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#1
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
Tim in Los Angeles wrote:
You may remember my post from a few weeks ago regarding using a computer as a high end signal source for a high end stereo system. I have just built, with a lot of help from a computer guru, a music computer. It sports a gig of ram, a P4 200 something, a big IDE hard drive, an HP DVD/CD RW drive and a Digital Audio Labs Card Deluxe sound card. It's connected to my stereo with a pair As-One interconnects between the sound card and the pre-amp. My electronics are by PSE a Minnesota company whose stuff is not real well known but sure sounds good. My speakers are Nestorovic. I play cd's with my Rotel RCD-991 AE player. I am using iTunes to rip cd's on to the hard drive and to play them. I am using the .wav format for maximum quality. I see this in my future, but it look like I'd need 500+ Gb of storage space for my collection, as .wavs. THe max I see available (for a single drive) is about 500 Gb, and that goes for $700. What hard drive are you using? Songs played from the hard drive using iTunes (to both rip and play) sound pretty good. But not as good as CD's played on the Rotel player. Selections played on iTunes sound about 80% as good as those played on the Rotel. The sound from the computer is harsher and does not have the fidelity or detail of the CD. This is not to say that things sound bad from the computer because they really sound pretty good. They just don't sound as good as the CD player. Any thoughts? Should I use a different piece of software to rip or play the selections? Is there something I should know about ripping? Any other thoughts? Based on what you wrote, I suggest you should match the levels as closely as you can between the Card Deluxe and the Rotel, and do the comparison blind. You might find that the 'differences' become much harder, if not impossible, to hear. -- -S. "They've got God on their side. All we've got is science and reason." -- Dawn Hulsey, Talent Director |
#2
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
Tim in Los Angeles wrote:
You may remember my post from a few weeks ago regarding using a computer as a high end signal source for a high end stereo system. I have just built, with a lot of help from a computer guru, a music computer. It sports a gig of ram, a P4 200 something, a big IDE hard drive, an HP DVD/CD RW drive and a Digital Audio Labs Card Deluxe sound card. It's connected to my stereo with a pair As-One interconnects between the sound card and the pre-amp. My electronics are by PSE a Minnesota company whose stuff is not real well known but sure sounds good. My speakers are Nestorovic. I play cd's with my Rotel RCD-991 AE player. I am using iTunes to rip cd's on to the hard drive and to play them. I am using the .wav format for maximum quality. Songs played from the hard drive using iTunes (to both rip and play) sound pretty good. But not as good as CD's played on the Rotel player. Selections played on iTunes sound about 80% as good as those played on the Rotel. The sound from the computer is harsher and does not have the fidelity or detail of the CD. This is not to say that things sound bad from the computer because they really sound pretty good. They just don't sound as good as the CD player. Any thoughts? Should I use a different piece of software to rip or play the selections? Is there something I should know about ripping? Any other thoughts? Tim If you just play a CD on your computer (using windows media player for instance) and feed the soundcard's outputs to the preamp, do they still sound not as good as your Rotel? I'm not familiar with your sound card. Can the difference be due to that? I don't believe the difference comes from the ripping to hard disk, if you are not using compression. |
#3
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
Steven Sullivan wrote:
I see this in my future, but it look like I'd need 500+ Gb of storage space for my collection, as .wavs. THe max I see available (for a single drive) is about 500 Gb, and that goes for $700. What hard drive are you using? I've seen 250GB hard disks on sale for less than $200, and 200GB drives for $110 or so. It's perfectly OK to have multiple drives. I can put together a 500GB storage system easily for less than $400 now. Using the approximate number of 10MB/minute of redbook CD audio, 500GB is about 50,000 minutes of music. Or 833+ hours. Almost 35 days. Without repeating any selection. The good thing about digital (as opposed to vinyl) is that you can copy the music a lot faster than real time, so that 35 days of music may only take a couple of days to copy. |
#4
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
Hi Tim,
I just built a computer to use a jukebox also. I got a Shuttle mini case and hooked it up to my TV. Last night I sat down in front of the stereo and put a cd in. Then I cued up the same song on the computer and started playing them together. I sat back and started changing sources, after matching the levels (by ear) on the cd player and the computer output. After that, I noticed a difference in the sound from the computer and the cd. The cd was definitely better, but I would never have noticed if not for doing this test. A little about my computer juke box (and some day soon video player): P4 2.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 410 GB of hard drive space (250+160). I run linux use Gnome and XMMS along with Rhythmbox sometimes. I found last night that XMMS gives better quality playback. Probably due to the state of gstreamer. I have ripped my entire CD collection, encoded using FLAC. 6144 sounds uses up ~167 GB, roughly 19 days of listening time. It's a great setup, wish I had done it a long time ago. slate On Fri, 05 Dec 2003 15:55:33 +0000, Tim in Los Angeles wrote: You may remember my post from a few weeks ago regarding using a computer as a high end signal source for a high end stereo system. I have just built, with a lot of help from a computer guru, a music computer. It sports a gig of ram, a P4 200 something, a big IDE hard drive, an HP DVD/CD RW drive and a Digital Audio Labs Card Deluxe sound card. It's connected to my stereo with a pair As-One interconnects between the sound card and the pre-amp. My electronics are by PSE a Minnesota company whose stuff is not real well known but sure sounds good. My speakers are Nestorovic. I play cd's with my Rotel RCD-991 AE player. I am using iTunes to rip cd's on to the hard drive and to play them. I am using the .wav format for maximum quality. Songs played from the hard drive using iTunes (to both rip and play) sound pretty good. But not as good as CD's played on the Rotel player. Selections played on iTunes sound about 80% as good as those played on the Rotel. The sound from the computer is harsher and does not have the fidelity or detail of the CD. This is not to say that things sound bad from the computer because they really sound pretty good. They just don't sound as good as the CD player. Any thoughts? Should I use a different piece of software to rip or play the selections? Is there something I should know about ripping? Any other thoughts? Tim |
#5
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 20:16:00 GMT, chung wrote:
Steven Sullivan wrote: I see this in my future, but it look like I'd need 500+ Gb of storage space for my collection, as .wavs. THe max I see available (for a single drive) is about 500 Gb, and that goes for $700. What hard drive are you using? I've seen 250GB hard disks on sale for less than $200, and 200GB drives for $110 or so. It's perfectly OK to have multiple drives. I can put together a 500GB storage system easily for less than $400 now. Using the approximate number of 10MB/minute of redbook CD audio, 500GB is about 50,000 minutes of music. Or 833+ hours. Almost 35 days. Without repeating any selection. The good thing about digital (as opposed to vinyl) is that you can copy the music a lot faster than real time, so that 35 days of music may only take a couple of days to copy. Didn't Sony and others make a CD jukebox? Seems I saw their top O' the model that held like a hudred or so cd's, used dual lasers for continuous play and interfaced with computer via a cable. Seems this might be an easier solution for you. |
#6
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
tweak wrote:
On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 20:16:00 GMT, chung wrote: Steven Sullivan wrote: I see this in my future, but it look like I'd need 500+ Gb of storage space for my collection, as .wavs. THe max I see available (for a single drive) is about 500 Gb, and that goes for $700. What hard drive are you using? I've seen 250GB hard disks on sale for less than $200, and 200GB drives for $110 or so. It's perfectly OK to have multiple drives. I can put together a 500GB storage system easily for less than $400 now. Using the approximate number of 10MB/minute of redbook CD audio, 500GB is about 50,000 minutes of music. Or 833+ hours. Almost 35 days. Without repeating any selection. The good thing about digital (as opposed to vinyl) is that you can copy the music a lot faster than real time, so that 35 days of music may only take a couple of days to copy. Didn't Sony and others make a CD jukebox? Seems I saw their top O' the model that held like a hudred or so cd's, used dual lasers for continuous play and interfaced with computer via a cable. Seems this might be an easier solution for you. I have something llike 850 discs at this point. Even daisy-chaining the highest-capacity changers, I'd need to buy at least three, and the cost would be more than setting up a digital server. However, one option is a CD changer that also plays MP3s -- I could probably fit the whole collection on 100-200 discs. If it *also* played DVDs, SACDs and DVD-As, that would be just peachy.. -- -S. "They've got God on their side. All we've got is science and reason." -- Dawn Hulsey, Talent Director |
#7
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
tweak wrote:
On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 20:16:00 GMT, chung wrote: Steven Sullivan wrote: I see this in my future, but it look like I'd need 500+ Gb of storage space for my collection, as .wavs. THe max I see available (for a single drive) is about 500 Gb, and that goes for $700. What hard drive are you using? I've seen 250GB hard disks on sale for less than $200, and 200GB drives for $110 or so. It's perfectly OK to have multiple drives. I can put together a 500GB storage system easily for less than $400 now. Using the approximate number of 10MB/minute of redbook CD audio, 500GB is about 50,000 minutes of music. Or 833+ hours. Almost 35 days. Without repeating any selection. The good thing about digital (as opposed to vinyl) is that you can copy the music a lot faster than real time, so that 35 days of music may only take a couple of days to copy. Didn't Sony and others make a CD jukebox? Seems I saw their top O' the model that held like a hudred or so cd's, used dual lasers for continuous play and interfaced with computer via a cable. Seems this might be an easier solution for you. Well, 500 GB takes care of about 1,000 CD's, even without going to (lossless) compression. Searching is much quicker and efficient. And you can create playlists easily. |
#8
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Computer high-end audio - in practice
"tweak" wrote in message
... On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 20:16:00 GMT, chung wrote: Steven Sullivan wrote: I see this in my future, but it look like I'd need 500+ Gb of storage space for my collection, as .wavs. THe max I see available (for a single drive) is about 500 Gb, and that goes for $700. What hard drive are you using? I've seen 250GB hard disks on sale for less than $200, and 200GB drives for $110 or so. It's perfectly OK to have multiple drives. I can put together a 500GB storage system easily for less than $400 now. Using the approximate number of 10MB/minute of redbook CD audio, 500GB is about 50,000 minutes of music. Or 833+ hours. Almost 35 days. Without repeating any selection. The good thing about digital (as opposed to vinyl) is that you can copy the music a lot faster than real time, so that 35 days of music may only take a couple of days to copy. Didn't Sony and others make a CD jukebox? Seems I saw their top O' the model that held like a hudred or so cd's, used dual lasers for continuous play and interfaced with computer via a cable. Seems this might be an easier solution for you. And now that have two that play SACD's as well as CD's. |
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