Slashdot Mirror
Linux-Based Audiophile CD Archival System
cporter writes: "My disappointment with the quality of compressed digital music formats (MP3, Ogg, WMA, the list goes on ...) and playback hardware has so far forced me to stick with the good ol' aluminum coated plastic discs. However, Linn has created the Kivor Knekt multi-unit linux-based hard disk system for archiving CDs in uncompressed form for cataloging and playback (yes, it does support ripping to MP3). It includes the Tunboks storage system, the Linnk control interface, the Oktal D/A converter, and the PCI Musik Machine sound board. The system can support up to 11 hard drives for storing audio. Stereophile magazine has a review in their current dead-tree issue, not available online, during which the reviewer hooked up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and found an AMD Duron system running Linux. The price is a mere $20,000, plus installation. Guess I'm sticking to CDs for the moment." Looks amazing despite the price. They should send me a review model :)
Try the Free Lossless Audio Codec. It isn't as compressive as MP3 or OGG, but will help.
http://flac.sf.net
David
Bah, just get a CD jukebox. Yah yah, wonderful machines for archiving CDs :)
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
forced me to stick with the good ol' aluminum coated plastic discs.
Sorry to nitpick, but....aren't they PLASTIC coated ALUMINUM discs?
El riesgo vive siempre!
To be able to tell the difference between an MP3 encoded at 640 kbps and the actual wav file. Just because the shit you dl off napster's quality sucks, doesn't mean the whole format does.
I wonder what the price for additional hard drives are? Can you stick in a generic 76 gig IDE drive, or do you need to buy specific ones from them? 250 hours of music isn't all that much...
[TMB]
Would really like to see aluminium coated plastic discs for a sound medium....
Knekt .. Linnk .. Tunboks .. Oktal .. Musik
Of course, because it's a Linn, someone, somehwere will shell for it and help them improve their diction to match their fidelity.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
different formats will likely make you happier. wma, mp3, ogg, and the like are all lossy compression schemes, so they discard some audio information when you encode the sound into their format.
.wav files to each other.
there are other options, though, that use lossless compression, so what you get from the file is the same as what's on the cd. there are a few out there, but shorten is the only format i can remember. it's widely used for trading live recordings where the fans want the best possible quality without sending
think of how many 'great' bands you could just purchace for that much. Dokken, Kix, Winger, and probably enough left over for DIO and some pizza. Actually the system would be wonderfull if the price was right or if I were rich.
My disappointment with the quality of compressed digital music formats...
If you are so disappointed then why don't you create a better compression algorithm for digital music. I doubt it is exactly easy.
Hey, we need magazines. What else can I read on the toilet?
Besides, if the article winds up to be no good, then guess what else I can use it for while I'm on the bowl...
If you were a real audiophile, wouldn't you be buying records, and not CD's?
Beyond just sticking to the CDs, if you don't like the quality of WMA, Vorbis, mp3, ect, you could try using a losless codec.
Basically the difference is this- a lossy codec, such as mp3, in order to shrink the filesize as small as possible, "throws away" less relevent information, to focus on what you will hear.
A lossless codec, such as Flac, does not lose any information. You could, if you wanted to, restore it to the original WAV file.
Think of it as zipping the wav file, but with special routines that encode tighter.
Flac can be found at http://flac.sourceforge.net/.
It might be possible to modify this system to use such a format? It would save HD space, which would allow you to archive more onto it.
Be well.
Colin Davis
Why aren't you at least using Shorten? It's lossless audio compression and it'll at least double the amount of stuff you can archive.
I'm doing it now on a 300 GB RAID 5 partition, and things are sweet.
Read about SHN here, and then use it.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If you don't want any compression, why not go down to Circuit City and buy a 400-disk CD jukebox for $300? What's the point of spending a lot of time and money to transfer CD's (uncompressed, no less) to a computer?
They say they don't use compression...not all audio compression schemes are lossy! Etree's Shorten (SHN) format gets something like 50% compression without loss, and that's nothing to scoff at!
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
linn makes good stuff - i'd much prefer to store my music on this than with MP3's.
But - i'd rather just throw all my music onto a server uncompressed that pay them 20K - i could do some terrible things with that much change in my pocket.
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
I bought a Panasonic DVD-CV51 5-disc carousel DVD player recently. Has MP3 CD playability, for only $249 down at Best Buy. Burned up a 131-song MP3 CD, and piped it out of my 5.1 surround home-theater.
:)
I was actually quite i
mpressed. I was expecting clicks, pops, crappy dynamic range, etc etc. However I ripped most of the tracks on that CD myself, using mid-high (192ish) quality VBR encoding. Some of the songs I did NOT rip myself that were encoded at 128kbps were obviously inferior, but as long as you rip them well, you should have a good bang for your buck audio experience.
Of course, YMMV.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
...with 11 harddrives. Íve never seen such a box, but I guess it would be quite loud.
So it is no replacement for a good old CD player.
Micha !!!
My disappointment with the quality of digital music, has forced me to stick with vinyl. 8*[
Even if you can't tell the difference between the original and something that's compressed in a lossy format (such as MP3), there's still a reason for lossless!
With MP3, if you compress a file which has already been in MP3 format, then each time you will introduce more artifacts into the audio. Likewise, JPEG may look just the same as TIFF on your monitor, but if you take JPEG to a professional printer you will get laughed at!
this is not.
you could build a box with 50,000 monkeys in it to go get your CDs too, or hire an orchestra to recreate your music full-time, too.
on those, cost would also be prohibitive.
a "comparable" solution will have cd quality and mp3 cost.
Goat sex free since 2001
When there is not such thing as a audiophile quality sound card. It seems to me that until the Denon's, and Bang/Olufsen's of the world start coming out with sound cards, there is no point in worrying about loss on the storage end. You're gonna get some loss on the output side that makes it all a waste of time.
In the meantime, there is the Sutherland 12dax7 system which works with any type of music on your computer for $1699 IIRC. www.12dax7.com
Nevertheless, it is good to see high-end audio companies paying attention to newer recording technologies.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Subject says it all.
At that price it better have nothin' but vacuum tubes in it. Transistors just don't cut it when it comes to high-end equipment like that.
Error:
Unless you're dealing with double-sided discs like DVD, the aluminum is deposited on top of the polycarbonate disc. I suppose the resin they spray on top of that to provide some nominal protection might technically be called "plastic," but it's really more like paint.
Most people don't realize that the label side is the fragile side.
Any true audiophile I know knows that CD's are a dieing technology. This is a system for somebody who is into toys. Not somebody who truly enjoys accurate music. (Who would most likely go with records anyway) But what about SACD's? Practically records without the hiss and imperfections. What about 5.1 audio too? I highly doubt they will find a way to make a system with another storage to hold the kind of information stored on future technologies.
Also, check out Etree if you are interested in getting or distributing live shows in Shorten format from bands that allow taping and trading.
That's classic snobbism from self-declared "audiophiles". The truth is, 99% of people won't be able to hear a difference between a well-encoded 128kbp MP3 and the original CD. Of the remaining 1%, 99% won't be able to tell the difference anymore if the MP3 is encoded at or above 256kbps. And that's even with top-of-the-line amplifiers and speakers. It's the same kind of people who claimed years ago that vinyls were so much better sounding than CDs, when the truth is that the dynamics and S/N ratio of a good vinyl will never match that of a bad CD, and the only difference between a vinyl and a CD is the audio on the vinyl is compressed.
Those who really can tell a difference whatever the encoding are golden ears used as sonar officers in nuclear submarines, and professional audio testers in their anechoic chambers working for Kenwood, Denon and the likes. Is the poster one of these people ? not bloody likely.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I REALLY doubt you can tell the difference between uncompressed CD audio and really high bit-rate OGG or MP3.
If you're truly that much of an audiophile, you should see a shrink, because you've got problems. You also might want to check your ears, they may be malfunctioning...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
People don't want to have to re-rip lossless when they get better sound cards in 15 years.
you could buy a real bad ass harley and use that to pickup hot chicks who couldn't care less if your audio compression was lossie. Plus in two years the harley would still be worth 20K while this Archival thing would be worth less (worthless?)
Does anyone else remember this article? With the current price of HDs (Fry's has 100Gig for $199 this week), I bet a similar box can be built for a fraction of the price. Of course there is the software side of it, but that is what us geeks do best. The thing is based on Linux after all. Just my thought.
Oh, come on, and since when so called 'esoteric' audio component makers make meaningful decisions? It's just a matter of perceptions, if it's priced at $20,000, a lot of 'audiophiles' will think it's worth it.
It's the same rationale as people who think that a CD player that has a gold plated/rare woods case sounds better than a standard plasticky CD player regardless of what actually is inside.
Same goes for people who spend hundreds of dollars for gold-everything interconnects (cables) and other various snake oil products.
Music appreciation is by definition subjective, so if one spends several hundred bucks for a component which *might* produce a difference measurable in a lab with ultra-sensitive equipment, one mysteriously becomes able to hear this difference even while listening to the newly enhanced hi-fi kit from three rooms away and under the shower...
While it's obvious that there *is* quite a difference between a $300 hi-fi, and a $3000, most of the things above a, say, $5,000 threshold for a complete system (CD+pre+amp+speakers+interconnects) tend to cater more to your aesthetic senses than actually sound incrementally better. If the room you put this system in has not been modified in any way (i.e. if you stick the speakers in a wall mounted library 3" apart from each other etc.) cut the $5,000 by half at least. Same goes if you live in an apartment and you can't turn the knob on your 400W RMS amp higher than 1 without your neighbours threatening to evict you.
-- the cake is a lie
Taco's brain is strictly regulated by The inverse of Moore's Law Which states that the processing power of his severely thrashed noodle will be decreased by half every 18 months. This explains his inability to properly express the simplest of thoughts.
I've grown tired of snobby audiophile types that claim there is a difference, that analog plastic LPs are much better than "digital".
The bottom line is, CDs encode the entire range of human hearing. The sampling is beyond the Nyquist frequency of human hearing.
The only way that a human could tell a digital recording is different from an analog is if it is done incorrectly, i.e. bad digitization (recording) or bad analog conversion (the result of a badly adjusted CD player).
Just listen to your music A LOT louder. Eventually, you won't be able to tell the difference between compressed and non compressed. Worked for me!
The biggest tip off for me when I hear mp3s encoded onto CDs is the nasty high-end aliasing artifacts (e.g. listen to the cymbals or high hat). These are immediately noticable even in my car on my Apline head unit through my factory speakers. Unfortunately, I can not say for certain if these artifacts disappear at high bit rates since I refuse to listen to CDs made from mp3s. I only know the artifacts exist from listening to CDs other people have made and play in my car. But, for all I know, these artifacts may be introduced by the software used to burn the CDs. I've never been sufficiently motivated to do any real scientific tests.
I also agree with the poster who made the comments about Linn being relatively expensive. You're paying quite a bit for the Linn name and quality. I'm sure someone else could come up with something similar for much less money.
Um, the "Nyquist frequency" has nothing to do with "human hearing." It's a function of the signal (i.e., the signal which is sampled to get the discrete time series that is then encoded on the CD) itself. It has nothing to do with _who_ is listening to the music. If you sample a signal at a frequency lower than its Nyquist frequency, you get aliasing, that's all.
Probably the human ear would be able to pick up on aliasing if the sampling rate was too slow... and I'm certainly willing to believe that the sampling is so fine on CDs that it's indistinguishable to the normal human ear... But those are different issues.
I'm just frustrated with your use of the phrase "Nyquist frequency of human hearing." Get your math straight before you go calling other people "snobby."
"The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum does not vary."
Dear CmdrTaco (Rob),
Thank you for your time spent testing our review system. We hope you enjoyed the awesome sound this system is capable of producing. We have noted from a review of our server logs that your "Slashdot" reader base has purchased a lot of our units, and therefore we extend our gratitude for your indirect financial support as well.
Since our unit has given you so much joy, you can extend your listening pleasure by visiting us on the web at http://cheesyecommerce.com/musik/payusnowdammit.a
Please note that our hardware's self destruct mechanism is protected against tampering by advanced ROT13 encryption. Any attempt (which undoubtedly will fail) to modify the hardware control routines attached to our patented C4 explosive destruct device contained within will result in our special Linux edition "Magic Lantern U.K." software reporting you directly to the FBI, and may result in loss of life or limb as well.
Once again, thank you for trying our unit. To avoid accidental explosions, please remit payment in full ($20,000 USD) within 15 calendar days. We appreciate your business!
Sincerely,
Linn.Co.Uk Sales Team
--------
Web hosting by geeks, for geeks. Now starting at $4/month (USD)!
If you're gonna email, use the public key!
CD's are aluminum disks with plastic coating, not aluminum coated plastic disks.
Once again slashdot gets the facts mangled up in there desperate attempt to get more banner-clicks by rushing a story out.
It's true that the sampling rate at 44khz is just about enough to cover the nyquist of human hearing (about 20khz, so they say). But this doesn't say anything about the sampling resolution. You could sample at 44hkz but use 4 bits per sample, and the result would be awful. 16 bits is pretty damn good, but it is not perfect. (And it doesn't help that it is spread linearly over the range. 32-bit floating point sounds much nicer.)
Anyway, I say that CDs sound pretty good, personally, though I do wish that it wasn't so common to compress (as in, flatten out the dynamics, not as in MP3) them so much. If they didn't do this (DVD audio typically doesn't), I think they would sound as good as LPs (and be much more convenient and robust).
