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Sloth 
Forum Senior Member 
Joined: April 24 2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 105 |
 Topic: The ultimate audiophile pollPosted: April 27 2006 at 14:20 |
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I feel that you can enjoy music with any kind of equipment you might
prefer to use. This leaves me in the middle. However, i
believe that Analog is much better than digital in terms of actual
sound. With analog you get that deep, rich bass sound and soft
highs. But with digital you get flat bass and harsh highs.
Both are good in the mid-range. Even my fiance' can tell the
difference and she doesn't take music very seriously, to her
music is music. But i think anyone can get by just fine with a
decent system, whether i is digital or analog. I could see
spending upwards of $2,000 at the very most for a quality sound system;
amp, surround sound, cd, dvda, record player, seperate EQ. but to
spend more than that is absurd and a waste money.
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BUH!!! It's what the Buffalo say!
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Meddler
Forum Senior Member
Joined: September 29 2005 Location: Massillon Status: Offline Points: 881 |
Posted: April 27 2006 at 09:30 |
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Thanks Mike and Goose. I did read your reply sooner. I was just too lazy to post.
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goose
Forum Senior Member
Joined: June 20 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 4097 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 20:29 |
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For sure, but those buying Ipods have already locked themselves out of
(edit: most) sane music stores, as well as most music players and most formats of
music, bless them.
Looking at emusic though, that does look pretty good. Not that I want to buy audio files, but if I did I'd probably look there first  Edited by goose - April 26 2006 at 20:31 |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator 
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 15:31 |
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^ goose, you may be correct about iTunes. But I'm talking about sane download stores.
Seriously: 192kbps are becoming the standard for downloads, Napster and most other European stores use that format (although some old tracks still exist in the Napster database which were ripped in 128kbps and haven't yet been replaced).
BTW: At this point I have to recommend www.emusic.com again - they offer tremendously well ripped mp3s at varying bitrates (VBR) which average at 200 kbps.
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goose
Forum Senior Member
Joined: June 20 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 4097 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 15:27 |
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Mike, I think Itunes does use 128kbps still (!), according to
http://www.connectedhomemag.com/Audio/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=49339
anyway. Mind you, there are so many horrible innaccuracies in that
article that it's quite possibly wrong...
oliver: EAC doesn't simply claim to make exact copies, it makes verifiably exact copies. That is the nature of digital audio. Jitter is, as Mike says, not relevant to this situation. |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 11:17 |
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Two things: - Today music you buy in internet stores is encoded in 192kbps. It's also not encoded as mp3, but WMA with DRM (digital rights management), which puts severe limitations on what you can do with the files. - Personally I would never buy music in this form, unless the price would be considerably lower than the real album. There are a few websites which offer mp3s in an acceptable form, most importantly www.emusic.com, where you can buy whole albums for around $2. That is a price well spent IMO, because you can always decide to get the real album later or to be content with the mp3. My personal recommendation: Look for subscription based services such as Napster, where you can listen to all they have for the price of one real album per month. Together with services like eMusic and a few albums per month which you still buy "normally", that is the perfect solution to me: - you have huge quantities of stuff to listen to in low quality - you don't pay much for that, so you have enough money left to buy those albums which you REALLY like after extensive listening. |
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Meddler
Forum Senior Member
Joined: September 29 2005 Location: Massillon Status: Offline Points: 881 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 11:00 |
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[Random question]
Would I be wasting my time downloading musuc over the internet? Because, its just 128kps. It doesn't sound bad to me. (legally  [iTunes.. etc]) Or would my money be better spent buying CDs?Edited by Meddler - April 26 2006 at 11:01 |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 08:11 |
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I'm not bored at all ... these things cannot be explained too often.
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Snow Dog
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 23 2005 Location: Caerdydd Status: Offline Points: 32995 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 08:10 |
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Actually you are both wasting your time, this argument hasn't progressed from previous threads.
 In my opinion.
