Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?
From my limited reading it seems that a cd burned to a hard drive will be a bit for bit copy because of the software programs used to rip music files. A transport has to get it right the first time and feed the info to a dac. Wavelength audio has some interesting articles about computer based systems and have made a strong statement that a transport will never be able to compete with a hard drive>dac combo.
read a little bit about it. its basically replacing your transport with a digitally stored data on a hdd, the whole signal conversion is supposed to take place in your stereo system (good DAC), away from a computer...
Let me try again. Playing a song (Bill Evans Live at the Village Vanguard - Track 1, let's say) from an external LaCie hard-drive, using my Apple laptop running iTunes as the interface -- with the U24 taking the USB signal out from the computer and converting it into S/PDIF, and then running a coxial digital cable from the U24 into my Dodson DAC, which was connected to a Modwright Preamp, a Pass Labs 250.5 amp and VR4JR speakers....sounded AS GOOD as playing the CD I ripped the music from via a CEC TL51X transport with the same coaxial cable out to the Dodson DAC and through the same system.
Anyone care to suggest why it would be as good or better? We all know that transports make a big difference, but it appears that the hard drive solution somehow works around whatever problem it is that a good transport fixes.
Let me jump in here with a slightly off topic question I'm very curious about. There is one so far unmentioned problem with computer audio I haven't seen addressed, namely fan noise. How do the contributors to this thread deal with it? I nearly went crazy figuring out how to minimize the 24db. computer fan in my PS Audio Power Plant, so the thought of more fan noise from other sources puts me off.
search posts on this subject by Edesilva. also check out the links given in these discussions (some comp hardware possibilities there). as far as the comp noise - theres several ways to have a dead quiet pc, including keeping it in another room, having a fanless soution (some mini IPX simpleton to run the media front of the system) and lotsa ways of making your pc quiet (passive cooling, quiet fans, water cooling, quiet case, or noise killing enclosure for the machine), if it has to be close to the stereo.
Great thread! I am very close to going down this road. One FM question. I understand you can feed FM off your computer just like CD's. Seems there are FM streams which can be used. Is the sound quality as good as everything I am reading about here (CD) ? I think this could replace my FM tuner. I would assume the sound has a dead quiet background and no reception issues. Can someone tell me if these "FM" computer streams are free? Uncompressed? Choice of Jazz, Classical etc??
One other question. Can't we send our current high end players with great DAC's in for moding by the builders? They can simply install a S/PDIF input. Now I can use my player as the DAC for a computer based front end or use the transport in my player when playing CD's, DVD's , SACD's and DVDa's. I can do it all! I would think this is a pretty simple mod for our players?
Grannyring, sure I have seen wadia with input cards, and Quad Audio type CD players able to play the disk and have an external music source flow thru right to the internal dac, they even come with several digital inputs I think too.. This is good because you can have a good transport right there, as well as all your high quality cables are shared to feed the analog audio signal to your system after conversion...This eliminates having to have several cables too. So yes even the super hi-end pieces can be modified to be not completly obsolete. But I just choose to for now use a good DAC cause it will never go out of style and is a safer investment and will always just be a good decoder box basically for whatever Redbook source can be thrown at it, and just Run any type Transport I want vs. expensive CDP,Plus Dac's in general now have extra input so I can leave a transport and when the Audio MEdia systems settle down, can hook anything else simaltaneous to the same dac and not lose out on anything.. But I will never invest in a a very expensive straight CD player again, cause yeah unless they all start offering or can even fit the extra components in it for external devices to share the dac its a risk, and will start loosing value more and more.
One thing I forgot to add to my above post is that all my tunes were ripped in Apple Lossless format.
There is no fan noise on my Apple Laptop -- I have the unit on a stand that keeps one end propped up and it is virtually silent.
FM Radio: Many radio stations offer a webcast of their boradcasts and the sound quality is good. Not all stations do this though. That said, I subscribe to Live365 which is an internet radio clearing house that has thousands of stations of both FM and CD quality, commercial free, in every genre imaginable. I spend almost as much time listening to this as I do my CD collection on hardrive. It is not that expensive given what you gain access too.
