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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: Magnetic/hard-drive vs. optical/CD: Who has made the switch? posted by Srajan Ebaen on October 30, 2005 at 08:10:47:
I switched somewhat before I began taking my audio very seriously, so you could say I replaced a non-descript Technics CD player, but I don't think I've ever owned an audiophile CD player. I do currently have a Pioneer universal player for DVDs, DVD-As and SACDs, but it's not particularly special. I do occasionally drop a CD in it if someone brings one over, but I haven't done a detailed comparison vbetween it and my hard drive based system.I've constructed several hard drive based systems over the years, but my current one is an Apple eMac with an external USB M-Audio Duo DAC. I originally ripped my entire CD collection, about 500 discs, into the aiff format with iTunes and stored it on a couple of 250 GB external Firewire hard drives. I use a little free app called Clutter to snarf the cover art off of Amazon. When Apple released the Apple Lossless Codec, and it was confirmed to be bit-for-bit accurate, I compressed all of my music with that allowing me to get everything onto only one external drive.
One issue I've had was recently I experienced a bit of HFS+ filesystem corruption on the external drive. This was repairable with Disk Utility, but I lost about 400 files, out of about 7000, so I've had to dig the CDs out of boxes and re-rip those. Incidentally, since my problem was with the filesystem, not the hardware, a RAID array would not have protected me from this issue. I've subsequently copied all of my music onto a new drive with the ext3 filesystem in my Linux server. The eMac now uses NFS to access the shared drive and generally acts as if the file were local. I use the external Firewire drive as a backup, though, as I actually own all the original CDs, this is a bit excessively redundant.
There are a couple of other practical issues with the system as well. First, the eMac has an audible fan. I originally considered using a Mac mini, but with the requisite monitor it cost more than the eMac. It would have been a better solution in terms of noise, however, and I would have gone that route with a little better planning. Second, I find it somewhat harder to actually sit down and listen to an album. iTunes does an annoying thing where it gaps slightly when changing from track to track, but the bigger issue is the damn shuffle button is too tempting compared to actually picking something to listen to. I sort of miss the experience of picking a CD off the rack, dropping it in the player and taking a seat. I guess I get that experience from vinyl still, but I miss it a bit with the CDs.
Finally, an additional benefit I get from having the computer wired to my system is the ability to record. I mostly end up copying LPs to my digital library for use as background music or to burn CDs for the car, or even to be further compressed (shudder!) for my iPod. I have the tape outputs on my preamp connected to the inputs on the Duo and I use a program called Amadeus II for the actual recording. I typically record both sides of an LP as one long file, apply processing, and then use markers to split it into tracks. As far as processing goes, Amadeus II offers a facility for repairing record pops which sounds decent if used sparingly. Also, I've corrected the EQ on some poorly mastered LPs and occasionally applied limiting to get the rms level up to that of a modern CD. With classic recordings, I've managed to produce better sounding CDs than some of the official label reissues, and I find this process to be almost as enjoyable a part of this hobby as the actual listening.
In conclusion, I think the computer can be a valuable asset in an audio system even if it isn't used as the primary source. I also think it's important to dedicate a machine for that purpose and select it's hardware and software configuration with audio related use in mind.
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Follow Ups
- Re: Magnetic/hard-drive vs. optical/CD: Who has made the switch? - Gulliver 09:29:44 10/31/05 (0)
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