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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 :)
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]
Your average music listener would most likely not be able to tell the difference, especially the average Mp3 music listener.
To us very snobby audiophile types any form of even uncompressed digital music is not up to snuff of good ole analog. Yes, that's right I did a back to back comparison of an $8000 CD rig (Manley tube DAC and supremely isolated AudioMecha transport) against a mediocre turntable (about $2000 new). Wasn't even close the LP sounded leaps and bounds better. There weren't small little audiophile only nit pickings to be found, either. Everyone that listened to both setups liked the LPs better. And this was with recently remastered "audiophile" quality CDs vs their analog LP counter parts.
So, to suggest that any sort of *lossy* compression can stand up, well... color me a skeptic.
That being said, everything I've heard about Sony's new SACD seems pretty good.
I agree with you to an extent. Vinyl rocks. I have some good 'ol punk vinyl and the vinyl definitely gives it the feel as the artist intended. This new digital stuff just doesn't recreate the atmosphere the way vinyl did.
The solution, of course, is to dump your vinyl to digital and burn it to CD, giving you the best of both worlds. Well, ok not exactly, but the vinyl -> CD sounds a heck of a lot better than these digital -> CD facsimiles they pawn off these days.
Now, to put this post ontopic, how do you spend $20K on a setup like this? Especially since it's just a PC with some nice audio and lots of hard drives.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Was this a blind test? I.E., did you get someone else to play the audio, from somewhere you and the participants couldnt see? If not, it isn't much of a test. Anyone asked would pick the turntable, since it's generally common knowledge that "turntables sound better", so your mind plays tricks on you. It wouldn't be much of a test unless it was run like 10 times, each time blind, with different tracks, switching the 2 sources randomly. THEN we'll see which one really sounds better to you.
Yes, CDs encode the entire range of human hearing, however they also miss part of the picture. Now, I don't know the exact physics behind all of this but I do know that because of the way information is pulled from a CD, called PCM, it lends itself to jitter (not all of the bits get lined up correctly at playback) and harshness. In fact, this is so well known that Sony, one of the PCM originators, has come up with a completely different method of digitally storing music, call SACD. It not only samples at a much higher rate (hence the larger storage requirements of a DVD for 2 channel audio) but it also transfers information in a completely different fashion.
Most audiophile LP types agree that this new SACD format bridges the gap between LPs and CDs. I have yet to hear it so I can't comment on that.
No, those artifacts are from low bitrates. I ripped all of my Rush albums (cymbals are very important
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
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.
"The bottom line is, CDs encode the entire range of human hearing"
i'm not qualified to debate that point. but consider this: people may actually LIKE the imperfections inherent in record players. even if the CD is scientifically better, a record be more subjectively pleasing to some peoples' ears.
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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 was wondering how this box deal with corrupted CD (so called copy protected ones). ;)
It would be more than problematic to throw that much money and not being able to listen to the CD you buy
Note that I made one box like that, less expensive
Using flac to compress files, an digitla optical card feeding a Meridian signal reformatter and cdparanoia (although it seems that exact audio copy on win is better), and it costed far less than that box!
See http://uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/bad/