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Build High-End Audio System w/ Hard Drive Storage?
nganju asks: "Hard Drives have finally reached the size where I can rip down 1000 CDs directly to WAV files, and skip the compression step (read: headache) altogether, ensuring that the audio playback is what the original CD author intended. Now the question is, how do I get that WAV data off the computer and into the amplifier with minimal distortion? Are there D/A PCI cards comparable to high-end CD players? Or is the best solution some direct digital output card (SPDIF) and a standalone D/A converter component? Specific model names would be greatly appreciated."
MOTU, M-Audio, Digidesign, and many other companies make audio interfaces capable of 24 bit 96 Khz audio encoding and decoding, which is well above the 16 bit 44.1 Khz that CDs use. Any of them should do.
You really should consider some type of lossless compression. The "headache" is minimal, and although it isn't the 10x compression of its lossy brethern, 2x is nothing to completely ignore. http://flac.sourceforge.net/
m-audio
Here, though it does use lossless compression, if you care.
And it's only $129.
GPL Deconstructed
Kitbash yourself a computer with an AOPEN AX4B-533 Tube motherboard (picture here).
Just use optical output at the soundcard such as sb audigy.
The signal will be in totally digital form, until your amplifier D/A converts it back to audio.
That way your computer/soundcard won't affect the sound quality at all.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
You really should be asking this over at Hydrogenaudio:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php
The signal to noise ratio is much better there for this kind of question.
I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
i have been on the brink of buying some mini-itx componants to do this and create a small, fannless machine for the front room that can be bolted under a table. the forever pending release of better and smaller boards by VIA has kept me from acting. my quesiton is whats the diffrence between the 5.1 sound from a VIA board like this.. http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_MII_spec.j sp?motherboardId=202
and a PCI card like the ones from AVID ..
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Revolution51 -main.html
no sig today, come back tomorrow
You'll find this sort of thing is widely used by the pro-audio recording industry. Most high-end units will be loaded with features you don't need though, like 8 channel recording or 24-bit 96Khz playback, although if you are an 'audiophile' with an unlimited budget / drive space, you might like to consider ripping your vinyl at better than CD quality!
Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) are well respected in the industry, but their prices are steep compared to normal soundcards. Take a look at their 828 mk II to see what $800-ish buys you.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
have you tired this board? does "Vacuum Tube Technology" really work?
no sig today, come back tomorrow
No, you want compression -- lossless compression. Oh, and just grab an Audigy if it's a Linux box.
Otherwise, be warned that Creative will not give you free Windows driver downloads, only updates.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Seems braindead to me.
Just rip to uncompressed PCM AC3 and pump directly to the receiver via the SPDIF jack.
Or get a receiver with a USB Audio jack, like I do, and your receiver itself becomes the sound card.
http://www.zzounds.com/cat--PCI-Audio-Interfaces-- 2421
t er/search?c=9132
or
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/g=rec/s=compu
Choices galore.
Unique.
Do an ABX test (http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/abx _testing.htm) comparing a MP3 extracted with EAC and encoded with Lame 3.93 --alt preset standard and a wav file.
l oad&name=Elite_DAE&file=painless for an easy guide.
Come back to me with the results.
I think you will be suprised.
99% of the population can't tell a difference.
http://www.chrismyden.com/nuke/modules.php?op=mod
MP3s are not only smaller, they work on portables, and they have great metadata.
Regardless of your decision regarding encoding or not - EAC is a must for a quality extraction!
I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
"MP3s are not only smaller, they work on portables, and they have great metadata."
They also break more easily as well. Poke a hole in the middle and you don't get to keep both pieces, just the first one.
Another solution is to get a card with S/PDIF digital output and an amp which supports it. This is a good solution if you already have such a soundcard, but the soundcard upgrade can be expensive. On the whole, if you're starting from scratch, I'd go with USB.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Here's one way.... Get a small computer, big harddrive.
Get an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 (~$100) and maybe a right-angle PCI adapter to fit it into your little BTX box or whatever. Load your OS of choice. You've already got plans for the rest - that way should be just fine. Rip your stuff onto the drive (encode with FLAC), hook it up to an amplifier, and you're all set.
The 2496 has already got RCA IN/OUT and Digital connectors (read the specifics on compatibility and what you can and cannot use at the same time) making hookup easy. It will also record at impressive rates and resolutions (playback too if you've got fancy hi-res sources). You can find drivers for most of the following at OSS (these are commercial drivers that run ~$50 for the most common OSs that include free tech support and upgrades for 2 years).
* Linux (x86, Alpha, PowerPC)
* VxWorks (Tornado)
* LynxOS (x86, PowerPC)
* SCO Open Server
* SCO UnixWare
* Solaris (x86, Sparc)
* IBM AIX
* FreeBSD
* BSD/OS
* OpenBSD
* NetBSD
* HP-UX
You could buy a mixer and some mics to do some high quality recordings too. (I've picked up a 10 channel Yamaha mixer [MG10/2] w/ 4 mic inputs (phantom capable) for $99 and a Samson CO2 matched pair of small condensers for ~$120 at Sam Ash to do recordings with a setup very similar to that above and it worked quite well.) No experience with the OSS drivers but they seem to be responsive to email inquirys about specifics and have a free trial available.
I dream of a portable custom BSD based solution that has easy controls (serial keypad and LCD - "real" buttons and switches), could be setup for automated recordings, has a builtin mixer, microphone inputs (phantom powered for my dream large condenser pair), and speaker/headphone driver, AND is powerful enough to run baudline for use in the field. Background processes could compress material as I was recording (incremental, selectively, to be sure you could grab the entire recording - even if your quality had to suffer - but you'd get the highest possible of any given event). The network interface could stream audio at selectable bitrates (.ogg peeling) OR amplify a stream like an internet radio station. AND it could do my laundry for me and fit in a backpack. If anybody else would be interesed in something like this please contact me and I'd love to collaborate. [ bricoleur !AT! 80d !DOT! org ]
Why not use http://www.alcohol-soft.com/ (or similar) and create an exact duplicate of the CD? Unless you're making one big wav file you may run into issues with cutting contiguous tracks (think crossfade with a track sep) that have silences removed for long-play albums (or is music so bad these days everyone only aggregates singles into an album?)
Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
I *thought* I couldn't tell the difference between a rediculously high quality mp3 and strait PCM, but the difference really made itself apparant on my high end car stereo. No matter what I did, EAC/LAME optimizations galore, the lower frequencies sounded like junk. Converting over to FLAC just cured everything magically. mp3s were cool on a 486/28.8, but with storage and bandwidth so cheap, it serves little purpose today (for those who care).
It's not the "best sound ever!" but the Squeezebox will play back uncompressed flac and wav files, and sounds pretty darn good to me. Analog and digital outputs, wireless or wired options (I strongly recommend the wired).
I also strongly recommend you peruse the mailing list archives first, because there is much past discussion of how the product compares to others for the exact purpose you describe.
Buy an Xbox, an SP/DIF dongle for it, and install XBMC. Plug it into a good outboard converter or your surround reciever, as dictated by taste and equipment. It will play whatever audio format you decide on, either from its own (upgradable) hard drive or across a network.
To my ears, with my system, it sounds indistinguishable from the Carver TL-3300 CD player that I've used as a reference for the past decade. And the organizational features of XBMC are second to none for any system capable of being operated sans mouse/keyboard.
Note, however, that listening to music isn't as much fun once it becomes computer-based and completely intangible, even if it does sound the same. There's nothing tactile or visual about it. It's just a sterile index of music. The disparity is not unlike a flipping through a card catalog instead walking through a gallery.
XBMC's relatively slick handling of cover art and biographical information helps a bit, but it's still very impersonal.
Keep your CDs around.
Kid-proof tablet..
The coolest solution I've seen is the Bithead portable headphone amplifier and USB audio device: http://tinyurl.com/5293w/ It's got hi end D/A converters, audiophile parts thoughout, and goes for about $270. I want one, but I'm going the cheaper route: a $5 sound card with SPDIF output and an outboard D/A decoder that I have lying around. Grab a D/A on ebay: http://tinyurl.com/4nsws/ The Audio Alchemy units are great for the price! The airport express solution from apple is also worth looking into: http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/
q a z
Lower frequencies are where MP3 excels - but I will assume you are uninformed, and not a cheap troll.
Besides - there is a HUGE difference between an insanely high bitrate MP3 and a quality MP3.
Encoder and settings make a large difference.
Once again - I challange you to use EAC & Lame with --alt preset standard. ABX test against source and let's talk about your results.
Don't let your bad experience with shit MP3s cloud your judgement. Do the scientific test and THEN talk.
The very notion of "lossless copmression" is faulty. If you compress, you lose. I don't get lossless compression. How can you substitute one thing for another and then get it back the same way? Don't give me the math, I want to hear the difference. In fact, let me here the difference signal between a lossless compression file and the original wav. Of course, I am assuming there will be a difference signal, because there will, in fact, be one- not just residual noise, but an actual signal representing lost musical information.
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, what I mean is I want to hear one signal subtracted from another- take the original and subtract the "lossless" signal from it. See what you get. You will get something. It will be the lost information from the original track. I have heard it.
How is it that I can compress a text file with WinZip or gzip and unzip it without losing data? It's exactly the same. No jokes about how corruptible Winzip files are, please.
