Baby steps toward Hi-Fi
I like music, I like tech, I like being a geek. These preferences have led to me to take very small steps toward a very expensive pass time. My partner and I are in the process of buying a house, so you all will understand that these are baby steps indeed and true sound and audio junkies will laugh at my pitiful efforts, but I wanted to hear what gets people geeked out about audio equipment.
So I bought a few things, trying to get higher quality sound without paying much money. For now I limited myself to a player (which hardly qualifies as a big purchase, they are ubiquitous) and an entry-level set of headphones. I picked a player that natively plays FLAC files and will run Rockbox as well. The current generation of players don't seem to be rockbox friendly and FLAC or OGG capability isn't guaranteed for off-the-shelf purchases. I waffled between the Grado sr80 and sr125 headphones, but decided to go with the lesser pair because my ears aren't trained and I might as well leave room to upgrade before the prices get excessive. I used the difference to get what appear to be a decent set of in-ear buds for working out or portability.
My original plan was to get a Headroom Total Airhead or Total Bithead amp to power the speakers, but I figure I should listen to what this sounds like before I spend any more, even if they are relatively cheap. I also may decide that I should break out the old soldering iron and make a cmoy amp myself, but that will be messy until I master the learning curve again. I haven't done any electronics projects since I made it through puberty. Picking up one made by a skilled amateur is another option.
The other half of the project is ripping my music collection to a lossless codec (FLAC). This will be a slow process, ripping everything again, but I'm kind of compulsive about my metadata, so getting the opportunity to tweak my cataloging right will be rewarding, if tedious. Still, the thought of trading quality for storage makes less and less sense with how cheap storage is these days. I'm likely never going to buy a truly great home hi-fi system, but I'm curious just how good lossless music sounds through a decent pair of headphones.
The gear hasn't arrived yet, but I'm curious what you all think. Waste of money? Good call? Right idea but wrong price point for true performance? Any suggestions for next steps?
*Legion* wrote:
There's not enough bandwidth on a thousand Internets to detail what's wrong with that idea.
I'm no expert in Hi-Fi, but I have managed to get to a point where I'm comfortable with my dollar spent/quality ratio. Keep in mind I am only interested in two channel, and mostly classical at that. I've no interest in X.1 systems or wall-shaking bass; only an affordable system than can approach natural sound.
I've got about $2,000 invested in a 2 channel stereo system. I'm really pleased with my Bowers and Wilkins 603 floorstanders. They're considered entry-level by true audiophiles, but they hit the sweet spot for quality and cost. I have a Harman Kardon HK3390 2 channel receiver and an Onkyo DX-7555 single-disc CD player. All of those pieces were chosen on a combo of cost and their ability to be transparent.
I choose to listen to CDs only with this system, as I can tell a difference in quality in other formats. I've purchased some of the Itunes Plus tracks and some of Amazon's 256kbs mp3's, but I don't like the way they sound. I don't have much experience with the lossless stuff, but what I heard from Apple's Lossless encoding was not terrible, but still not good.
Osiran, lvl 49 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND
I went in a similar direction as you're going now. Originally, I was using a 3rd gen iPod with a Total Airhead and a pair of Sennheiser HD580s. This sounded really good; the 3rd gen iPod is excellent, and with LAME-encoded VBR tracks, it was really very nice.
I then tried to build a theater. I always liked it fine as a theater, but the music through that speaker system always kind of sucked. It just sounded... bad. I was using a USB Soundblaster with a digital out to my receiver, so when music came out kind of soggy and murky and nasty-sounding, I thought it was the speakers, and I was pretty disappointed with them.
I was experimenting with using the Mac as a home theater PC -- the G4 Mini had a very appealing form factor for that -- and I discovered that Mac surround sound wasn't very good at the time. So, I bought a Sonica Theater USB soundcard, which was supposed to have good Mac drivers. But I gave up on the Mac and sold it before the soundcard even arrived, because the DVD playback was just awful. It's better now, but at the time the OSX software DVD player looked terrible.
Just on a lark, I hooked it up to the PC to see how it compared with the Audigy 2NX. I fired up an MP3 to test that it was working. I distinctly remember hitting play on the mouse, hearing the sound, and getting up to then hook up the next pair of cables for the next channels.... I got halfway there and stopped dead. "Holy sh*t that sounds good", I thought to myself, and sat back down. "Wow. Jesus." Suddenly, I had music that was absolutely splendid, where before it had been garbage. Anyone with a working pair of ears would say the exact same thing; this wasn't subtle. The 2NX sounded like someone had thrown a blanket over the speakers.... and all that time, for a year or so, I had blamed the speakers. Wrong!
