Digital Audio Myths - Listening on a PC

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Snow Dog wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: I don't know how many CDs you're planing to archive ... I would recommend an external 200GB hard disk. I ripped my 650 CDs in 128-192kbps mp3 (VBR), and now I'm ripping many of them again in lossless format because it just sounds so much better. How many CDs will it be? Don't know. There is no plan. I will not be buying anything extra... Have you tried WMA 64kbps or 96kbps? IMO it sounds much better than mp3 with extremely low bitrates. You can also consider ripping in two different formats, your favorite albums in 128kbps and the others in 64kbps ... or just rip your favorites.

 I have been using WMA variable at the moment. Or I could use MP3pro in Nero. The reason I prefer using WMP though is it creates the folders for you, unlike Nero!

Alex Grey, i mean.

The other factor that's not being discussed is personal time. It's sad, but I just don't set aside enough time solely for listening to music...there's almost always something else going on. So almost all of my music time comes either when I'm in the car (stock CD player) or working (PC with Echo Gina soundcard into Grado SR60 headphones). Add that to a somewhat limited budget for music, and an audiophile approach for me would be wasted- and, honestly, even if I had more money than I knew what to do with, I'd probably just spend it on more albums.

Of course, as an old deadhead taper, I'm probably calloused towards poor sound quality. But high-bitrate mp3's are fine with me.

BTW cobb: how's the hoontech? I thought of picking one up- they sound great, especially for the price...but the company makes me nervous (kind of a crappy website, not many US distributors, etc.).

I wonder if there's a PC audio card that simply does musical upsampling like the audiophile CD players ... and yes, oliverstoned, it IS theoretically possible to do that on the PC.

oliverstoned wrote: It's very complicated to do a musical converter.

It's a completely digital process ... there's no reason why it shouldn't work on a computer. Unless the algorithms are kept secret by the manufacturers of musical CD players, that is.

I know all about digital technology. In the digital domain, there are NO mechanical, electromagnetic or acoustic problems. It's only bits and bytes.

Sorry, but if you don't believe me ask any expert you trust. The ONLY complex part in the digital domain is the algorithm.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: I know all about digital technology. In the digital domain, there are NO mechanical, electromagnetic or acoustic problems. It's only bits and bytes. Sorry, but if you don't believe me ask any expert you trust. The ONLY complex part in the digital domain is the algorithm.

Not as simple!
Here's an article from "What hifi" (english magazine) which explains why a cd copy is less good than the original(they don't talk about good burners) and it's also about CD mechanic problems.
They say what i told you: the smallest vibration disturbs reading and it makes corrections circuits works, which recreates an aproximative signal.
I was right!

"Why CD-R and Minidisc copies can sound different from the original
The term 'digital' has been used by the marketeers to equate with 'perfection' - but there's still a lot that can go wrong...

Our recent reviews of various CD-RW and MiniDisc recorders have attracted a flurry of correspondence, much of it via e-mail, denouncing the results we reported. 'How can different CD-RW discs/MiniDisc blanks/CD-RW recorders sound different?' they howl, adding, 'Surely the machine/disc combination either records the ones and zeroes or it doesn't. After all, different floppy discs don't make word-processor documents read better or worse, do they?'

It's hard not to argue with that last bit of logic, even if sometimes the reviewing staff on the magazine would love to be able to blame their floppies (!). But experience has taught us that, just as different CD players impose their own sound on a recording, so the various digital recorders on the market, and even the various brands and types of blank media available for them, can make a difference.

So what's going on? Digits are either there or not, right? The answer to that is 'kind of...' since all digital systems rely on error correction to get the sound from the disc to the analogue outputs in a recognisable form. The less hard the correction systems are having to work to reconstitute the original sound, the better the reproduction becomes.

What's being corrected is faults in the data, caused by anything from scratches on discs to mistracking of the laser pickup, from fluctuations in disc speed to wobbles in the spinning disc, and from low reflectivity causing misreading to vibrations caused by someone walking across the room. And that's before you get into electronic failings such as jitter...

Trouble is, a CD or MD player looks dead simple: you bung in a disc and it just plays music, just like these words are about to be saved to a hard disc on a computer and when we want to read them they'll come back on the screen exactly as they were typed. Hopefully.

But the fact of the matter is that CD players, and digital recorders, are all about high-precision engineering operating in a fairly hostile environment. For example, the laser pickup system in a CD player, or the write head in an optical or magneto-optical recorder, needs to move in three dimensions, alter its power and focus, and deal with a disc spinning at a constantly-changing speed, and do all that on a microscopic scale.

Thus anything that can make this task easier, be it discs with greater reflectivity, more even spirals of pits, or even a more consistent optical layer, is likely to give a better sound.

No, all digital equipment doesn't sound the same, however much logic might suggest otherwise - in fact, it's a miracle most of it is so consistent... "

WhatHiFiSound+Vision

The article is just wrong. Unfortunately my browser just hosed a more elaborate reply ... but here's a short summary:

Conduct a little experiment:

• Install CDex, configure it for "Full Paranoia" extraction mode.
• Insert an audio CD, preferably one with some scratches.
• Rip one of the tracks to WAV, stored on the hard disk.
• copy the extracted track to another folder/filename and repeat the previous step, shaking the computer a little bit. If what the article says is true, this should result in subtle mistakes in the ripped files.
• Compare all the extracted files ... I'm sure they'll be perfectly identical. Unless CDex signalled an error, if the CD is too badly damaged.

There, all proven wrong. And EVERYONE who has a computer with a CD-ROM drive can conduct this experiment, not just people with esoteric equipment.

^ Exactly.

 Come on oliverstoned, there's no arguing about this particular issue. Mind you, we're only talking about the extraction of the digital information here. The musical CD player does much more:

• upsampling
• D/A conversion

I firmly believe that in these two areas the computer has a long way to go until it sounds as good as a musical CD player. But the EXTRACTION of the audio is a really simple process. Too bad that a lot of people are suckered into believing that in order to extract information properly from CDs, the same amount of mechanical precision as required for vinyl as to be done. It's just ridiculous.

BTW: What makes you believe that audio CDs contain more information than CD-ROMs? CD-ROMs can be extracted without any error (obviously, because otherwise the programs wouldn't work anymore), so why do you refuse to believe that audio CDs cannot be extracted? A data CD-ROM is basically an audio CD with one huge track. The method to read audio CDs is EXACTLY the same as that for reading CD ROMs ...