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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:
Srajan: market study for 6moons ? (Good job btw, I read it regularly)I went from an Arcam CD player to a PC based system. The machine by itself is nothing fancy. Ultra quiet was the only requirement, the PC is in the listening room. To read audio, you do not need any computing power. The soundard is just a way to carry the signal outside the computer into SPDIF/toslink. I chose M-audio transit. Without monitor, the whole computer is about $600 (self-assembly, way too powerful CPU, quiet hard drive and housing). I feed the hi-fi system with the SPDIF signal. The resale price of the Arcam paid for the computer entirely.
The move was performanced based. The digital out of a computer can be as good as or better than the one of a CD player. I was no longer needing an analog output from a cd-player (digital amps). If you tweak the soundcard, you can get external clocking to get a reference clock for the whole system. Some soundcards already have clock inputs (any serious soundcard above $500 has one). I have yet to build an clean power supply for the soundcard.
The system is almost a year old. I have a little over 100 cds now on the hard drive. It is cumbersome to go through the CD collection and rip music. Time consumming and the backlog is long (a little discouraging). Most CDs are ripped as soon as I get home now.
Software: EAC has the audiophiles aura, but I still wonder why (some guy some day declared it was better... so plenty followed?) . It is much slower than other free softwares and does not improve sound quality (from my experience at least). I compared music extracted with different softwares, bits are exactly the same (Matlab for comparison). I use only EAC for the very, very rare case when a CD is scratched (and significant scratches are rare in my CD collection). I extract music with audiograbber (also freeware). I use freecddb to fetch the cd titles. Extraction is done at 20 to 30 X. I cache the tracks entirely in the RAM first before writing them to the HD. No compression, directly to wav.
Playback: foobar with ASIO4all driver. ASIO makes a significant difference (no unwanted resampling of data, no weird behavior)
Download: no. I buy cds locally and support local independent commerce. I still use a rig at work with cds anyways. Furthermore, I prefer having a "hard" copy... just in case my hd fails.
Superiority of HD based system: a PC based system reads the exact information each time, regardless of its price (a $200 pc will do). After that, it is a matter of having a good clock and a relative electrical noise free system... but CD players are not exempt of these problems. To affirm technical superiority of HD system, the real question becomes: is there significant and audible error correction with a CD player? Considering some cd players buffer the music, I have doubts. But I have yet to find a $200 Meridian !
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Follow Ups
- Re: Magnetic/hard-drive vs. optical/CD: Who has made the switch? - InTheCornFields 06:52:57 11/02/05 (0)
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