So I got to researching online, and I discovered this basic fact: Windows sound really sucks. By default, Windows does everything at 48Khz. Almost all soundcards work at 48Khz, and resample 44.1Khz streams to 48. Some do this better than others. Soundblasters are bad at it, and the Audigy 2NX is dismal beyond belief. This is why movies had always sounded good... because they're at 48Khz already, and weren't getting resampled.
If you want genuinely good sound out of Windows, you first need a card that's able to pass true lossless sound to a receiver. You want one that will do it with a S/PDIF, because most onboard DACs don't sound very good. (again, computer sound is AWFUL.) There aren't very many cards that will do this. You can do it with an X-Fi in Audio Creation Mode, with lots of fiddling. The easy and cheap way is with a Chaintech AV-710, which is a crappy little soundcard with fairly crummy drivers, but which supports true lossless output on the S/PDIF, and that's all you need.
Once you have the hardware, you need to bypass the Windows native sound system. You can use either ASIO or kernel streaming, whichever is supported by your drivers. And you need a player that will support these output methods. Foobar will do it nicely, although I think you have to add a plugin for ASIO. Winamp will also do ASIO. But iTunes and Media Player will not.
Once you're set up, you can test whether you're getting true lossless output by playing this DTS-encoded WAV file. You have to find every volume control you can, and set them all to maximum; if any step along the way changes even one bit of the original data stream, it won't work.
If it's working, you'll get nice multichannel sound out of your stereo interface. If anything along the sound chain isn't lossless, you'll get pure hash. If you get multichannel sound, you have a perfect audio path, and you'll get the full benefit of your receiver's DACs.
There are other ways you can approach the problem:
1. Buy a Mac. Macs do lossless audio with almost no effort; you just set all volume sliders to max, connect a S/PDIF, and it just works.
2. Buy an Airport Express. iTunes, playing via Airport Express, does lossless audio flawlessly. It also now supports gapless playback on concept albums like Pink Floyd's. It didn't do this a couple of years ago, which is why I went to:
3. The Squeezebox. These marvelous little units do lossless audio with almost no effort. They support FLAC natively, too. If you get the older Squeezebox3, it has a really nice Burr-Brown DAC on board. The new Duets have a cool remote, and are cheaper for the actual players, but they've gone to another DAC that I'm not familiar with. I loooooove the headphone out on my Squeezeboxes... run through my Airhead, it's just liquid and floaty and absolutely wonderful. The Duets may be just fine, but I don't know that from personal experience.
The next challenge is getting everything ripped to FLAC. I use EAC in Windows, and bought a specific CD drive, the Plextor Premium, explicitly to do CD ripping. That's all I use it for; it's probably the best computer CD drive ever made. I also get, however, really excellent results from my Pioneer DVD players, so if you can't find one of the Plextors, you can use a Pioneer and be perfectly happy that you're getting good results.
My process is to rip to a CUE/WAV image file, which I then mount with Daemon Tools. I then re-rip the individual tracks to high-bitrate MP3. This does two things: it gives me MP3s for my iPhone, and also does an AccurateRip check. AccurateRip is a global database of hash values from ripped CDs. If you get the same hash as several other people, chances are very high that you got an Accurate Rip... thus the name. If you get a number of tracks that are the same, but a few that are different, chances are fairly high that you have a scratched CD or other damage, so you can investigate and fix the problem.
At that that point, I then move the file into my SlimServer music path, compress the WAV to FLAC, edit the CUE file to point at the FLAC, and use par2 to generate 10% redundancy information. I then tell Slimserver to scan for new music, and voila... I have a highly resilient music store of archival quality, with error checking if something goes wrong. Having done this once, I should never again have to touch the original CDs. I treat them as backup, and store them in a box. Ideally, I'll never need them again.
I wrote scripts to do this en masse, for when I was first converting, but I don't bother using them when I'm just ripping one CD. It's only if I'm ripping a few that I fire up the compress/edit/par2 scripts.
Yes, this is anal. Yes, this is a lot of upfront work. But the maintenance is zero, I can regenerate any of my CDs on demand, should I lose one, I can generate any other compressed format I need very rapidly, using Foobar2K, and I get lossless playback through pretty much any device I want to hook up to. As far as I'm concerned, this system is absolutely perfect. The only real improvement I can imagine would be streamlining the rip process for non-techies. The actual storage and playback are flawless in all respects.
Holy....wow, Malor.
Half of what you just explained whooshed over my head.
My brother sells high end audio/video for a living, and I always thought, "How hard can a nice high end audio archival system BE to set up?"
I feel humbled, sir.
Just....WHOOOOOOSSSSHHH!
"I have not supped of Buffy, nor have I supped in any wise during the absence of Firefly. When Firefly returns again in glory, then shall I sup at the table of Whedon." - Fedaykin98
Ok now that I re-read it, the whooosh has lessened.
I had a look a the Squeezebox and it seems like a nice system. I may go that route at some point.
"I have not supped of Buffy, nor have I supped in any wise during the absence of Firefly. When Firefly returns again in glory, then shall I sup at the table of Whedon." - Fedaykin98
The biggest problem is simply that Windows sound sucks. Most of that treatise was how to get around that problem.
You can skip almost the whole thing, until you get to the alternatives section. Those are much easier. Both the Airport Express and the Squeezebox will do very nice lossless audio to a receiver, and the Squeezebox has a fantastic headphone out as well.
From there, the only awkward bit is getting the music ripped; my EAC process up there will work well, but it's somewhat labor-intensive. But, once you've done it, it's done forever, as long as you keep good backups. That's kind of the point of putting that much effort in... you do it once and it's done.
There are turnkey systems to do most of this for you, but I don't know how good they actually are, not having heard any, they're generally exceedingly expensive, and they use closed formats, so that your music is stuck on their server.
From experience, I know that you can do a fantastic job with just three things: a computer with enough storage, a high-quality CD drive for ripping (Plextor or Pioneer) and a good playback device. (Airport Express or Squeezebox). You probably have the computer. Net outlay... between $200 and $350, for a Pioneer drive and either an AE or Squeezebox, plus possibly a drive purchase, plus a fair bit of your time.
The turnkey solutions cost thousands, and still take plenty of time for loading the music anyway.
Thanks for the info.
For now I'm not going to worry about sound out of my computer. We're in process of buying a house and we'll redo some of the home theatre setup then. I'm using XP MCE for my HTPC currently and need to decide whether to keep that, install Myth-buntu, or go w/ squeezebox and an appliance DVR. I'll take a good look at the chaintech when the time comes for that.
Thanks also for the heads up on proper ripping to FLAC. I started out ripping using Winamp (paid version) and you clued me in to looking at EAC. Now I just need to figure out if I can use EAC's direct to FLAC feature or if I'll need to follow your steps above.
I also went ahead and bought a little portable headphone amp. I followed advice from some folks at the Head-fi.org forums and picked up an amp built by this guy. Perhaps eventually I'll want something w/ a quality onboard DAC, but this should do for now.
*Legion* wrote:
Call me old-fashioned I guess but I really prefer the act of picking out a CD from the library, placing it in the player, and settling in for a listen.
Malor, it's like we're from different centuries.
Osiran, lvl 49 Minstrel in LOTRO: Gladden server
XBL/Zune: TUBASareBEHIND
Well, the net effect is that I have a tiny magic box, about the size of a VHS cassettte, that has every piece of music I own 'inside'. (it's actually on the computer in the spare bedroom, but nevermind that part.
) It has a display and a remote, so anyone can sit down, browse through the library, hit play, and voila! Instant music. I don't ever have to get up to load or unload CDs. And I can stream in Internet radio stations as easily as listening to local music.
Rituals are soothing, but I'm willing to trade away the load-a-CD ritual for the convenience, the inherent backup, and the dynamite sound quality. Only very high-end CD players will match a Squeezebox for output quality, whether analog or digital. I'm not really a believer in 'jitter', but if you're one of the audiophiles that are, the Squeezebox 2 and 3 have incredibly low jitter figures, far better than any CD players I know of. And the analog output has a very nice Burr-Brown part. It's not very expensive, something like $5 these days, but it's still the nicest analog DAC I've personally heard.
Oso: direct-to-multiple-FLACs should work fine, I imagine. I was focused on creating true archival images of the CDs. It's less convenient having them in a single large file, rather than in separate files for each song, but that way I'm sure I got EVERYTHING.
If you're less anal than I am, you might prefer the multi-FLAC approach.