Music from hard drive better than CD?
It is also important to note that getting music from a cd onto a harddisk is non-trivial due to the vaguaries of the redbook format, so some quality will be dependent on the copy. There is more information about this at EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) which seems to do the best job so far, and here's a good thread about both this and the squeezebox: http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1082299211 |
Sorry, I just noticed that EAC has already been mentioned here. I believe there are 2 main issues that effect the quality of audio from a hard drive, which are 1) creating an accurate copy of the source material onto the hard drive and 2) accurately transporting the data off of the hard disk to a DAC. I think that if these are optimized, it is possible to beat any cd transport. I have been using a 4 meter run of coax SPIDF from a computer into a Meridian 518 with shorten and flac files created from EAC copies and sound quality is excellent, though I think the length of the cable is a drawback. A 1 meter AES/EBU from a Meridian transport is still better, but I think if all things were equal, the hard drive would win. |
Thanks Edesilva, I had always assumed that there was a significant drawback to the long digital coax, even going into the "jitter buster" Meridian 518, so I replaced the long coax with an equally long USB cable attached to an M-Audio Audiophile USB box and a 1m digital coax into the 518. This setup sounds significantly better, and it is now comparable to the Meridian transport, but not quite there yet. I'm thinking of trying the hardwired version of the slimdevices squeezebox to see if that makes an improvement. It is certainly a more flexible, user-friendly, device and having my entire music collection available at the press of a remote button is enticing. |
I use the slim server software, which you can get and run on it's own, and it works well. It can stream most any format of music (shorten, flac, wav etc) over the internet (you'll need a fat upstream pipe), handles 100,000+ songs no problem, and is fairly easy to use on multiple platforms (pure perl). You can also administer a whole collection over the web, and access your music from anywhere on the internet (works great on a lan). It is a great piece of Open Source software regardless of whether you buy the hardware, and this is part of my motivation to get the hardware [shameless plug for Open Source]. http://slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html |