I fail to understand how (original sound source) -> vinyl -> CD, the second conversion done with your own equipment, could possibly sound better than
(original sound source) -> CD, done with professional audio equipment.
and maybe you'll see that they also sell sound cards.
Off topic but Linn demo'd the £86,000 stereo this weekend at Carlisle. Imagine the mortgage application for that!
I am not a real audiophile, but I'm often disapointed from the sound coming off of a CD. I don't have a 100 000$ sound sytem at home or high quality professional CD-player / amplifiers / speakers, but DENON makes pretty good quality products for the price. Anyway, I claim you can notice imperfections in CD sound using any decent player/speakers.
In my opinion, the problem is not the media by itself. In theory, it can reproduce sounds so precisely that only experts could find imperfections. I think the problem comes from "mastering", when they take all the clean tracks from the DAT or something, and they channel it to a single track, distorting the original work. When mastering isn't a big deal, like for techno music, the sound produced can be very clean. For rock, pop and common analogly-produced music, the result is often a disaster.
What I would really like is to have multi-track CDs. How many tracks? Ideally as many as there is instruments, signers... in fatc one track for every "noise" source would be ideal (but impractical). Let's take an example for a rock band. You would need 1 track for the signer, 2 back vocals, 1 bass guitar, 2 guitars, and let say 5 tracks for the different frequency range a drummer can produce. Total: a dozen of tracks.
How would it be useful? In a standard system the "mastering" could be done on the fly. In a good system, you can have different set of speakers / amplifiers for each track. Deep subs for the bass guits, high-spl subs for the base drums, big midrange for the guits, etc... This means you get rid of the distortion from mastering, and now you can elimitate listen-time distortion created by putting a too wide range of frequencies through crossovers,amplifiers and speakers!!! You want to get rid of the stupid keyboard? Don't play the track and voila!
Do I need to say that I don't like the sound produced by mp3's? Even the CD is dead, bring us the multi-track CD!!
delete free(system.gc);
With my Ogg Vorbis files recorded at VBR average 190kb/sec in high quality mode, I can here know difference between CD and those files. But my sound system isn't very good so that could be part of it.
If it's truly superb quality your after, digital is not for you. I have yet to learn of any digital system that can beat a high quality vinyl system.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
It doesn't say anything about it on the web page, but it seems like that would be an obvious feature that they're 90% of the way to providing anyway.
And *that* would be sweet: having essentially my entire music collection on one disc. I couldn't squeeze everything onto 5 CDs without compressing well past the point where I start to notice artifacts.
a well exercised anal sphincter is the secret for a hemorrhoid free life.
No, those artifacts are from low bitrates. I ripped all of my Rush albums (cymbals are very important
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Even if it were at a more reasonable cost, I don't see how it would be of use for anything but the moderate CD owner. Which doesn't make sense, given that the pricetag pretty much guarantees they're trying for the radio station market....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
That would be the quality of a CD played on a decent system with a good DAC and not a $50 Sony walkman that you use to listen to CD's.
Here's an analysis of your entire argument: apple, meet orange.
The last sentence says it all.
"My disappointment with the quality of compressed digital music formats [blah]"
"That's classic snobbism from self-declared "audiophiles"."
I do not claim myself "audiophile". But I hear the difference.
"The truth is, 99% of people won't be able to hear a difference between a well-encoded 128kbp MP3 and the original CD. Of the remaining 1%, 99% won't be able to tell the difference anymore "
Where did you get that numbers from, dumbarse ?
"claimed years ago that vinyls were so much better sounding than CDs, when the truth is that"
They still claim the same (me included).
Yes, the funny thing is with you Microsofters, that you go to the shops to buy the nifty-wifty stuff available. And the industry wants to sell it. When the DC came out, they said: Superior to the LP. I always thought: Idiots ! Any studio-technician of a better level will tell you the same. Now that DVD-A and SACD comes, the industry says exactly the same, we said years back...Finally the are right, though, they would say anything.
the dynamics and S/N ratio of a good vinyl will never match that of a bad CD, and the only one of these people ? not bloody likely.
So what ? dynamics are dynamics. S/N is S/N.
Ever heard about sounds, that area bove the 20KHz limit ? They can't be heard, but _felt_. There is even a bone in the head, which is called Musician's bone in my native language.
Tube amps have a very bad S/N. Still, many people consider them the best (I don't).
You are so lame and unknowing that I just could not resist to flame you, dumpass.
Go home, or better, go to a High-End shop. A real one. Listen to equipment for USD40.000.
You will never say such stupid things again.
There is a difference between Nissan and a Rolls Royce. Not only in the price...
Your real problem is, that *your* ears just do not *sense* it. Hence you imply your crippleism upon the rest of the world. So you're not alone. So noone sees you're an audiophile cripple.
First: Inform yourself by ear.
Second: Speak.
I'm moving to the next level (from surround) and want to get a good setup. I'm willing to pay for quality, but none of the Circuit City guys can explain why I should use Denon or HK over Sony (or even over Kenwood)...
/. nickstuff...)
Can you help me?
TIA,
thormj@iname.com (forgot
In other words, I want an electronic format which keeps the _entire_disk_ intact as a single entity. Think of your classical or electronica discs where there are no breaks from track to track: once converted to mp3 (or whatever), I found it impossible to play the album the way it was meant to be heard. No matter what I tried, I still got a slight break in-between the tracks.
Also, wouldn't it be nice if there was an open electronic format that retained things like the liner pages, etc, from the CD? Maybe I'm the only one who cares about such esoteric issues, but to me, the concept of the "album" itself is important and needs to be retained.
My solution? I, along with some other people, created a system which allows me to integrate my Sony CD changers with my Linux/Apache web server. Now, I can control my jukeboxes from a web page. I am running a streaming server, so I can listen to my collection from work or wherever, and the concept of an "album" is retained throughout. You can see my work here:
Discs
You won't be able to control the changer, as a login is required to do that part. If you're interested in a demo, drop me an email and I'll set you up with a login.
Regards;
DaC
There recently was a post in for an audio test. Let's see... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/31/212723 1&mode=thread, which leads to this: http://ff123.net/128test/instruct.html
I participated in this test. There were 3 samples of music, each encoded 6 different ways. I could not tell the difference between any of the 18 encoded files and the originals. No way, no how. As a caveat, I should mention that I was in the US Navy for 10 years and worked in an engine room for many of those years, so I was exposed to high decibels for long periods of time. I found a tone sweep somewhere and played it. I can't hear anything over about 13 kHz.
So, for me, this is overkill. I've been ripping my CD's to MP3's pretty steadily. I've found a few that sound bad. I'm marking them and when I get through with all of them, I'll re-encode those at a higher bit-rate. Total cost to me: 40GB hard disk - $200; Winamp - free; Lineout cables to preamp - $10. Already had the computer and sound card. At this point, I'm not sure 40GB is enough, but if it comes down to it, there's a lot of crap in amongst what I've ripped so far. (Not every song on every album is a good one.)
So, a word of advice from an old (38) geezer: Buy expensive stereo stuff when you're young. Also, don't blow out your ears too early - wear hearing protection at concerts, while shooting guns, perhaps at work if it's noisy there. You'll thank yourself later.
Great... a Linux box that contains uncompressed music. There are lossless compression formats, and they could be used to dramatically increase the number of songs stored on the system.
An interesting use for this kind of system follows: What I'd like to see is a machine that looks like a jukebox but is totally computerized. Instead of flipping pages, album covers and information would be displayed on screens. The audio would be stored in any of several supported formats on a RAID array inside the machine. Lossy and lossless compression would be supported, as well as uncompressed audio. (Leaving it uncompressed is stupid, in my opinion, as decompressing a losslessly compressed file will produce exactly the same information as no compression at all in the first place.)
Here's where my idea becomes interesting. Networking hardware would be built in, and additional screens, which would look somewhat like miniature jukeboxes, could be placed around the room, as in some restaurants. Internet connectivity would be possible, and would link the jukebox to a central resource, any of its mirrors, or any other site that supports the required protocol. You could conceivably select to play songs that aren't saved inside the jukebox at all! While other songs are being played (songs that were selected before your selection), it will download your song in the background (in a small-file format, such as MP3).
Songs that are seldom played would eventually be removed from the jukebox using a simple LRU (Least Recently Used) algorithm, unless they are marked as permanent by the jukebox owner, in which case they won't be deleted. Songs that are played often would be downloaded in a larger, lossless format during idle cycles, for better sound quality.
OF COURSE, THIS JUKEBOX WOULD RUN LINUX.
The main jukebox and smaller "consoles" that would be placed around the room would all accept money, just as "real" jukeboxes do. This would be a great product for bars and restaurants. (I often visit a nearby bar that has a jukebox, and there are plenty of songs I wish they had. This jukebox would solve that problem.)
OH WELL.
> Same goes if you live in an apartment and you
> can't turn the knob on your 400W RMS amp...
Shouldn't it be called a GNU/amp then?
(ducks thrown objects)
CDs are recorded at 16 bit resolution. Digital signal-to-noise ratio is 6 dB / bit, which will give you 96 dB SNR on a CD. Can you name ANY analog recording method that comes close to that? Or any analog system that has 0.0015% THD?
The limiting factor in any music reproduction system is the transducer that converts the electric signal to sound. The BEST speakers and headphones cannot even reach 0.1% THD, which is equivalent to 10 bits resolution.
BTW, even the most modest digital systems are surprisingly good. I have measured my Sound Blaster card, by looping a sine wave from the output to the input through an ordinary cable. By doing a Fourier Transform on the input signal, I found it to have a response starting from 7 Hz (-3dB point), with NO discernible distortion anywhere. That's right, there was no second (or higher) harmonic above the -96 dB noise floor.
All Macs come with iTunes and FireWire. You can easily hook on more than 11 FireWire hard disks, and iTunes is happy to rip to AIFF and work only with uncompressed audio. It's UI is a pleasure to use to archive lots and lots of music. I have about 800 albums archived in iTunes and can find any song in a second or two. For a couple of grand, you can get an iBook and a couple of 80GB FireWire drives, and you'll be able to edit movies and surf the Web or play DVD's and do other things with it as well.
Make this software and you'll be the coolest dude around:
1 web-based front-end that can:
-read the cd currently in the linux box's cd-rom drive
-copy all the tracks to the hard drive
-use lossless compression
-use a cddb type database for directory placement and file naming
-do real-time mp3 encoding and streaming
-burn tracks back onto a cd
if this could all be done through a web-based thing for those of us with a linux server in the closet, it would be EXCELLENT!
I tried those "blind listening tests" that were featured on /. a while ago (can't be bothered digging up URL) and I couldn't tell the difference using $150 Sennheiser headphones through an SBLive Value, nor my $1000 stereo setup (though my CD player isn't the greatest). I still maintain that badly encoded MP3s sound like crap, but from that test it seems to me that modern encoders are better than my ears, even at 128 kbps, and these days I count as a semi-professional musician (I get beer to play in a cafe :) ).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
There are plenty of sound cards with digital output. An optical cable goes straight from the card to your fancy receiver, so no information loss occurs before the signal reaches the amp. Even cheap receivers these days have very good DACs, so you can easily get all the way to the analog portion of the signal train with no measurable degredation.
An optical-out sound card runs about US$1000, which is a minor cost to an audiophile. Personally, I'm happy with 128 kbps compression and a pair of cheap headphones.
you'd be extremely hardpressed to tell the diff between a silver stamped cd going thru its audio chain and this setup as I described. in fact, my setup will be better, on average, since the audio alchemy (or even midiman) DAC will usually be better than the one built into your cd player.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They're aluminum-coated plastic discs. Notice the hyphen.
There is a plugin for XMMS called Crossfade that helps a lot with this. You have to fiddle with it a little to get acceptable results. If you're really picky the results may be noticable but I can listen to Zappa albums again without wanting to throw my machine through a window. It's on the plugins page at www.xmms.org.
I went through all of this stuff a while ago, and managed to settle down on a pretty good A/V system. The basic gist is this:
There is little in the way of technical innovation in this field. Mostly that's done by the big labs, like Dolby, who came up with AC-3 (our current standard of 5.1 digital surround sound). Basically there are some ASIC's that manufacturers put into their receivers and off they go. Sound quality differences come down to the individual components used, and how much a manufacturer pays attention to component noise in their designs. That is, you really, really don't want a big audibly humming transformer sitting right next to the output stage of your amplifier!
Basically, you want good quality transformers, capacitors, internal wiring, switches/binding posts and overall design. Switching and binding posts should be as far away from any sort of noise generator as possible, capacitors should seem obscenely large and a nice, big transformer, or two should be present. That doesn't always mean you're on the right path, but it's a good indicator.
As far as brands and what not drop me an email at justin@websocietyinc.com. I went through all of this so I have a pretty good idea and am happy to share...
From the Latin Audire, to hear, and the Greek Philein, to love. An audiophile is someone who loves what he hears. That may include hiss, pops, crackles, and everything an analog recording has.
However, if you love music, instead of audio, you will insist on CDs, all other things being equal. Of course, there are classic recordings which were done the analog way, before digital perfection came along. Jazz lovers will have their Miles Davis recordings, and Beethoven lovers cannot live without their 1962/1963 recordings by Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker. But those true music lovers will have those classic recordings in digital format, preserved forever from further analog degradation.
You probably used that hard disk to store non-music things, such as html files or a browser. Because of this, you need to use a "Web-safe" marker. You ruined that IBM drive, so you'd better buy a new drive to try it.
Experts like to use "CCFF66" or "CCFF33", but you can play around to tweak the right sound.
It should work as soon as you put the drive back together, so if it doesn't, just buy a new one and try again. Rinse and repeat until one works.
My disappointment with the quality of compressed digital music formats (MP3, Ogg, WMA, the list goes on ...) and playback hardware has so far forced me to stick with the good ol' aluminum coated plastic discs.
If your that picky, you should be listening to LPs, or tapes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The myths section is intresting. But claims that CD audio is "Perfict" ware a little thin. IIRC while CDs bit depth is 'good enough' for perfict reporduction, it's not for mixing (mix a bunch of 16bit tracks together at 16 bit and you'll end up with a lot less). And the sample rate could be higher, as well.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Unless your name is Lassie your ears cannot discern the difference. And no, spending a lot of money on audio equipment will not magically endow you with the capacities.
Facts. Tube amplifiers tend to give a more realistic presentation of vocals and soundstaging--especially depth. If, due to your preferred music, that is what you most care about, then tube amps give great value for money.
Facts. Simply listen on a good turntable: use your ears, and you will prefer vinyl. I have never met anyone who disagreed after actually listening. There are various theories as to why. (A) Vinyl has a greater dynamic range (you can hear ~20 dB into the hiss, which is ignored). (B) Vinyl allows much faster transients (the human ear detects up to 30 kHz, even though pure tones are inaudible above about 20 kHz). (C) Things related to Shun Mook and PWB (which seem to work, though I don't understand why). (D) etc.
Facts. This is really the same as above: CD has to throw away a lot of the information, especially getting rid of fast transients. The CD standard compresses music much more than DVD-A: so much so that the difference is audible (though "huge" might be exaggerated).
Facts. Anything in the signal path will cause some unwanted distortion, and so should generally be avoided. This is truly obvious.
In other words, the things claimed to be myths are largely true.
There is nothing wrong with being ignorant. There is something wrong with pretending you're not and promulgating untruths.
... the parent post is simply wrong. If you had compared MP3 and CD on a decent stereo, then you would know so. If you haven't, then please either don't mod it or consider that it is a likely a troll.
Moderators, the parent post is a troll. See the verious replies for why.
(from an episode of Geeks in Space)
"MP3s are great because you can fit 9,000 songs on a 40GB hard drive.
MP3s suck because then it sounds like shit ".
Posting anonymously because I never bothered to make an account.
Audiophiles are people who listen to the sound system, not the music.
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
I know a lot of people say that CDs record a wider range of frequencies and automatically equate this to better sound. The big difference is that digital recording equipment will "clip" the input when it overloads, whereas analog equipment just starts sounding warm and fuzzy. I used to record on three digital 4-tracks, and in between the mixing board and the DAT recorder I used a tube preamp which made a world of difference. Took away the 'cold' sound of the purely digital recording.
For my rebuttul, please refer to every other post on alt.audiophiles.recurring.pointless.holy.wars
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Most SB-Live models for instance always has their effects engine engaged,
like or not, changing the digital soundstream before it leaves the
system.
SPDIF is also a somewhat touchy thing, and a poorly designed
digital out card can lose some bits of fidelity I'm not sure if
this occurs with any sold cards, but it could.
Some digital out cards give you pure unadulterated sound, but
many consumer-targetted ones (Creative Labs, for isntance)
do not.
-josh
Has anyone out there used a Linn Rekursiv machine ? Very strange ...
What this thing really needs is a noise generator that approximates analog.
Let's see... For $20,000 US, I can buy:
1. Terabyte Fileserver: $5000
2. Turtlebeach sound card with optical out (SBLive won't do it; it resamples the data for no reason): $400
3. 'Ultimate Linux Box 2001'= $3200-$7000
4. Choice of storage formats: WAVs (Free[as in beer]:1250-1750 cds:lossless) MP3 (done proper) (Free[as in beer]:12,500-17,500 cds:lossy) Ogg Vorbis (Free[as in speech]:12,500-17,500 cds:lossy), and FLAC (Free[as in speech]:2500-3500 cds:lossless)
All this, 2.54*10^24 times more storage, and a set of components guaranteed to be better than what is in that POS that's being sold. Oh, and lets not forget the $7000 or so you'll be saving.
I'll pass.
Toodles
Toodles D. Clown
I have no doubt you actually believe you're getting better sound, because you've dumped so much money into it. However what you're saying simply goes against a lot of blind testing that has been done.
If you can listen to your WAV, alongside a good quality 320 kbps MP3 in a controlled, blind test and tell the difference I salute you. This is almost certainly not the case though. I'd be glad to take a quick $1000 off of you if you want, just send me a WAV file and I'll even encode the MP3 for you.
As for 96KHZ sample rates - so your ears can hear inaudible differences in MP3 audio, AND hear noise above 22khz? You're truly remarkable..
You'll need this to beat yourself over your head once you realize how badly you were taken.
lossless audio compression
more like oxymorron
The so-called "resolution" is better defined as "quantization noise", which is like any other kind of noise. The best vinyl records will get something between 65 and 70 dB of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), assuming a perfect pick-up and amplifier. Worse than a 12-bit digital recording. And, by proper digital signal processing, the quantization noise can be pushed out of the hearing range, by the "Delta-Sigma" method, for instance, so the actual performance is even better than the nominal 16 bits. I have some CDs that have been treated to 20 and 24 bit resolutions (120 dB and 144 dB SNR).
There's a million posts above me saying roughly "come on, mp3 should be good enough, why do I want this?" That's not what the article is about. First of all, there are some people crazy enough to spend $20,000 on cool audio equipment. Second, there are some people can tell the difference and who care. Finally, this is suddenly paints the DMCA, copy-protected CDs, etc in a totally different light.
On the last point, there is finally a 100% clearly legitimate reason for a person to want a 100% accurate digital reproduction of a CD. Record companies cannot possibly argue with this. This device, by itself, can be used as legal leverage to force record companies to open digital media to fair use copying. It also underlines the most important advantage of digital media over analogue: music recorded in a digital format can live forever -- if record companies force it to remain on its original physical media (the cd you purchased original), the lifetime of the music is finite. With a series of machines like this extending into the future, the music can live forever uncorrupted.
This is a very good thing.
And it runs Linux.
period.
Seriously, though, having one of these would kick ass. No more waiting for my stupid CD jukebox to shuffle to the right disk, you can make custom playlists, and, best of all, you can play your MP3 collection on it. Next 20K that I find on the ground, I'm getting one!
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
r3mix.net cited a blind listening test of 300 audiophiles using some $30,000 worth of equipment and they concluded that mp3 @ 256kbit/s encoded using lame or some Fraunhofer codecs is equivalent to cd quality. And now that lame's vbr encoding has matured, achieving archival quality, why is this guy complaining about the lack of quality compression schemes?
Having worked in the recording "biz" for several years before coming to the dark side of computing (I was a recording studio tech for years) I have a few thoughts on the subject.
Uncompressed storage isn't that bad of an idea (I don't know about $20k tho). There are those out there that think 16 bit/44.1kHz CD's are too "lossy" of a medium. I'm not calling them snobs, because I know some of them and I know how incredible their ears are. They can tell the difference. If you've ever sat in a real recording studio (http://www.studioxinc.com, http://www.plantstudios.com, http://www.recordplant.com/start.html) you can too. And there is something to be said for being able to hear the difference. If you can tell it's different, no matter where it is, that's what counts.
I find two things funny:
1) The idea of "lossless" compression.
2) People who are declared snobs because they hate compressed audio.
First off, there's no such thing as "lossless" compression, no matter how you define it or package it, compression is throwing away something to make room for the stuff being squished. I realize that what is being thrown away is probably not audible, or is even unused bits or samples. There is alot of talk and theory about this and it's being hotly debated as to what is really percivable in compressing audio and what isn't. Also, there's much debate about if there really is a difference in tossing unused bits and frequencies (eg anything above 20k) and whether or not that affects the sound you can hear (think sympathetic frequency boost and loss).
After working in the audio industry in pro recording studios for over 10 years and being a music nut since I was 3 years old, I now have come to believe in functional audio. I was what some of you call a "snob" at one point in my life, using only gold connectors and declaring anything that wasn't from a tube mic as impure. I even once thought $30,000 record players were a good idea (believe me, tone arms aren't that important). This unit may suit the needs perfectly for the high-end guy (and yes they're mostly men) who doesn't trust his computer, hates MP3's and wants the newest toy. But to me now, functional audio is using equipment and technology that gets the job done; which means that I don't use gold contacts in my car or a special car stereo (just the stock one), because it's a car and when I drive there's road noise. This means I can't really "hear" the music. But I like to listen to it and yes, there is a difference between hearing and listening. If you've ever made a record or are a musician you know what I'm talking about. There's nothing wrong with being a purist in audio, but it's important you don't force your audio-religion on everyone else, just at the flip-side is true in saying that audio purists are crack pots. They have a point, just as you do. The difference is listening and hearing.
I believe that's what sets the "audiophiles" and regular "Joes" apart; listening and hearing. Audiophiles are just people who like to hear the music and the average joe is someone who listens. There's nothing wrong with either. My wife doesn't like or use the computer like I do, she's a user, I'm a geek. There's a difference. Same thing applies here.
Moral of the story is don't haul off and call someone a snob because they can sense differences in compression, it's a personal thing, not a technical one in the end. I love my audio, too much sometimes, but it's intensly personal for me, in that I know many of my friends don't care that I have perfect impedence matched speakers and the phase in my listening room is in tolerant ranges. That's ok with me, that bottom line is that I love it. And yes I can tell when an MP3 is compressed even with 196 kbit/s, but that doens't mean I think you're an uneducated moron, I just spend more energy hearing my music.
-cs
Same goes if you live in an apartment and you can't turn the knob on your 400W RMS amp higher than 1 without your neighbours threatening to evict you.
What country do you live in where your neighbors can evict you?
I'm not sure exactly how MP3 compression could really worsen the quality of a live recording. Or has someone managed to arrange for all live performances to take place in recording studios without any audience present?
Any country, if your block has windows.
All this extra audio hardware is pretty silly considering the biggest improvement in sound quality comes with using an external D/A converter. Of course the real trick is trying to find a good digital output card. SB Live normally sucks for this because anything sent to /dev/dsp* gets internally processed and resampled before getting sent back out via SPDIF. However, there is a neat hack available with the emu-tools for Linux (http://opensource.creative.com) that lets you use the "digital pass-through" feature of the driver to send raw 48Khz PCM streams (or even more fun, AC3 streams from your favorite DVD player..) out via the SPDIF connector. Now the last problem is jitter (time domain non-linearity) and it's probably the nastiest one to solve. AFAIK, the only way to truly deal with it is to use a D/A converter that buffers the input and precisely re-clocks the signal using an internal clock before the D/A circuit sees it. Linn probably minimizes this problem by using AES as the digital interconnect instead of the SPDIF via Toslink or coax that you'll get with most solutions. Digital audio isn't as simple as it first seems. (-:
But drop the consoles, please. At least the prospect of having to walk across the bar to reach the thing prevents most of the drunker drinkers from putting on... well, I'll leave their choices to your imagination.
Oh, and add a credit/debit card reader. I need my change for the pool table.
Lovely! Now all we have to do is convince our local bartenders to part with $20,000 or so.
if you want to do it right i say invest in some decent quality scsi-based storage and keep the wav files in raw form. then compress and store as needed. a highly reliable way to store with absolotely no loss of audio quality. i wonder how many .com style people lost all their money trying to this already, haha.
* Myth 1. Tube amplifiers are the best way to listen to music.
:-)
:-)
Facts. Tube amplifiers tend to give a more realistic presentation of vocals and soundstaging--especially depth. If, due to your preferred music, that is what you most care about, then tube amps give great value for money.
Fact: Tube amplifiers distort the sound. The distortion may be pleasing to the ears, but they do. You admit so. This pleasing distortion can be applied in much cheaper, more effictive, higher quality, and much more consistent ways -- You could try parametric/graphic equalizers, for example. For some reason audiophiles have problems with this (dunno why -- they say they want to hear the source, but they put a tube amp in the mix). The beloved tube amp is nothing but an overglorified sound pre-processor, if you ask me.
* Myth 2. Vinyl records are the best because they are analog while digital sampling ruins the sound.
Facts. Simply listen on a good turntable: use your ears, and you will prefer vinyl. I have never met anyone who disagreed after actually listening. There are various theories as to why. (A) Vinyl has a greater dynamic range (you can hear ~20 dB into the hiss, which is ignored). (B) Vinyl allows much faster transients (the human ear detects up to 30 kHz, even though pure tones are inaudible above about 20 kHz). (C) Things related to Shun Mook and PWB (which seem to work, though I don't understand why). (D) etc.
(A) DVD replaces vinyl for dynamic range.
(B) I'd like to see proof of that -- No pregnant teenage mothers with ear infections, please.
(C) Dunno, I'm not that much into it all. This is coming from an electronics standpoint... What are their points?
(D) Click. Pop. Hissssssssssss. Wobble. loUDer to SOftER. Too fast! Too slow!
Vynil introduces defects such as clicks and pops and sub-audible noise (which, without proper filtering, will ruin even the best speakers). They also wear much more quickly than most other media. Why do people want to hear this?
Beats me. Probably because most of the stuff people hear on vinyl isn't BSB, or Britney Spears (sp?). Maybe they just enjoy a break from the usual?
Personally, I prefer CD. Nice and clean. No hiss. Hiss drives me nuts.
* Myth 3. CD doesn't have a low enough signal to noise ratio. The new DVD super audio is a huge improvement.
Facts. This is really the same as above: CD has to throw away a lot of the information, especially getting rid of fast transients. The CD standard compresses music much more than DVD-A: so much so that the difference is audible (though "huge" might be exaggerated).
CD samples at 16 bits, 44.1 khz. CD may lose resolution, but fast transients? WTF are you talking about?
The only thing CD might miss would be a VERY small change in the input level. Enough that the ADC doesn't pick it up. It would have to be less than 1/65535 the dynamic range of the CD. A very small detail indeed.
A fast transient, AFAIK from EE, is a sharp spike/dip in the signal. It would have to last less than 4.5 x 10^-5 seconds to be missed by a CD. Period. This is physics and Nyquists law here and they aren't to be disobeyed, not even if you are an audiophile.
* Myth 4. Equalizers are bad.
Facts. Anything in the signal path will cause some unwanted distortion, and so should generally be avoided. This is truly obvious.
No, you are so very wrong on this point. Use a DSP. If you go all digital you will not get unwanted distortion unless you are an incompetent designer, or an unknowledgeable user.
Besides, the entire goal of vinyl and tube amps is to change the input audio. Otherwise, whats the point?
So all the arguments against using a graphic equalizer, noise machine, and a fader that dulls the music over time to produce the identical effects of a record, or a tube amp, rest on this. That more stuff in the signal path is bad... This was true until a decade or two ago. Now we can use electronics to do it all real time, real well.
Better, if I might say so, than media that (especially over time) warps, dulls, scratches (permanently), reacts badly to a wide variety of cleaners, is impossible to accurately duplicate, and is bulkier than a digital player and media itself.
In fact, digital electronics do it longer, faster, easier, cheaper, consistently, and, might I say so, with more dynamic range than a tube amp. Sure you usually want something analog to power the speakers, but thats because PWM just doesn't cut it. Transistors and FETs are great for class A/AB/B/D amps. They cover the entire range of well known methods of high power music reproduction.
>There is nothing wrong with being ignorant. There is something wrong with pretending you're not and promulgating untruths.
How rude. But, to refute your questioning of my ability to comment in these areas:
How many years of EE did you take? 2 myself.
How long have you been a DJ? Getting close to a year for me. On Canada's biggest independent radio station. Listen to me on 88.3 CJIQ FM, in the KW area of Ontario, Canada between 7 and 9 pm on Thursdays. We share the same signal output as the CBC does round here.
Ever built your own speakers? I've built 7. All of which my friends were amazed at (a few want me to make some for them).
On a board of directors of a radio station? I am.
I don't usually say that flat out... but seriously, trying to attack my credibility without providing any yourself? Is that enough proof I'm right?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Rip the disc to your HD as a single audio file, then compress that. If your software can't do that, rip as separate files then combine them into one long one. It's not hard :)
Liner notes, etc, I'd rather leave in the jewel case.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
what's that supposed to mean?
So why bother? If the sound is crapped up at the studio you can't really fix it. You might be able to equalize a bit but you can't replace what has been cut out and you can't take out what has been put in. once you fuck up the sound, its fucked
build it yourself:
-pc $200
-win2k license [yeah - I buy my music too] $100
-killer audio card $170
-free VNC to control it via any pc (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/)
-with ssh if you like to control it from wide and far(http://www.openssh.com/)
-free media jukebox (http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/index.html auto cover art,CDDB, local database)
-free MonkeysAudio (http://www.monkeysaudio.com lossless compression ~60% smaller!)plug-in for MJ
-home R/C IR to serial device - $30
-plextor 'accu-stream' drive for ripping $150
-lots of slow and quite 5400 RPM drives (much quiter than 7 or 10k drives and cheaper). each CD will be rouhgly 300MB - and drives are roughly $2@GB
I just started ordering parts last week
www.raidzone.com has a 1.3TB file server that uses 15 hotswapable 100Gb UltraATA 100 Drives and comes with dual 1Ghz P3.. $21,650 (according to december linux journal) You could rip the CD's stright off in wav format and store a hell of alot more audo than this offers :-)
I'm looking forward to hearing about the business that starts selling these.
I don't agree about tubes being better. I replaced a very good tube preamp with a truly state of the art solid state unit, and it was no contest. Everyone who's heard it agrees, and these are all serious audiophiles.
Couldn't agree more about vinyl being preferable over CD. My very heavy turntable with air bearings and active air suspension is about 20 dB quieter than my old one, and records are definitely more dynamic sounding than CDs. Lowering the noise floor allows the dynamic range to come out.
DVD-A is going to die soon. SACD has all but taken over. Look at the number of titles coming out in each format for an indication of what direction things are going. I don't have either format but will eventually.
Agree about equalizers. No tone controls. Use room treatments as needed instead.
bzip and gzip give poor results when compressing PCM audio data. bzip and gzip do good work when compressing repetative, discrete, spatially-oriented codes (like text), not widely varying and perceptive data (like photographs, data measurements, and audio). This is because their algorithms involve pattern matching.
Shorten uses techniques from linear prediction and correction to encoded audio data precisely.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
From the FAQ you linked to:
A SHN file made from a WAV is quite a bit larger than the corresponding MP3, with a size perhaps ~50-60% of the orginal WAV.
This != "at least double the amount of stuff you can archive". From my experience, 50-60% is an "optimistic fudge" as far as estimates go if you're dealing with ripping CDs. It's closer to 60-80%.
Overall though, I agree that buying a lot of cheap IDE drives and setting up RAID5 and doing lossless compression is much saner than dropping $20k on something. Especially if you have a decent sound card to use.
They do not ouptut square waves.
The DACs (digital to analog converter) are not capable of (and are not designed to if the player is well manufactured) outputting a square wave at 22 KHz. In fact, they can not recreate a true square wave at any frequency (it will be missing the high frequencies)
If you were to observe the output with an oscilloscope, you would see no "blocky" edges to the output, but a filtered representation. If the DAC driver filters are well designed, the output can in fact be EXACTLY reconstructed to the power limited by the frequency response of the system (x-22 KHz) with only the data recorded on the CD.
However, while the THD and noise floor of a CD player are very low, the dynamic range of the players are lacking. What would make them sound better is a logarithmic code instead of PCM (or a few more bits, hence 24-bit DVD audio)
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
... although I will probably go back and re-rip them as entire discs early next year.
.wav files with FLAC, which usually results in file sizes about .6 the original. My average CD seems to be about 250MB after that.
