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Is Internet radio a good enough source for top audiophile systems? I mean does it have the wherewithal to drive Wilson speakers and such to the levels those speakers are designed for. With top Apple stuff and DACs and whatnot, will it rise to the level of say a top Clearaudio turntable and a Fremer cartridge?
Cheers
Bill
Follow Ups:
I listen to it as background music. For that purpose its great.
I like Internet Radio because I have thousands of choices. Granted the bit rates vary. I took a cheap solution. I bought a Grace Internet receiver. I run the analog outputs to a J-Tech analog to digital converter and then on to my DAC. That arrangement is a vast improvement over the Grace receiver itself. Is it high resolution? Of course not and I don't pretend it is. I like the idea of listening to virtually any radio station in existence. I get it using this arrangement.
Isn't it time Fremer the brand trademarked himself?
Is it over 16?
Don't blame radio of any type for NOT being able to drive!
That is the responsibility of your components.
Would think it's as good a source as any, given the original source of the
broadcast material - some tracks will sound MUCH better than others.
And so it goes - all back to the source.
"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination" -Michael McClure
"That is the responsibility of your components"
And the HD tuner (or whatever) IS a component.
"And so it goes - all back to the source"
Indeed it does. And in this case, the tuner IS the source. Hence Bill's question.
I don't think the original question was phrased exactly right. It's not that the internet radio is tasked with driving the speakers, but is it up to the task as a source component? Which it IS a source component.
Oz
Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
- Winston Churchill
You are right, Ozzy. My question is whether the tuner is a good enough source. Wanted to be a little dramatic saying the tuner driving speakers like Magico, dominating the 20k stuff. People owning these top speakers must be listening to the same Internet radios but must be going thru a lot of DAC and related stuff. I guess the quality will still not be anywhere near the Fremer sound.
Thanks
Bill
FWIW, I listen to internet radio a fair amount and enjoy it, being rather like an endless dessert menu of music at the touch of a finger. On average, the performance is not up to the level of my old Kenwood analog tuner, but it's nonetheless quite enjoyable, and gives me the opportunity to hear things I might never become aware of any other way. That has to be worth something, and I consider the Cambridge that made it possible a worthwhile investment.
Free and Enuff Genre to fill any soul..........
internet radio broadcasts have a bitrate ranging from around 60 to a high of 320. 320 is far below the normal 1400 for a CD. But I find a number of the stations from 128 up that have decent fidelity and are enjoyable to have on.
makes everything sound better! That's why we have them. We were listening to Grimes on spotify yesterday and our guests commented how super the sound was. Hopefully, technology will continue to improve the media.
I use the Sony HAP Z1 for Internet Radio,
and it has replaced my Sony HD Tuner W/Radio X Mods.
Columbia U has my Favorite Station.
/
.
"will it rise to the level of say a top Clearaudio turntable and a Fremer cartridge?"
I'm not a fan of Clearaudio tables, but the short answer is "No"....
Oz
Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
- Winston Churchill
Is Internet radio a good enough source for top audiophile systems?Not really.
With top Apple stuff and DACs and whatnot, will it rise to the level of say a top Clearaudio turntable and a Fremer cartridge?
No. Not even close.
That being said the variety of content to choose from is huge and entertaining but the audio quality ranges from awful to adequate to pretty darn good, but not fantastic.
One inmate commented on a UK station that streams at 320kbps AAC which is a lossy compression format that can sound good at those higher bit rates, but it's still not in the same league as "CD quality". To many audiophiles "CD quality" is not in the same league as vinyl with a good cartridge, TT, and phono preamp. Is "CD quality" good enough for you? If not, then internet radio will not be because internet radio is not even "CD quality". Is it enjoyable? It can be, but that wasn't your question.
There are streaming services like TIDAL that stream "CD quality" but you pay a subscription fee and it's not quite the same thing as "internet radio".
Edits: 03/16/15
Abe
CD quality would be good enough for me. But some of the internet stations are no good at all. But this poor quality has prevented me from upgrading my speaker.
Regards
Bill
The audio quality varies a lot between internet radio stations. Some allow you to choose the compression method you want streamed and the bit-rate. I usually go for the fastest bit-rate AAC format as I have found AAC to generally sound better than MP3.
