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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 :)
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!
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
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?"
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.
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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.
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.
Also, check out Etree if you are interested in getting or distributing live shows in Shorten format from bands that allow taping and trading.
However, there is little motivation for people to discard their CD's to upgrade to (similar looking) SACD's, and most people are not willing to pay the extra money for an SACD when a CD suits them just fine.
From what I have read (I haven't listened to them yet), SACD's do make a large improvement in sound quality over CD's when used with a good stereo system. The problem is (1) whether the average listener will notice and (2) whether he will actually pay more money for them.
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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.
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...
A lot of people in this thread yakkity yak about blind tests, and the answer in my case is "yes". My friends and I love to sit around on a weekend conducting controlled tests. We conduct controlled tests of cables, components, and source formats. In some cases we detect differences, in others we don't. In our tests the listener has consistently preferred CD to MP3. Further, in tests using ONLY CDs, the listener has indicated no preference. We are using a cheapo JVC DVD player that handles MP3 CDs. For this test we encoded using lame and iTunes (fraunhoffer). If there are better encoders I'm all ears. As for your other swipes, as with most personal attacks, they are all false. I haven't spent a lot of money on audio equipment because I mainly build it myself. A few hundred dollars will build what sells for thousands. Also I don't hear above 19khz, but 44khz recordings audibly distort signals well below the Nyquist frequency. This distortion is in the form of phase errors. For a lot of consumer playback gear, the result is that, at 22khz, the signal is 90 degrees out-of-phase. Blech. A 96khz recording has loads of headroom.