their quality is low, even on their highest sampling level. They are great when you are on the road, but over a good stereo you hear exactly what they are: a low quality CD substitute. On a PC or in your car you don't hear the difference because of all the ambient environmental noise, but in your home that's not the case. Let MP3's stick to what they are good at: letting you listen to your favorite tunes on a laptop with crappy speakers. I would hope that we could have a better quality format for those that want it and have the space. I mean no disrespect to the developers of MP3! I think it is a great format and I use it a lot, but it isn't a substitute for a CD yet.
When is somebody going to make a stereo component that reads ISO9660 filesystems, goes into the directory structure, assembles a list of the MP3 files in the filesystem, and then plays them? I like to burn CD-Rs full of MP3s (which amounts to about eleven hours worth of music), bring them to work, and listen to music all day with xmms (never once hearing the same song twice.) It would be nice if I could take that same CD and throw it into a MP3 stereo component and have it be able to recognize the format.
..)
Hard drives are nice, but IMHO removable media is nicer. That way you don't have to maintain a network connection between your stereo and your computer. Or better yet, do it both ways (of course, that type of design decision tends to affect the price tag
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
or SMB, not a standard but would require no extra software for windows users?
Is the average user computer savvy enough to understand how to share a directory from his PC HD ? From that point of view, a dedicated and simplified FTP server included on a CD found in the box would be easier.
I know Macs have some implementation of SMB (I don't know what it's called).
I think that "Dave" is an SMB server for the Macintosh.
Another question that comes to mind is : is it easy for Dell to implement an SMB client ? An FTP client would sure be easiest to implement, wouldn't it ?
Stéphane
Have you checked out Badtech The daily online cartoon?
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
I actually wonder if it has any storage whatsoever... the blurb phrases it kind of strangely:
To me, that sounds like a very expensive winamp-in-a-can... more like a translator than a solid-state MP3 jukebox, which is what I'd much rather have in my stereo. :)
Don't forget the MP3 discman. Burn CDs full of MP3s and play 'em. I got one from easybuy2000.com... took a while to get it in, and the way they make you change dirs on the cd is kinda screwy, but other than that it works great. $125 too, can't beat that.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Ok, this is slashdot, we're mostly linux computer-types here... I can beleive no one's mentioned CAJUN.
It used to be at http://cajun.current.nu, but that seems to be down. Anyone know who's maintaining it?
Anyway, it basically turns a linux box into a jukebox... Mine is kindof neat, I mounted a pentium motherboard into a tape deck. It runs LIRC [linux infrared remote control] and so I control it with my reciever's remote. It also has a nifty LCD screen.
Also, because I wanted it to sound good, I bought a fancy SBlive and use SP/DIF, and also took out all the fans and spun down the hard drive. So now it just plays mp3s over ethernet from the samba server in my basement.
Definetly not mass market or anything, and a real pain to build... but it's so 1337...
Ive got my ram image of it here along with some really bad blurry pictures.
I hope cajun is progressing 'cause it is really cool.
MP3 is the current popular format, but it will surely be extended with more features. I hope all these dedicated MP3 players have an easy way to upgrade them to support new formats. Otherwise, we'll all be stuck with the old formats, because lots of people will have players that only play MP3's, so content providers won't use newer formats because they don't want to lose part of their audience.
I have a unique setup, but my mp3's sound better than anybody else's, heh. 1. Good mp3's. 128k isn't going to cut it. 160k minimum, 192k if you can get it. Napster's filter is a godsend. Hallelujah. 2. For those of you that are (unknowingly) using Xing encoders, I'll say a little prayer. They sacrifice high-end for size, and suck, making cymbols sound like running water. Tip: use Fraunhofer's encoders. I've got the codec (the C source is avaliable somewhere) so even audiograbber uses them. See? It's right in my media control panel. :) 2. Good soundcards now have digital audio output. Mine has optical digital output. Besides the cool factor (mp3's x-fered via light!) the quality doesn't diminish, you bypass the DAC on the soundcard (which is usually really crappy), plus it is very electrically noisy inside a PC. Digital bypasses that. For those of you using analog, another prayer. 3. Outboard DAC/Pre/Pro. This is a beauty. I've got a pre/pro that decodes the following data: A. CD digital audio B. DTS CD audio C. PCM digital audio (mp3/wav/midi/any other file format) D. AC3 (Dolby Digital) 5.1 audio E. DTS 5.1 audio And guess what? The soundcard's digital output passes all of this info. D&E require WinDVD or PowerDVD. It's hard to distinguish mp3's from CD's if ripped right. And the added plus is that you now have a decent Home Theater (at least from the audio standpoint). 4. A good Amp. I use a Carver. Very good for the starving college student, which I am. 5. Good speakers. Paradigm Atoms do very well, thank-you-very-much. Also a bang-for-the-buck must-have (sorry for all the hyphens). And a 12" sub. Voila! These "digital" speakers sound great, I now have DTS in my dorm room, and mp3's are good. I may have lost 30lbs in the process, but I needed to cut back on my food budget anyways. This post is longer than I thought, but I just get a little aggravated when people comment on how crappy mp3 is. It's just a format, like wav. Just compressed. Dolby Digital is compressed too, 384k/s.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
...a real standard for MP3 audio encoded on a CD. It could even be based upon an existing standard (ie. ISO 9660), with some required heirarchial structure.
That way, we could have a real MP3 home audio player, rather than something that just seems to simplify what can already be done with a PC and some technical knowledge.
I would buy one, especially if they were available for car stereos. And you could even integrate it with a standard CD player!
Will this only recognize mp3 files on fat partitions? It'd be nice if it could be used to recognize mp3's on an ext2/BeOS/MacOS formatted drive.
And can I get a hallelujah? The MP3's you get off of the net sound like crap. They get played back on crap equipment.
The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap. Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?
And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
The average windows user is smart/lucky enough to share a folder on their hard drive if given just the right instructions, I see it happen all of the time.
It's not the FTP client that would be hard to implement it's the FTP server.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Shame, I've been looking for a USB-based hardware MP3 player to chain off my overstressed old 266MMX portable...