CD Player? PC Music? Naaa Flash Memory Music.


Do you have a CD Player? Throw it away!
I wouldn’t rest until I’ll share this with the rest of you, audiophiles in the world!
First of all forgive my English. My native language it’s Portuguese.
Second, If your source of music is the analog LP (you know, turntables and needles, etc.) this article it´s not for you.
Do you enjoy hear music? You consider yourself an Audiophile?
Are you an Audio CD based system? Ok. Nothing wrong whit it.
Do you have a decent Amplifier and Speakers? Ok.
Do you have already a separate DAC (Digital to Analogic Converter)? Great.
If not, I’m sorry but you must buy one. No big thing, two or three hundred dollars and you will buy a decent one (Cambridge DacMagic ?).
If you comply with the requirements above then…
Throw away your CD Player!
Or you CD Transport!
PC Music, USB cables, firewire, etc? forget it
I’ll guarantee you that, whatever is your CD based system is, this will sound better! (Much better)
And I’ll promise you that you wouldn’t miss him anymore (the CD player or CD transport, not any one you love, although after this I cannot guarantee that you will not find some troubles with your other half, if you have one)
Hoops, I forgot one thing. You must have at least one or two hundred dollars more. But it will be the most well employed money you ever spend (in music, of course).
So, what you need to replace is your devil machine (the CD player or transport) with 3 things:
• A Media Player (yes, it works with the PS3) that reads wav files. The ones I know are the O!Play from Asus and the WD TV Live from Western Digital;
• A flash drive. Could be a USB flash drive or a SD card or similar (depends on the media player interface). With a 32 Gb pen (or card) you can store aprox. 50 albums.
• A digital interconnect cable (SPDIF). Here, it depends on the media player. Most of all work with the optical Toslink. But I’ll guess that with the coaxial it also works fine (even better?)
Note: It must be a flash card, not a HDD.
So, you are ready for your most rewarding audiophile change you ever made.
Connect this all (if you are an audiophile guy I don’t need to explain how, right? ) and…ENJOY.
Beautiful, quasi-analogic music, coherent, smooth, detailed, you name it, the best sound you ever had hear with your own system (digital). Of course, if you have a friend that have better amplifier, speakers (and DAC) and also did the something you did, probably his system will sound better than your own.
But in the same system, this solution will play better than any other solution Transport+DAC ,CD Player or PC Music. Promise.
Now you ask: Hey! Are you crazy? Where do I put my dears CD’s in, to play?
Nowhere!
Hey. Wait, don’t go away. I mean, you don’t need, no more, to introduce the CD’s in any machine at all. Except one time, in your PC, in is CD drive.
Here I must introduce you to that beautiful program named EAC – Exact Audio Copy by http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
Maybe there are others CD grabbers out there that work fine. But this one I know and I love him. It also let you access a free data base with track names and covers.
Install it and rip your entire CD collection in an UNCOMPRESSED way. This will create a wav file (*.wav) for each track. Put them in a folder with the album name.
Copy your collection for the Flash Drive( or several, if you have a lot of CD’s) , insert it in the media player and you’re on!
And another thing: You never always need to get up to change CD’s (or even change the volume, because most of the media players have their one volume, although I don’t recommend it for sonic reasons)
You don’t need to thanks me. Just spread the word. Maybe this way we can change the format they sell us the music.
CD (16 bit 44.1KHz) it’s not bad. But it could be sold in flash drives, not in cd disks.
HR Music (24 bit) it’s better than CD. Yes but, it could be sold in flash drives, not in sacd disks.
Why flash drives, not CD’s?
Because the big problem with the Digital Music is one thing called jitter. And with this solution you throw away the major source of problems in this matter. Optical drives and their Digital MASTER internal clock’s. (read this site http://www.lessloss.com )
With Flash Drives and Media Players you don´t have those problems. And you can let your DAC do what it was meant to do. Convert Music not garbage.
Enjoy and ear the most music you can.
Fernando Pereira
fmnp
Hi Fmnp, I just bought a dac today and am somewhat interested in this. I have a few questions though but I'm not real computer illiterate so please forgive me for that. Is the SD card the same one that is used for cameras? What is a 32 gb pen? Can you put the contents on the WD media player from your flash drive, then reuse the same flash drive to keep filling up the media player with just one card or do you just play your songs from each card? Sorry I'm so ignorant about computers, I do have one with my songs on it but I am looking for an easier solution to store my music on, as well as storing my videos. Sandra
Hi Smw30yahoocom (what a nickname!)

I'm glad to explain you whatever you need to know because I'm so happy with the sound that I achieved.
If your media player support CF (compact flash) SD card or other memory card, it will be fine.
The 32 Gb Pen it's a USB Pen! The media players have normally 1 or 2 USB inputs.
One of the secrets is to hear your music files trough one memory card or USB Pen.
The music files MUST BE in the WAV format and be ripped from the CD's trough a rip program (I suggest EAC),
If you don't want to have to many Pen or Memory cards, and if you have 2 USB input's, you could have a HDD with your complete collection and a PEN in the other USB input.
But ALWAYS listen the music trough the Memory card or USB Pen.
Good Listening.
Regards
Sorry for the double post, I don't know what happened. Also, wouldn't a netbook be able to do the same thing as the WD by using a flash drive? Thanks, Sandra
Hi Sandra,

Not even close.
There is so many noise in a PC (netbook, whatever)that the difference is tremendous.
welcome
Hi Fmnp, so a USB flash drive would work also? I have used EAC for a long time, most of my music is either wav or flac. I never heard of a usb pen but I looked it up and there it was. So I will probably buy the Western Digital TV live hub as it stores music too, and use a flash drive to try it. Does the media player have their own music player or can I use Foobar or J. River? Thanks, Sandra
(When I first joined here I didn't know what I was doing and put in my email for my name. Now I know better but I don't think I can change it.)