I have heard that it is easy to add a digital input on some CD players and extremely difficult with others.
There are other people who participate on this site who are far more qualified than I to answer the questions about why the hard-drive transport can sound as good as a dedicated CD transport. In fact, they have done so on other threads on this very same topic at this site.
I have thought the same about Ipod but it will not have quality sound files in the first place like the lossless systems of the other types, I think it is primarily compressed files like mp3 or something... from what I understand the only way is to have a big Gig hard drive or memory card type setup and transfer CD completly un-altered, an Apple type computer is suppose to be excellent, but Ipod itself is not near the quality of CD from my understanding.
My player is also a top end DVD, DVDa multi-channel player used as part of a combined 2 channel and HT system. Muse Thalia. I need it for this use and the computer based system wont help in these areas. I dont want to buy a DAC but may be forced.
Remember computer transports aren't limited to 16/44, spin at a much higher speed than cd transports, don't loose any data (computers can't afford to loose data), don't have to have a correction circut to guess what is correct. They are like stereo's in the fact different power supplys offer different sound . Some control the bass better , some have better midrange etc. You can download a ton of free things, like upsamplers etc. I have owned a Levinson 37, a CEC tl,a Sony 777, an Ayre d1x and now the Audiomeca Mepisto . I think the computer, with the off ramp turbo may be better in my system. Hope this helps
High tech equipment replacing low tech equipment ? The question goes back to why some people prefer LP sound than CD sound ? Why some people prefer analog amp as compared to digtal amp ?
Its all come back to demand & supply.
In any of the music u listened to, the source play a very important part.
My thinking is that if a cd burned to a hard drive will be a bit for bit copy because of the software programs used to rip music files, then the cd will surely offer a better sound than your burned cd.
The purpose of any recording is to make the cd sound as real as the original which cd is still trying very hard to achieve.
By burning a cd might add some colourity to the sound.
I don't think it is at all the same as Vinyl Vs. CD, just my opinion, Vinyl is superior in general cause the recordings can sound more natural than Digital period. Especially if done well and on a playback system worthy of it, Now with digital Transfer from storage Vs. spinning a CD is a whole different thing, cause its nature from either have nothing to do with analog sound like a Turntable. Fact is the further you can advance digital transfer the better it will be, regardless if people want to believe its impossible for a 400.00 dollar computer storing the INfo cannot sound as good as a 12,000 Transport transfering it in real time. I think it is very possible for a hard drive or storage based whatever we are talking about here to have less errors than a real time disc spinning, as long as the info is stored correctly in the first place.
The benefit that this thing offered is that u can burned all your flavourite songs as a form of library in the hard drive.
I think things are getting more high tech just like mp3 players. Its getting more & more convinent. Who knows this will be the future.
But I still stand at my own word that nothing sound better than the original. Talking about SACD, DVD-A. They are almost dead.
System trying to make the sound better, more musical but its full of colouration. Is that the sound that u like ? Yes, maybe to the newer generation of people.
Kublakhan: In regards to your plan to layout your storage as a 2 disk stripe, I wouldn't recommend it. Striped disks offer no data protection with the benefit being increased I/O. I doubt if the disk I/O requirements for audio would push the limits of even a regular PC hard drive sending a single stream. If one of those disks goes out on you, you lose all of the data, the same as if you only had one disk. Look at mirroring the drives, which will give you exactly half the usable storage as the total of both. The other option is a RAID 5 device, which requires a minimum of 3 or 4 drives. A safe estimate of usable storage would be all the disks added up, minus one. RAID 5 will give you very good I/O especially disk read performance. Both of these solutions will protect you against any single disk going bad. More importantly you can rest easier at night knowing something catastophic would have to happen for you to lose all of the songs on your drives. I don'd deal with the MS Windows world too much, so I'm not sure if XP or something like that can create these type of virtual devices for you without having to buy additional software or not, but the same would apply to your striped volume ( disk ). Personally, I'm in the process of upgrading my wireless network to support Apple's Airport express. I borrowed a buddy's for a few weeks and really liked the results and the lack of wires. I'm convinced wireless is the future for home networking, audio is good to go right now, video will be down the road as the wireless speeds and technologies continue to improve.
Someday I'm going to have to add pics of my PC based rig...
I'm in the Marco-camp, in the sense that I have a PC with a USB audio device (Waveterminal U24 also), which connects to a dCS Purcell, dCS Delius, then onto the preamp. My PC is a little (mebbe 2"H x 8"W x 12"D) serener fanless PC. Its got a NEC spinpoint drive, which make it one of the quietest PCs I have ever heard (really, "not heard"... its dead quiet). The spinpoint drive isn't huge--80GB--so the serener is connected to my home ethernet and accesses a Buffalo terastation stored in a closet. The Terastation is 4 x 250 GB drives, configured as RAID 5, so its pretty safe. If I blow up two drives at once, guess I'm reripping everything, but that prospect seems pretty minimal.
I do all my ripping using EAC in secure mode, which seems to be the best option for getting bit-perfect copies. I use a little script called iTunesEncode to interface between EAC and iTunes--EAC rips the wav file, gets tag information from CDDB, and passes it all off to iTunes to have the file converted into Apple Lossless (ALAC), with tags. I do have to add album art separately. I will typically then switch the iTunes library and convert the ALAC files to 128kbps AAC files for iPod use--means they are stored in a completely different subdirectory.
For controlling playback, I use a 10" viewsonic airpanel, a wireless touchscreen that has one trick only--it acts as a remote desktop under the PC RDP protocol. So, I can sit on the couch with the 10" touchscreen, see the iTunes interface, and select songs that are then pulled off the terastation by the PC and sent to the stereo.
The little serener is also sufficient horsepower to run slimserver, which is sort of integrated with iTunes. Slimserver is the "always on" side of the squeezebox system. I've got a bunch of Squeezebox 3s in other parts of the house that interact with the slimserver to deliver audio, from the common library to other stereos.
The SB3s are hooked up to systems that really aren't all that high-end, so I can't really comment on the fidelity of those. But, my serener->waveterminal u24->main rig sounds as good to my ear as my DV50S playing the same CD run through the same upsampling/DAC system.
My only complaints are that, with 1600 CDs, over 15,000 songs (stored both in ALAC and AAC) and 400 GB of tunes, iTunes runs a little slow. iTunes is also *not* my favorite user interface--I know Apple is supposed to do good UIs, but this isn't one of the better ones. No provision for looking at album art when you scroll through your albums... No play queue you can just "add" too as you scroll through your music... Sure, you can fake some of this stuff, but... I really need a better UI.
To your comment: "an Apple type computer is suppose to be excellent, but Ipod itself is not near the quality of CD from my understanding."
An iPod is just a very small hard drive installed in a very small case with some software to navigate to the songs you want. It's entirely up to the user whether the music on the iPod is stored in a format that is identical to the original CD or compressed.
The limitation of the iPod as a source is that it's designed primarily for convenience and portability, meaning there is no digital output and the number of uncompressed songs you can store is limited by the available capacity of 1 inch hard drives.
If you go to a slightly larger device size, to something like an Archos Jukebox, you get a 2.5 inch hard drive with theoretically higher capacity and USB connection.
As with all other things audio you just pick your system based on format, form factor, price, quality and convenience, there's no right or wrong choice.
Hi Jeremy, Assuming we can burn the info off the cd in a bit perfect manner (many programs can),then what you have is two mediums with the same data. One is a 50 cent piece of plastic that is prone to scratches, in a poor clamped transport that looses data and corrects for it, with some vibration in the horizontal plane. The other is a bearing, platter and read mechanism that is built to strict tolerances, extracts data in a perfect manner, and does not scratch like plastic. They have a lot less vibration because the industry has spent billions in R & D. We need look no further than phono cartriges. A better phono cartridge extracts the data from the same record better, the data (the record) is the same. So in the playback of that data, the dac is presented with all the data, in a more perfect manner. You are probably correct about hi rez as we know it (SACD & DVD_A) won't last . Computer audio has a lot less boundries. 24/96 and 24/192 is fine if you have the hard drive space. Has anyone heard Wilson Audio's master recordings at CES. They are breathtaking!!! Why can't we pay more and get what we really want?
Dweller... you only have to do most of it once... The post on how I play the stuff is much different:
Turn on stereo. Pick up airpanel. Use library to conveniently select one of 15,000 songs. Double tap. Song plays.
While I wasn't actually playing music in the sixties, it can't have been easy finding LPs with only a black light to guide you and no short term memory... ;)
configured as RAID 5, so its pretty safe. If I blow up two drives at once, guess I'm reripping everything, but that prospect seems pretty minimal
I think it's just a question of time before computer storage makes CD/transport systems obsolete, but I'm not sure the technology is quite there yet. I use very expensive RAID5 systems in my work and have had 4 of them fail (3 because 2 drives failed at the same time, and 1 because the RAID5 hardware failed). Streaming music is much less data intensive than my work, but consumer RAID5 systems are probably much less robust too, so I would not be surprised if some people will be dealing with RAID5 failures and re-ripping all their CDs. RAID6 might help, but when I switch to a computer system I might use a single large HD, with a second disk as a backup, just to keep it simple.
I like the idea of using a computer based system, but I also like the simplicity of the CD/transport, and if CD is very close to the quality of a computer system I'd be happy to stay with the CD/transport until computer based systems are perfected and made relatively simple, hopefully that will be soon. For people who like playing with hardware and software I think computers are the way to go now - for me that still feels too much like being at work.
Another point - Steve Nugent is developing computer audio systems that avoid the conversion from I2S to SPDIF, when that's ready it might be another good reason to go with computer based systems.
I've had really bad experiences with consumer drives, but the Buffalo seems to be holding up well. I've actually got another 1TB PowerVault 645N with RAID 5 in my garage as well... That one gives me more faith, but my god it's loud!
That said, I figure the CDs are sort of the backup-backup. Some people sell 'em... I like having them around, even if they are packed in Xerox boxes in an upstairs closet...
Hi All, I agree that eventually this will be the way to go. There is a VERY exoensive DVD system called Kaleidascape (sp?) that does this for movies. It will also hold HD material. AS you can imagine, it takes very large drives to hold that much material. It also retails for $30,000, at least. I can foresee the not very far future when all the dat will be sent to a high qulity set of DACs, say a Theta Casablnca with room correction. But it will take sveral years to make it availabl and affordable. Also, the storage softaware and algorithms have to be standardized. Meanwhile, I am REALLY enjoying my Esoteric X01 and my Meitner gear (one of which will eventually get sold).
Edesilva: Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissin' you or your masterful grasp of the technology involved.
However, your post reminds me of a tech company I worked for. This company used PCs instead of mainframes (my thing). To obtain test data, I had to perform a 35 step procedure to get data from one environment to another (so I could use it). I didn't stay there long.
As for the short-term memory thing -You're absolutely right! The upside is I've had 35 years of practice coping with (artificially induced) senility! Old age? Bring it ON baby!
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has really mentioned the issue of jitter. Reading the data without errors is not the problem (in a PC), but the data stream going out is still controlled by the internal clock (on the sound card), which the clock in the DAC syncs up with. Here's an excerpt from a review of the Lynx 2 audio card:
"Some time ago it was assumed that high-quality sound could not be obtained at all on a computer system because of magnetic pickups from a video card and a processor into the sound card's circuit of the printed-circuit board, terrible power supply from a pulse power supply unit, jitter in converters, inadmissible usage of transfer electrolytic capacitors, low-quality connectors, cheap components of the analog section. " [http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/lynxtwo/index.html]
The best approach seems to be to have the master clock in the DAC circuitry and have it control the transport's sending clock, or have them be one and the same. The latter may be done in integrated CDPs, the former can be found in products from Wadia and dCS as well as high-end audio cards (Lynx L22, LynxTWO, Emu1280M).