Take a 10 Mb text file and zip it. You'll get a much smaller file. Unzip it and you get exactly the same file. Now zip a .wav file and you'll get a file about 20-40% smaller. Unzip and you get the same .wav file. Now heavily optimize zipping specifically for audio data you'll get a file 30-70% of the originial size. Now optimize that zipping routine to allow unpacking on the fly for convenience. Now unzip the FLAC audio on the fly giving you the original .wav data and then send that audio stream to the hardware exactly as you would have if you had just sent the .wav file. (This is very simplified just to get the gist of it. For a more comprehensive overview try this.)
To put as nice a face on this as I can.... you, sir, are an idiot.
Of COURSE the losslessly compressed files are different on disk... they take half as much space! When you uncompress them, you get back exactly what you started with. That's why it's lossless compression. Bits are bits are bits... as long as the bits that go to the DAC are the same, how they're stored doesn't really matter.
THERE IS NOTHING LOST WITH LOSSLESS COMPRESSION. That's why it is 'lossless' compression. The files just take less space. You route the compressed bits through an uncompression program and you get a bit-for-bit identical copy to what you started with.
And I love your 'don't give me the math' line. "Don't confuse me with facts!"
I'll give you a simple example of two lossless compressions. "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?" Replace "wood" with "!", "chuck" with "@", and " would " with "#". The sentence is now "how much !#a !@ @ if a !@#@ !?" That was pretty good. You are standing 150,000 feet from a wall and move to 150,002 feet from the wall. You say you moved 2 feet further, which is a smaller number (and therefore takes less space). Usually, compression is done by knowing a lot about the domain of the problem and being able to notice patterns over a large amount of data.
Use the line out on your soundcard. Pipe that into your stereo reciever. Use that to amplify and manage the audio stream. I have several friends that do that exact same thing. They will not use ANY compression. Just the raw .wav file format. My friend has a smaller collection, but has a remote and a binder with the "cd number" and each track, ala jukebox. Whatever he bought for the remote allows him to key into his media player he hacked together the cd and track numbers just like a jukebox. Type something and it is added to the playlist. Track 00 is the entire album.
Hoe this helps out somehow.
Sigs are nice guns
It would be better if the OS had hooks to transparently use different compression algorithms on different file types.
So it could have gz as default, Flac for audio files, some future super-duper wavelet codec HDTV streams, etc.
This sounds like a fascinating setup. I've seen some infrared remote control software but it usually sucks. I suppose just making disc numbers 3 digits long, since track numbers can't go above 99, would make this sort of control easy.
Personally, I'm looking for a similar widget that would interpret numbers as letters to let me jump to a track. This would be used on my laptop with an external numeric keypad velcroed to the dash. (Key-remapping software would let me pop the keycaps into phone standard upside-down layout, to avoid learning the right-side-up numeric keypad.)
You know that you want to keep the signal digital until it's as close to your amp as possible. Assuming your amplifier has an optical input, simply running fiber from a soundcard's optical output is the best choice. This puts the burden of clarity on the amplifier's internal DAC and power supply. Optical SPDIF seems capable of 15 meters on standard cable with normal drivers. Since the PC end is all digital, component choice is essentially irrelevant. PCI soundcards with optical outputs are common, so let reputation and support be your guide.
If your amp only accepts analog inputs, things get more complicated. A standalone SPDIF-analog converter seems obvious (and leaves a simple amplifier upgrade path in the future) but consider that such gizmos, while overpriced, usually include a heinously noisy wall-wart power supply. Ripple on the DAC's inputs translates to noise in your audio. Careful design can filter this crap, but caveat emptor. Do listening tests.
This can also be a problem with many of the USB audio devices available. Since they're powered from the USB, a bit of digital noise is inevitably coupled to the analog side. Component choice and careful design are essential here. I'd trust any of the big names to get this right. M-Audio and Edirol both make some slick little USB audio dongles with excellent analog stages. A plethora of USB and firewire audio interfaces are avilable.
If your PC is just a few meters from your stereo, then USB is probably the way to go. My first question would be about ground potential differences, between the USB signal and the amplifier's idea of analog signal ground. Feeding the whole mess from the same branch circuit is an easy way to sidestep the question, but I'm sure someone has tackled it. (Clueful? Please reply!)
If you're dealing with a longer distance, real networking may be the way to go. The idea here is to let your PC in the next room serve the files, but put enough intelligence in the hifi rack to do the decoding as well as the DAC step locally. This usually includes a display and interface of some sort, so you don't need to mess with wireless keyboards or whatever. Various network music players are available, with varying levels of software sophistication and hardware quality. I don't believe any of them include audiophile-quality components in the outputs, and power supply noise is usually an issue in these cheapie designs done by digital engineers without an analog bone in their bodies. If you can find one that supports raw WAV file input, give it a try and see if the audio quality suits you.
Most such players rely heavily on the ID3 tag info for database and display purposes, so tagless WAVs might be awkward at best. Alternately, "tune" the network player to an "internet radio station" which is really a stream running from your desktop's player software. The stream server can then stuff tag information into the stream's metadata, which will appear on the display.
Someone mentioned using the Airport Express as an output device that iTunes could throw digitized audio at. Cute, but I'd be skeptical of any analog components sitting so close to a power supply. Anyone done SNR measurements on this sucker? If it worked with software besides iTunes, it wouldn't suck so hard.
You're also probably one of those assholes who claim that vacuum tubes have a "warmer" sound and that LP sounds better than CD.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This looks like it would be great for the audio out of my laptop for mythtv. I can't figure out if there's a linux driver for it, though. Do you happen to know?
Thanks!
You know, there are going to be so many steps that this audio goes through, that having the best soundcard will not make too much of a difference. First, it goes from CD to digital file. If you use uncompressed audio, there is no loss, but you will find that a 1000 CD collection starts to really take up space uncompressed. Next, it goes to your soundcard's A/D converter. Then through your cables to your amp. I imagine that the computer is rather far away from your stereo, since audiophiles hate the fan and HD noise of PCs. This cable length will degrade quality. Then you have your stereo's preamp and amp. These are big factors in quality, then your speakers. It might be best to use a digital connection to your amplifier, which skips several steps.
If your amp does not have a digital connection, perhaps the best thing to do would be to buy a USB soundcard dongle. These are inexpensive, many are quite high quality, and your could minimize the cable audio loss by using a long USB cable and a short audio cable. Check out Creative's Soundblaster EX models.
You sir a idiot.
"The very notion of "lossless compression" is faulty." No it really is not. Take a 200k text file and compress it with Zip. Rename the original. Unzip the compressed file and now compare them. Wow it just be magic. They are the same.
" If you compress, you lose. I don't get lossless compression. "
Then how do explain the text file?
"How can you substitute one thing for another and then get it back the same way?" Gee I do not know lets try. How about I write five. And then I write it 5. Gee I just got a five to one compression! The number 5 and the word five have the same meaning but one is smaller than the other.
"Don't give me the math". Of course not since you would never understand it to start with. If you take a digital file and compress it using lossless compression when the file is decompressed it will be identical to the compressed version. This has been used since the days of ARC and Zoo and is still true with FLAC, ZIP, and gz today.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Even if you do have a terrabyte hard-disc in your computer, no portable palyers do, so you would need to compress for that. it is said that ogg vorbis quality 5 or 6 is transparent, at just over 1 megabyte/min and will play on iRiver or Rio players. if you got the 40GB model you could get several days of transparent audio on that, which you could then plug in to big PA system as the player as optical out. the iRiver also comes with direct encoding. I plug mine into my DAB radio (optical connection) and can record in real-time to mp3 at same quality as broadcast. beats BBC listen again.
It's idiots like you that make me ashamed to be a tube fan.
Look, music has no discontinuities in the signal (Cal I). If you have a series of 16 bit numbers that are close in value, if you store the difference between the values, you can use one 16 bit "start" value, and just store the differences in an 8 bit byte. Bingo, lossless.
Unless you think that the "4" I get from "2+2" is noisier than the "4" I started off with, of course.
You're still an idiot.
Check out the Yamaha CDR-HD1300. It's only got an 80gig HD, but it does store the audio data uncompressed.
I take it the 'tube' in your name refers to tube-based audio? I hope your analog audio advice is better-informed than your ideas about digital audio.
The difference signal you seek will be all zeros -- silence. There is exactly no difference, as others have explained. In practice, you will hear whatever noise your system produces in the analog stage when trying to reproduce silence. On an all-digital setup, it should be perfectly silent.
The guy's username is "tubeguy"!
He is one of those asshats!
There will naturally be a Bit-Error-Rate in any Wireless system. Does the Airport Express use UDP (streaming) or TCP (error correction with Re-Sends on fails)? If its the former (or something like it) then you could get a loss of quality.. GSG
RG-6 coax makes an excellent digital connection for longer digital runs. Just install high quality RCA type phono plugs and use that with your sound card if the length is too long for optical. This only works well if you have good receiver that has an insulated coax spdif that is not susceptible to interference from the PCs switched power supply. Run the cable on the floor first before you fish it through the wall.
i have a musical fidelity a3cr that is using a Hammerfall 'light' with the HDSP 9652 a/d conventer as the pre-amp.
its expensive stuff but sounds great! and there are linux drivers.
best
greg
yes, of course. putting a SINGLE FREAKING TUBE on a motherboard and claiming somehow it improves STEREO DIGITAL AUDIO works just great. it's not just marketed at fools, at all.