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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 :)
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]
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.
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?"
What? You mean you don't have a computer in the toilet for browsing the web while on your porcelain throne?
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?
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...
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)
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.
Also, check out Etree if you are interested in getting or distributing live shows in Shorten format from bands that allow taping and trading.
DVD Audio. Kinda limited selection so far though.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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 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
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.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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
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!
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!
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
Amen to that, my brother! A couple of inches in the mike position, or one dB in mixing, makes more difference than the one between a $300 or $30000 playback system. I have often wished I could have a good way of pumping up those strings or taking down that percussion...
I think true experts wil lnot fall for that "analog is better than digital" song, but, for untrained ears, the noise in analog recordings may sound, let's say, more familiar. Some years ago, I was helping a friend of mine in a post-graduate work on voice compression for telephony. Although his compression scheme didn't eliminate any information in the voice signal, listeners found it "unnatural sounding". The solution was to add a certain amount of noise to the reproduced signal, because people just expected to hear a faint background hiss in a telephone call.
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
For my rebuttul, please refer to every other post on alt.audiophiles.recurring.pointless.holy.wars
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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
holy shit, that was the funniest post on slashdot in weeks.
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.
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).
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. (-:
Vinyl has frequency content out to 30+ kHz. Have the graphs to prove it.
If you ignore the fact that most music pressed on vinyl these days is recorded and mixed on DIGITAL equipment - you still have to contend with the fact that even if your hypothetical "30+" kHz sensitive vinyl was true, most of the subtle variations in the vinyl would be SCRAPED OFF BY A DIAMOND NEEDLE the first time around.
What next - you're gonna tell me that your Honda Civic is faster than a Corvette?
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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.
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
1. You don't actually rebut my point.
2. Have you tried listening with a good turntable/tonearm/cartridge? Again, you avoid the main issue.
As for (B), since you are such an authority, I shouldn't need to give you references, but since I'm so magnanimous, I'll give a few anyway:
91: 3207 [1991].
3. This is just point 2 again.
4. We agree here, I think. I was referring to analog equalizers (which seems to be what your original post was citing).
Your last comment seems an attempt to slip by the issues. My remark was hardly ad hominem (think about it).
Well - not a $30 sound card - but you could get pretty good results with a $600 sound card and $1500 external DAC. But did you actually read the website? I'm assuming a significant part of the $20K is the fact that it's touch screen controlled and has the ability to serve up many different streams at once (5 i think) in addition to offering superb quality.
Don't forget - just because it's digital doesn't mean it's perfect. Things such as jitter dramatically affect the sound quality - and the only way to get rid of that is with a really really good source ($$$$$) and good cables ($$$$$) or by running the stream through a digital anti-jitter filter such as Genesis Digital Lens which only costs around $1,800.
You also have to realize this product is aimed at people that don't blink at paying $20,000 for just a cd player, like the Linn sondek 12 cd player
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
it's all about asthetics. The process of dumping a signal to vinyl intoroduces noise. Some the artist intended, some the artists didn't. Anyway, you end up with a recording that has additional character to it. Compare that to a recording at 48K/24 bit and smapled down to CD.. there's no additional character there. You get an exact reproduction, not an asthetic reproduction. The process of dumping the vinyl to CD captures that asthetic sound in digital format, giving you the best of both worlds. Sort of. It's better than nothing, and it's better than setting up a turntable in my car :-).
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq