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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
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?"
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?
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)
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 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
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
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.
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!
You can fix most quality problems with audio on
your computer by carefully coloring the case of
your hard drive with a green marker. Too many
people give MP3s a bad rap because they don't
know this simple tip.
I'd like to introduce you to www.r3mix.net. Specifically, click on the link labelled "Myths".
If you don't like listening to the true, unadulterated source, well, I guess tubes are for ya! Me, I like to hear what the musician played, so I buy transistor/fet based equipment.
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
(better throw in a :-) for the humor-impaired while I'm at it...)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
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?)
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.
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.
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
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.