Edits: 03/17/15
Much will depend on your locale & provider.
check out shoutcast .com; been enjoying it for almost 15 yrs.
Best of all; you can't beat the price-free.
I had never heard of it but WOW. The genres are terrific and the sub genres make it extremely easy to drill in and find what I wish....
No. I have a few and most stations have very low sampling rates and sound like poop. However there are some that is decent but it's a bandwidth issue which is a financial thing so you know where that ends up. You'll need a very good Internet connection for high bitrate streams. My 3 megs down at home often doesn't cut it for HQ streams. At this time I see no point in adding Internet radio to an audiophile system regardless of Internet connection. We use a stand alone unit in the bedroom as a clock radio and it suits that purpose well.E
T
Edits: 03/16/15
If you like classical music then the free FLAC stream of Czech radio has good sound quality. It streams at 48/16 and usually averages about 800 mbps of bandwidth. I use Foobar to play it.
Reception is not perfect. Rarely, the stream drops and it is necessary to restart playback. When this happens it is typically at a station break. Also there can be a tick or pop, which I think is some kind of a buffering glitch. This seldom happens, perhaps every couple of hours.
Foorbar allows storing the received stream on disk as ell as playing it live.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Thanks, most of the best streams are from Europe somewhere I find. My 3 megs down Internet connection usually causes rebuffering on high quality streams.
E
T
Bill where are you located ? Whom is your cable/satellite provider?
Thanks for the post. I am so far away, in the antipodes from California. We have a local provider for both Cable and Broad Band, dependable so far, and used by thousands for Amerian medical billings. I have to say the quality of the Internet radio is very uneven. I listen mostly to a Classical station from SF and a Rock station from Calgary, Canada. Not bad. There are so many which are so bad Stones sound like Alice Cooper.
With some improvement in the chest condition I should be back in Brooklyn enjoying music like nobody's business.
Regards
Bill
Internet radio can be anything along a spectrum of great to awful in terms of sound.It depends upon the original source material, the DSP applied by the station, the codec used and the streaming rate.
For me in the UK one end of that spectrum is represented by BBC Radio 3 HD. Running live concerts at 320Kbs AAC the resulting quality is extremely fine on occasion and compares favourably with the best of other digital formats. It places the ultimate need for hi-rez formats in question from my experience. Recent experiments with surround sound have also been made. NB: The service is only available to UK addresses.
At the other end of the spectrum are some pop music stations that stream in mono at as low a rate as 80Kbs MP3 with ineptly applied DSP which produce a sonic nightmare IMO.
So the answer to your question is yes internet radio sounds fine on the best audio equipment but only if you can find the right station.
Edits: 03/16/15
The odd thing is that if I go to the BBC site directly, I can't get that high a data rate - I can only get it through iTunes.
Dire discrimination! iTunes and non iTunes, payment and non payment, Have and Havenot.
There shall be good sound for all.
Regards
Bill
Chris,Not surprising at all that you can't get it through the BBC website directly. As I said it is (supposed) to be only available to UK DNS addresses. Why? because we pay for it.
If you can get the 320kBs data rate via i-tunes , well this won't be the BBC's intention, but good luck to you and enjoy a fabulous Proms season later this year. If you can stay up that late!
Pete
Edits: 03/16/15
As I've said before, it's great to be able to listen to the live concerts on the BBC, and the BBC announcers are often miles and miles ahead of what we have in the U.S. And yes, I'm looking forward to this year's Proms, which we in California hear in the morning (10:30 or 11:30, depending on Daylight Savings Time), rather than late at night - time-wise, we're behind you guys rather than ahead. ;-)
How embarrasing that I got the time difference round the wrong way. I mean it's not as if I haven't been to the West Coast on several occasions. Just put it down to my general state of decrepitude :-/
Pete
I remember my manager and I got into a dispute one time as to whether some city in India (where a new team member had just been hired) was 13 hours ahead of us or 11 hours behind! ;-)
Thought I'd repeat Eldragon's subject line - that's what it is about. When the music is good and the sound is good - it can be heaven.I play internet radio through Apple TV feeding my DSpeaker DAC optically - and wow, this is the equivalent of being addicted to crack for a music lover. Play music on radio, note artist/song, whip over to Apple store - buy it - repeat all night long. While buying new music - peruse "purchasors of this album also bought" - and preview those albums, finding artists I'd never otherwise find. Apple gives you a 1 minute preview of each/every song, preview the whole album if you want or buy songs individually. What I do is buy the one I like, go review the rest of the album later.
As wondered by cloudwalker - yes, the transfers of older songs can vary in quality - some are really, really good. Soma FM "Illinois Street Lounge" transfers - mostly from records I think (often with record noise) - can be astounding. But new stuff created in the digital domain from day one? Holy crap! I listen to a lot of progressive, psytron, modern lounge - and my system is a 3D machine with stupendous layering and depth - lifesize and coherent. Gripping is the best word. My 16x14 room disappears. It's astonishing really. I credit a lot of that to using my DSpeaker as a DAC - this thing blows me away nightly fed by my Apple TV. So much so that I've had the upgraded power supply for a week now and haven't even plugged it in - I keep waiting to stop being astonished by the system as is so I can at least tell the difference when I do plug it in.
Pop and classic rock - not so sure, I've heard "acceptable" and occasionally "enjoyable" - but I really don't look for that stuff. Heard it enough. But deep cuts FM I would like to find in the same quality as Soma.
I hear Apple radio is going to have a "buy" button soon - I presume this is so you can buy the song without having to go search for it if it's in their library. Guess I'll be broke soon.
Religion is the world's oldest profession
Edits: 03/15/15
And I'm impressed! You seem to have found a Holy Grail that works for you and whose cost is not too dear - good on ya! Who woulda thought that Insignia speakers coupled with Quad amplification could bring the magic?
Once a gain, GOOD ON YA!!
-RW-
Thank you for that response, I usually fear ridicule on this board for using $50 speakers. Used Quad ESLs/63s/989s for 25+ years. Dozens of others, most all renowned for their imaging - LS3/5a, Spica, Maggies, you name it. I would like to have each and every one back now to put in the same position with the same system and have a showdown - but I'm not sure any would unseat the Insignia's (in a 16x14 room that is), not for a guy who values 3D imaging and layering above all else. Bigger images? Maybe. Truer image? I haven't heard one. And by "truer" I mean focused, in perspective, stable, ambience around each sound intact. Someone is whacking a cowbell stage right? I can hear the echo stage left.I think the people most wrong about the insignia's were some of their owners - they should have pretended they paid $2k for them and expended commensurate effort to hear them at their best. When I went from my beloved Quad 303 to the 606 on the Insignia's, that was the first time in decades I ever felt it wans't "six of one / half dozen of the other", I felt the 606 won in every respect and kept those little kevlar woven woofers in line, and omg the bass (not to mention the image sheer size). Powerful yet still delicate. Every single change I've done since installing the Insigia's has been so obvious - ya just can't miss, and it took me in a straight line with no wrong moves right to total nirvana!
As much of a genius as Peter Walker was with speakers, I revere him more for his amps - the 606 is my ticket out requiring tubes, and all it needs is the little Creek. More people should understand that the current dumping amps are completely unique designs as far as I know - and the 303 was a real innovation in it's topology as well. I'd be recommending the 909 all over the place if I hadn't personally experienced the "new made in China Quad" in a negative way a number of times. Great loss.
I could easily never buy another component - don't even think about it any more. Have highly regarded stuff in the closets I haven't even tried - and probably never will.
Religion is the world's oldest profession
Edits: 03/17/15 03/17/15 03/17/15
when you listen to an older song (obviously an analog recording) do they use a tape or record to convert to digital format to go over the internet. I use it and whatever the format it seems to be good.
I hear a lot of record noise in older lounge stuff - and man, some of the transfers are preeeeettttty damn good...
Religion is the world's oldest profession
I stream 16bit 44.1khz for $10 a month. If someone would step up and provided streaming DSD 128 we'd be talking at the same level as vinyl.
Content is just rehashed analogue recordings, which is problem #1, problem #2 is we are very very sick people, my hearing is 20% above average according to my ENT. Call that enhanced hearing a burden sometimes I guess.
...and glass is (hopefully ) full... Yes, It's just as goood :)
"Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn't. - Charles Bukowski
I think we're on the same page. There's times when I just want to relax with a nice IPA and put some music in the house. Pandora 1 is perfectly acceptable for these occasions....at least for me.
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