Like many of you I'm in the process of capturing all my CDs (to ALAC - Apple lossless), but I'm not sure a $100 or even $200 sound card will do high quality headphones or speakers justice.
BTW, some of you were looking at controlling the music remotely, and the touchpad option is certainly a good one. Something else to consider (especially if you aren't overly concerned with jitter coming off a hard drive based source) is the Sonos music system. I own several of their zone players and controllers, and it's great for listening over my built-in speakers. It's biggest plus is ease of use (very reliable, intuitive, and a killer interface especially with the little wireless remote). The built-in DAC is ok but not the greatest, but they are coming out with a zone player with digital out, which would let you use an external DAC and amp (not sure about jitter though). Highly recommended!
Frank, a lot of us swear by USB audio devices instead of sound cards. I don't have experience with a lot of the "pro" soundcards from the likes of RME and such, but you can minimize some of the jitter effects from reclocking inside a noisy computer by taking the audio out of the USB port and going directly into a DAC with a USB input or to a device like the M-Audio Transit, Waveterminal U24, or Empirical Audio Off Ramp. The reclocking is done in the external device. It may not be immune to reclocking jitter, but a lot of people's experience suggests USB devices are a better solution...
Having dCS gear, I am interested by the concept of a card with a word clock that can be sync'd with my upsampler/DAC, but haven't gone that route yet. Wish there was a USB device that did that...
I've been in the computer industry forever and yes raids do fail but typically it's becuase of bad batches of drives or heat problems. The raid controller and driver support are critical plus the alerting system of a drive failure is even more important and the most neglected item. Make sure to setup your email alert and test that the alert actually works. The MWARE controllers are the only ones for PC's that are even close to a good HP/COMPAQ raid controller, plus they have the ability to expand the array. If you are really concerned get the WD drives designed for Raid (Serial ATA) or Seagate (quieter). I was suprised in my home case with 4 drives and huge 120mm fans that while defragging the HD the drive temp soared to 60 C (upper limit of too hot) and I've had to crank up the fans to max to keep the drive at the 50-55 degrees... The Maxtor drives in my 2 systems run about 7-9 degrees hotter than the Seagates. HEAT KILLS.
I'm waiting for 500gig serial ata drives to drop in price so that I can do a 4-5 drive raid 5 with the Mware controller.
but I condered just using the two 400gig drives along with a cheap and portable backup solution.. periodically backup my local drives to an inexpensive external (under $700 for 1 Gig) using SynToy (free and awesome!) from Microsoft to do the backup duties fast. (only send what's changed over. Plus I would get a firewire 800 interface as even USB2.0 is slow if you need to defrag.
I am going to be doing a mod'd Squeezebox from Boulder Cables and upgraded powersupply and feed my Theta GenVIII DAC and compare as ease of access to my 800 cd's via my Table PC controling Slimserver via a web browser. Plus picking albums by album art ROCKS!! not to mention just sitting back and surfing while listening to great music.
I keep my server in another room so I don't have to deal with noise and use my wireless network to the music to my system.
Hey guys, I just bought an external hard drive to store all my music. When i drag my music onto it, now what? What can i erase on my itunes? How do i access the music on my hard drive to get to itunes?
>>>CAVEAT... After typing all this, I suddenly realized this assumes you have a PC, not a Mac. Similar principles should apply in the Mac environment, but this assumes a PC...
Let's see, you *copied* the songs from your main drive to the external drive, right? What format are they in?
Here's the general overview. iT has a library file that is basically an XML database that has info in it that has been read from the file tags (if available) and notes re: which playlist the song appears in, the playcount, etc. If you are OK with losing all that, you can just nuke the iT database file and then "add folders to library" specifying your external drive as the folder to add.
Here's why this might be a bad idea... You *will* lose all your playcounts and playlists. If you use a file format without tags--such as WAV--you will also lose all the album/artist/genre info, since that is *only* stored in the database for WAV files.
Here's another potential slip... iT has a feature called "keep my music organized" which will copy all the songs to where iT thinks they ought to be when you add them. So, even if you move them, if that flag is checked in iT, you will end up having all the files moved *back* to the iT default directory, which is probably *not* your external drive.
So what can you do? You can actually use the iT "keep organized" function to move the stuff for you. If you have copied the files, nuke 'em. Then reset the iTunes library to the external drive and check the "keep organized" button. That should result in all your files moving to the new external drive, organized into Artist/Album directories.
In the vein of potential slip ups... if you succeed in doing what you want, iT will have a new library where all the pointers are to a drive (specified by a letter). When your external drive is mounted, you need to make sure it appears as the same letter each time. Probably not that big a deal, but if you have a digital camera and turn that on before the external drive, you may find the digital camera memory as F: and the external drive as G:. If you turn them on in the reverse order, the external drive will be F: and teh camera G:. While you won't care, iT won't be able to find the files in one of those cases.
Believe it, or not. It's my experience as well. But I wonder if he meant that he was using a computer CD player? What I believe he may have meant, and correct me if I'm wrong Pardales, was comparing the music from CEC transport + Dodson combo, to the same music stored on a Hard Drive in WAV or lossless format going via USB, clocked and converted by the Waveterminal, and then on to the same Dodson DAC to be reclocked. It has been my experience with my own DAC and Transport (both Muse) that I cannot tell the difference from a lossless hard-drive version vs my transport. Never bothered trying the transport in the computer.
Ok, I reset the music folder to g drive{ my 300 gb hard drive }. Now, do i need to export my library to this folder, or will it do it automatically? Will this put all the info on the hd and free up memory on my pc? Thanks.
Streetdaddy, After change the music folder to G drive, try "consolidate library" from the Advanced menu in iTunes. To free up space from the old location, delete them. Hope this help.
Option for the lib should (in PC version) be under Edit->Preferences->Advanced. If you check the button underneath that, it should, I believe, copy all the files into the iTunes directory when you apply the changes. It will take a while.
Gigi, i put all my music on the g drive {my hd }, then i went back and erased my c drive, where all the music was stored. I set my g drive as my music folder, and consolidated my library. Now when i start up itunes it is blank. The songs are on my g drive,tho. How do i get them to automatically pop up when i start itunes?
Streetdaddy, you should be OK now that you've added your G drive files to the library. Gigi's advice concerning the Consolidate Library command was a little off target. It's possible to have music files that are scattered all over different drives in your music library. The library is a data base that keeps track of where the files are. The Consolidate Library command makes sure a copy of all the tunes in your library is contained in your designated iTunes music folder. When you tried the Consolidate Library command, you hadn't put anything in your library yet, so nothing happened.
The iTunes music folder location determines the default location for all _future_ music files you rip and add to your library. If you change the location setting, it will not affect the location of any files already in your library. Since you've put your G drive files in your library, and (I'm assuming) you've set your iTunes music folder location to that very same G drive music folder, your music collection will continue to be in one place as you add to it.
Jayboard, Thanks again for getting me up and running. I love the new setup. I still am amazed at having that many songs at my fingertips! Now, if i use up all of my new memory on my 300gb hd, and i add a second hd, will this change anything? Will it still all be on the itunes library?
Once you fill up your first hard drive and want to start on a second, all you would have to do is to set the location of the iTunes music folder to the second drive. Then, any new CDs you rip will be saved to the second drive. Nothing will change with the music on the first drive that's already in the iTunes library. You still would only have one iTunes library file (the data base), but the library file actually would be pointing to music on the two different hard drives.
I just want all you guys to know that you're scaring the heck out of me. I don't understand ninety percent of what you're talking about; I can barely load my ipod.
You must have a verified phone number and physical address in order to post in the Audiogon Forums. Please return to Audiogon.com and complete this step. If you have any questions please contact Support.