I may also do the re-ripping with EAC, which seems more reliable than the linux alternatives, even cdparanoia.
I encode the
I have a DVD-RAM that uses the two-sided 9.1 GB media for offline storage. Not a bad deal. I can put 30+ CDs on one, and it costs only about $25.
Meanwhile I can also archive high quality mp3s on CDR.
2000+ songs is a decent playlist. I actually have closer to 600 CDs but haven't got round to ripping them all yet.
I never thought about it that way... very interesting explanation.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
When using a tool like FLAC, you get out exactly the same bytestream that you put in. As far as the existence of the signal in the digital domain is concerned, it is completely lossless. Lossless audio compression tools exploit the (limited, but definitely useful) predictability of digitized audio signals to achieve, on average, a reduction in size to about 60 percent of the original. No further significant (re)compression is possible. The amount of compression also depends on the signal. Thrash and other music with a lot of high frequency energy compresses less (to .7 or even .8 of its original size) than, say, harmonically simple chamber music (which can be less than .5 of its original size).
The lossless compression techniques that I am aware of use specially designed polynomials and/or other functions to "track" the signal for short blocks. The parameters of these functions require many fewer bytes than the original signal. Of course they do not track the signal precisely, so the compressor must also store an "error" stream of small offsets. However, if the signal was well predicted, these error offsets are small and can be compressed quite effectively with Hamming trees and the like. It turns out that this data, which is sufficient to describe the original input precisely, is generally smaller than the original input.
So while you may rightfully claim that audio captured in the digital domain is not "lossless," at least not when the audio was subjected to ADC on its way into the digital system, it is not accurate to say that when you losslessly compress a signal you are "throwing something away." What lossless compression is doing is encoding the predictability of a signal in a more compact way than a PCM stream allows. The original stream can be completely and exactly recovered from the losslessly compressed stream.
On the whole the specs of LPs are crap compared to CDs. But LPs do have some advantages. Frequency response, for example. An LP can encode 40kHz audio. In fact that bandwidth was used for a quadraphonic LP encoding scheme, where the additional channels were heterodyned into the inaudible 20kHz+ band before being cut onto vinyl.
... it's better now) just didn't do it for him.
An all-analog chain can also satisfy certain people in ways that conventional digital systems cannot. I knew a guy who could hear 20kHz while in his 20s (his whole family could, apparently, but as far as I know they didn't have any dog genes in them...). 44.1 kHz DA with most content being rolled off around 18kHz (in the equipment of the day
But in the world 99.9 percent of us experience, vinyl is crap compared to CD.
-joseph
Has anyone written an open-source program that does all these things? I know we've got some great CD rippers (CD Paranoia), and players (XMMS), but is there an integrated system combining everything into a single consistant user interface?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Its starts from the recording, if its bad no matter what you do, the sound is bad(shit in-shit out)- it depends a lot on who puts the sound on the metal. Then comes the medium vinyl/cd/dvd/ and the codecs debate and kind of hardware that processes it. And dont forget the speakers are very important too! (A crapy recording can sound pretty darned well on a BOSE!) About the matter of listening I dont think the guy is right about 99% etc etc , i agree that not everyone is "pitch perfect" and not everyone is an "audiophile" but a common observation is that people will differentiate the quality of music..to a varying degree, ofcourse.
I have experimented with different sound systems and believe me it makes a whole hell of a difference with what you are putting your ears next too. Dont believe me? take your worst recording and play it on different systems at a local vendor, you will be in for a surprise!
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
You (or I, for that matter) may hear no difference between 190k .ogg files and uncompressed CDs, but remember that at $20 000 Linn is targeting the audience where the emphasis is on doing this to get rid of that oh-so-horrible jitter that is making CD not sound good enough!
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Yup, like that portishead disk, with all the crackles & vinyl noise on the CD.
Consider this: Take CD out, pass it through a unit that generates a bit of noise and fuzzes the signal a bit, and voila: Vinyl quality.
But if you have vinyl. and you prefer CD quality, you are SOL. Thus, CD (or any high-sample rate lossless digital format really) is better 'cos it can emulate vinyl's analogue fuzzy sound, while the reverse is not true.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Yes, but you said yourself it's a subjective matter, so your opinion that those are snake-oil type of things may simply be a result of your not wanting to spend that much money and sunsequently persuading yourself that it doesn't make objective difference. Oh, and if you buy a $20k setup, I imagine you can go to the store and *try* it before buying, since you can do the same with even a $400 setup. In fact, many audiophile grade stores will let you borrow expensive products, the reason being that there's indeed few people willing to spend 20k or more on something they haven't made absolutely sure is worthwhile.
If possible, bend it in a gentle curve between the amp and the speakers, so there are no sudden bends for the electrons to have to navigate...
All other interconnects are fancy, expensive wastes of money!
They are also selling their own systems.
S1000 for single rooms
M1000 for multiple rooms
The soundquality is probably not as good as as the linn, but who will hear the difference ?
The gold interconnects, and oxygen free copper actually have to do with impedance, and
oxidation between disimilar metals .
2 metals with current flowing through them
while touching will causes an corrisive
effect , a good example the battery post
terminals on cars if they are not sealed .
You call it snake oil because your happy
with the level of equipment you use, and
so be it .
You should not disdain that which does stand
as common thread due to research of ppl
such as Bose, Threshold, Forte', Polk,
etc etc, and other even more prestigious names.
At an eletrcial engineering level how do you
rate yourself ???
Your inference smells of an insulting tone
toward those who spend the extra money
to make small differences in what they hear.
Take it ez,
Onsiterepair@yahoo.com
I wish people would stop using shitty compression programs like Xing and start using Lame, Blade (a bit bassie) and other good encoders. Most MP3s I hear from the internet are pretty bad. Besides that, most people also encode them at really low bitrates. 128k doesn't cut it. 192k is great, but only if it is VBR. It just depends on the encoder. MP3 is still a very acceptible format, when encoded properly.
Use the latest CDEX with the CD-Paranoia library.
A 160Kbps VBR mp3 will sound as good as CD with my modest monitoring system. Or better if you're comparing to a digital-mode cd player using a shitty cdrom drive.
Also, just using a D/A converter that's not inside your computer's case would make a big difference...
Just buy a bunch of Lego Mindstorms kits, build yourself a juke-bot that will live in your basement and serve the sole purpose of retrieving CD's from their shelves and popping them into your high-end stereo system. A robotic DJ, if you prefer.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
While it's obvious that there *is* quite a difference between a $300 hi-fi, and a $3000, most of the things above a, say, $5,000 threshold for a complete system (CD+pre+amp+speakers+interconnects) tend to cater more to your aesthetic senses than actually sound incrementally better.
Not always true. For example, ever hear anything on BMW $20K+ speakers? Sounds a *LOT* different than on your mid- or even high-end "consumer" speakers.