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oliverstoned
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 26 2004 Location: France Status: Offline Points: 6308 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 08:07 |
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In your opinion? Edited by oliverstoned - April 26 2006 at 08:08 |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 07:18 |
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It doesn't apply in the case of audio extraction, because computers have very large buffers. Driver units are legacy systems from times where large buffers (even 2MB) were not affordable even at these prices ... so it was crucial for these systems to not have any errors while reading the data which would cause the unit to have to go back and read the data again ... which leads to pauses in the playback if the buffer length is exceeded. Computers have all the time in the world to read the CD ... read the excerpt that I quoted on the previous page. The software reads a sector up to 82 times, and only if the different extractions are identical it accepts the result. There is no interpolation or "guessing" in case of data which has been not been read correctly due to jitter, scratches or whatever else that may happen. |
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oliverstoned
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 26 2004 Location: France Status: Offline Points: 6308 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 07:13 |
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..except that you deny the jitter issue which affects transports, evoked in the text i posted up.
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 06:57 |
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The drive is connected to the converter digitally - that means it transmits the 0s and 1s to the converter. All that I'm saying is that computer cd drives can reliably extract the 0s and 1s exactly as they are on the disc, and thus they do the same as your drive. Absolute, undeniable, easily verifiable "carved in stone" bulletproof fact.
Show me one single post where I said that these systems don't sound good. All I'm saying is that I can be just as happy with my system. |
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oliverstoned
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 26 2004 Location: France Status: Offline Points: 6308 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 06:46 |
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Ths fact is that i've heard drive/converter, i own one and know others, not you.
BTW, i just received a thanks PM from one of our members, happy about a purchase he made, following my advice! |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 06:12 |
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This statement indeed only proves that you don't have the slightest idea of what we are talking about here.
Only your arrogance is painful to me. How can you know that I never listened to an audiophile system? Your arrogance dictates: I'm always right - so whatever facts people present to me - if they conflict with my personal experience then they must be wrong. This attitude has clouded your judgement so much that you can't even see that this discussion isn't about hi-fi systems. (that's alll in my humble opinion of course) Any opinion which suggests that computers+audio can make sense is ridiculous to you - even the article in your so highly praised stereophile.com website.  |
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oliverstoned
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 26 2004 Location: France Status: Offline Points: 6308 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 06:04 |
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Experience proved that if you put a DVD player (even a good one) instead of a good drive, it’ far less good. No you can tell me that your theories say the contrary, but don’t tell me it’s like that, cause you have not tried, That’s what’s painful with you! |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 05:57 |
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You're really immune to fact. I present fact and considerations and you say "listen to our systems". What does your system have to do with digital audio extraction? nothing at all. BTW: I'd be willing to bet 1000 EUR that when I connect the digital output of my sound card to you D/A converter box, you won't be able to hear a difference. How could you - the bits are identical. |
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oliverstoned
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 26 2004 Location: France Status: Offline Points: 6308 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 05:53 |
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They should need to listen to our respective systems to judge!
BTW, the fact that DVD technology is different doesn't change the transport problem and you should refer to what i've posted from Stereophile. |
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MikeEnRegalia
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 22 2005 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 21138 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 05:43 |
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BTW oliver: You do have a point with CD audio stability issues in the early days of CD audio and computer CD drives. But you must accept that with the tremendous progress in computer technology, extracting CD audio has become a fairly simple task for computers and drives. Audio CDs have a really low resolution, and DVD drives (or HD-DVD for that matter) extract much more data which is even stored more densely with a much higher need for precision of the laser beam.
I quote the EAC technology page: "In secure mode, this program reads every audio sector at least twice. That is one reason why the program is so slow. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this will help the program to obtain best result by comparing all of the retries. If it is not sure that the stream is correct (at least it can be said at approx. 99.5%) the program will tell the user where the (possible) read error occurred. The program also tries to adjust the jitter artefacts that occur on the first block of a track, so that each extraction should be exactly the same. On drives found to have the "accurate stream" feature, this is guaranteed. Of course, this is a little bit more complex, especially with some CD drives which have caching. When these drives cache audio data, every sector read will be read from cache and is identical. I initially implemented two ways of dealing with the caching problem. First there is an extra option for resetting the cache for use the the old secure mode (the one being kept for compatibility reasons). In the current beta version, the cache will still be reset by resetting the drive completely. You might imagine that this would slow down the reading process very badly." Still convinced that this is all laughable? |
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Snow Dog
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator Joined: March 23 2005 Location: Caerdydd Status: Offline Points: 32995 |
Posted: April 26 2006 at 05:38 |
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1 vote for Mike.
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The ultimate audiophile poll
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Meddler wrote: