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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.
...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 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
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'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....
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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...
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)
Right, but that's what MP3 Anywhere is for, and at a fifth the cost. So the question remains, what makes this worthwhile?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes