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136.1.1.154
With all these mega buck players on the market...technology is quickly taking over the Home Entertainment market...Now-a-days you can easily get a sound card that will rival many $1,000 plus CDPers, and ROM's make great transports.
With software like FLAC and others as well as products from Squeezebox etc. your stand alone CDP is fast becoming a thing of the past. Soon you will be able to down load SACD quality music directly to your hard drive and pipe it directly to your amp.
Computers are taking over the front end of audio and video....
Follow Ups:
I just tried doing this today for the first time in my system.
I must say overall that I did not like it. I really hoped I would. I wanted to like, I tried to like it. But for me it just didn't cut it.I used a iBook with a Digidesign Mbox and my Wadia DAC.
All files were uncompress and in Raw AIFF form.Technically speaking everything sounded better. The soundstage and imagining and depth were great. They were in fact better than I have ever heard them. But the PRAT was gone!
I just could not get involved in the music. When we tried a disc strait from the CD drive it sound better (PRAT wise). My guess is music coming off the hard drive looses it timing?
It's hard to describe, and you kinda have to hear it. It should of been great. Every aspect was better (bass, clarity, soundstaging, etc), but the music was lost. It sounded more like hifi and less like music. Over all it was a let down.
A friend was with me when we did this test. He has about a 10K 2 channel system. In the end we both felt the same way.
Has anyone else experience this?
Of course YMMV, but for me I am going to stick with my CD player. I won't be adopting HD playback any time soon.
Happy listening,
Nick
What you desribe is imo a high jitter in the transmission between your cdp and DAC. Jitter eliminates PRAT !
There's a fair amount of tweaking that needs to be done on the software side of things, although I think there is less to do with a Mac, but that might be affecting the sound.I agree that the sound is really clean, but I enjoy it (at least through tubes). Maybe a case of sound that's too clean not sounding real to some folks like tubes v. SS and digital v. analog?
I have noticed this as well.Tried an M-Audio Audiophile USB playing uncompressed .WAV files via FOOBAR with kernel streaming.
Sound was squeaky clean via the M-Audio's internal DACs, but the groove was gone. Sounded hifi, not real.
Tried the Audiophile's SPDIF connection to my Micheal Yee DA-1 DAC and the sound was similiar. The Yee DAC is usually very musical and instruments sound real. The Audiophile SPDIF caused the highs to sound a bit unnatural (like white noise)and the music lost its groove.
Interesting phenomenon... I was hoping for computer audio to sound better :(
Hello,I am glad I am not alone on this one.
There is another thread going on right now on audiogon. I seem to be the only one who is experiencing this. I am agree with your comment about squeaky clean sound, but the music begin lost.Absolutely everything other than the PRaT is first rate.
But the PRaT has gone completely missing in action.Hopefully sometime in the future we will be proven wrong. Because if the PRat can return we will be in sonic heaven.
Digital out on my hoontech soundcard didnt stupendously impress me either (nt)
Computer as transport has already proven itself to be a superb performer.The DAC section is a different animal that could be built into a computer. Well, all computers have a "DAC" on board anyway.
The real deal for the next few years is music server plus remote players where the computer is essentially the transport and the DAC is in the remote players. The current examples of remote player are Squeezebox and Soundbridge. For audiophiles, better DACs can be connected to the remote players.
For over a couple of years now they have been using a CD Rom drive with a dedicated PC based DAC. I personally believe that most computers have too much going on to produce really superlative sound, at least jugding from my CDR's (computer based CDR's compared to standalone CDR's). Don't get me wrong, though, PC based stuff is quite good and the average listener may not really discern any difference at all.
I don't know of any soundcards that can output a DSD signal or media players that can read DSD data. Weiss Engineering recently released a software app that will convert PCM to DSD but I don't know what OS it was written for.
There may be a pro audio PC solution that can output a DSD signal, but the problem remains - no way to get it into a PC natively, again without a probably large investment in Pro Gear. There's a Danish company that can mod a SA player to output the SA datastream, but I think it takes 3 SPDIF outputs to do it. The problem with SACD, and DAD, and DVDA is copy protection, tough to work around, for anyone retailing. For the DIY guy, maybe feasable.And now we have bluray coming - again probably as well copy protected as the other hi-rez formats.
We're still in the beginning stages of really getting the most out of Redbook, though. I think it'll get a LOT better.
And then there's ASIO & DSD:
So if I wanted to put together a computer rig to rival my current stereo system (Cary 303/300, McCormack RLD-1 and DNA-0.5 with all the revisions) how would I do it?
I'm not familiar with the sound of your current setup, but if you wanted to get your feet wet without spending a ton, you could try an Edirol UA-5 (or an Empirical Audio modified Transit) feeding the DAC of your choice for a relatively low cost. Lots of info on the AA PC Audio board.Or if you want a taste for even cheaper, you can use an M-audio USB Audiophile to feed a DAC. I'm quite pleased with the sound, not to mention the convenience. The hassle is in tweaking all the software, but it's worth it.
I dont think computers are at that level yet...hence the "becoming" part of my post.BUT, believe you me....its on its way....just as soon as they make sound cards with tube output stages....Hmmmmmm
I beleive there newer models uses a CD ROM to play the cds on.
I think Wadia originated computer-based playback. The only difference is the computers, software, and algorithms are all proprietary. (I don't ever recall anybody trying a "reverse-engineer" a Wadia product.)
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PC/external DAC combo sonically outperforms even the best transports, with convenience thrown in for free (i.e. thousands of songs a mouse click away) It also shows that limitation of the Redbook standard was silver disk itself.Will it be the end of $6000 CD players? I guess not.
First of all, there is P.T. Barnum factor. Secondly, wristwatch market provides good analogy. People do not buy Patek Phillipe and Blancpain to tell time, they buy them for prestige and the pleasure of looking at them.
The same will be happen with high end CD players. They will be bought for pride of ownership reasons, not quality of musical reproduction.
(although they will not be good investment vehicle as premium watches)
I think a middle ground will be found with future transports.I know there are a lot of PC fans out there, and Ive used a PC as a transport or source more than a few times myself (w/ hoontech dsp24 soundcard doing either analogue or digital out duties).
I think people have concerns and preferences here, I for one dont like hearing a PC in the background (and yes I have water cooled, used seagate V harddrives and 'noiseless' power supplies).. But for that matter, I dont even like hearing CD players in the background (I have some here where seeks and spinning is audible from the listening chair). I dont like the idea of using a mouse to navigate (and yes again, I have used remotes with pc's and its clumsy). I dont like the idea of having the power lines around my hifi being poluted with noise, nor the potential of EMI.
I think with toys like ipods and what not proliferating like mad, and becoming cheap, that the next step in transports might be something similar. A device with enough solid state memory to store a colection of CDs/whatever, and read it out of a buffer at extremely low jitter. Theres no reason the main advantages of a PC cant be made in a unit thats much less clumsy to use, and much more friendly to the surrounding hifi environment, while taking into account all the other 'audiophile' things we love.
Interesting post. I think this is the middle of the beginning of the end of "high end" cd player sales. Eventually, the PC as transport solution will trickle up to the high end manufacturers as one box solutions with dithering algorithms. Similar to this
A computer with a good digital out sound card with say a Lucid, Grace or Benchmark DAC would be sweet!!!!!!
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