Youth may prefer lower quality music.

[Scott_Arm]

Scott, it's not that crazy with the belt drive since it does indeed run smoother, but yeah it's not like something digital would care about that. The official PR-talk is that it runs so smoothly and vibration-free that it reduces the read failures significantly. The reality is, it's a all hand-built, tank-proof and very fine device which will survive us all - but still the price is simply insane.

Are CD read errors really that significant? Don't the players do error correction?

The only benefit I can think of is if the player was quieter for low volume listening, but my player is pretty much silent, and at $450 CAD is even more expensive than anyone should spend on a CD player.

Anyway, I'm a firm believer that most people, myself included, do not have speakers that can accurately reproduce the full fidelity of an LP, let alone an mp3 or CD.

 

[MfA]

On the other side, there are reasonable limits to the price tag at some point.

No there isn't ... if you are in the right mindset more expensive gear will sound better. There is no upper end to that effect, for obvious reasons.

 

[pcchen]

Are CD read errors really that significant? Don't the players do error correction?

To my understanding, if a CD is in good condition (no crazy scratches, etc.) it can be easily read from a normal CD-ROM/DVD-ROM without error. That is, you can read the same CD with different devices and they all give the same result.

The fact is, CD-Audio still has error correction codes. They are not as good as data cd, of course, but they are not that useless either.

 

[Scott_Arm]

To my understanding, if a CD is in good condition (no crazy scratches, etc.) it can be easily read from a normal CD-ROM/DVD-ROM without error. That is, you can read the same CD with different devices and they all give the same result.

The fact is, CD-Audio still has error correction codes. They are not as good as data cd, of course, but they are not that useless either.

Yeah, I've never seen actual stats, but I've always been under the assumption that errors reading an audio CD would be insignificant because of error correction, as long as you had clean, unscratched discs. I think buying a belt driven CD player would be more useful in calming someone's OCD than actually playing back more accurate music.

 

[green.pixel]

If one wants error-free reproduction, just get a Mac/PC to act as a music server and one of these:
http://www.bd-design.nl/index1.html - CrazyT DAC
http://www.wavelengthaudio.com/usbdac.html

With touch-sensitive remote control, terrabytes of music at your fingertips.


With HDD/flash-based playback, you can always get exactly the same sequence of 0 & 1 to the DAC, which is not possible even with the most expansive CD players out there (excluding ridiculously priced belt driven ones) due to the error corection during playback.

 

[Scott_Arm]

If one wants error-free reproduction, just get a Mac/PC to act as a music server and one of these:
http://www.bd-design.nl/index1.html - CrazyT DAC
http://www.wavelengthaudio.com/usbdac.html

With touch-sensitive remote control, terrabytes of music at your fingertips.


With HDD/flash-based playback, you can always get exactly the same sequence of 0 & 1 to the DAC, which is not possible even with the most expansive CD players out there (excluding ridiculously priced belt driven ones) due to the error corection during playback.

I don't get it. If you have a CD, you need to read the CD at some point to get it onto your pc to play through the USB DAC.

So basically this is a high end external soundcard? Looks like they're stereo sound. How do they handle mixing surround sound content?

 

[MfA]

You have to be pretty brutal with your CDs for error concealment to be called into action on a regular basis (error correction is lossless).

 

[green.pixel]

I don't get it. If you have a CD, you need to read the CD at some point to get it onto your pc to play through the USB DAC.

You rip your CD/vynil collection to WAV/FLAC/ALAC or whatever lossless format you want and store it on HDDs. Of course, you woudn't listen CD in PC CD-ROM like you would do in standalone CD players. That's the whole point of avoiding CD transport and using solid state mediums like HDD, SSD, memory cards etc. because they are superior to CD transports. And we are not even talking about comfort, ability to control thousands of songs with ease on PC/MAC + DAC setup.

So basically this is a high end external soundcard? Looks like they're stereo sound. How do they handle mixing surround sound content?

No, it's not a sound card. It's only function is digital-analog conversion.

 

[Scott_Arm]

You rip your CD/vynil collection to WAV/FLAC/ALAC or whatever lossless format you want and store it on HDDs. Of course, you woudn't listen CD in PC CD-ROM like you would do in standalone CD players. That's the whole point of avoiding CD transport and using solid state mediums like HDD, SSD, memory cards etc. because they are superior to CD transports. And we are not even talking about comfort, ability to control thousands of songs with ease on PC/MAC + DAC setup.

I still don't get it. I have a CD. I read that CD and write the contents to HDD, SSD or whatever. You're still reading a CD which is just as prone to error as playing it on a CD player, no? Wouldn't it have the same error correction going on?

I mean, I understand the convenience of a media server and the attempt to retain the quality of the source, but I don't see how this solution eliminates read errors. Not that I think read errors are an issue. Or maybe your post had nothing to do with the read errors and I just assumed?

 

[V3]

I still don't get it. I have a CD. I read that CD and write the contents to HDD, SSD or whatever. You're still reading a CD which is just as prone to error as playing it on a CD player, no? Wouldn't it have the same error correction going on?

I mean, I understand the convenience of a media server and the attempt to retain the quality of the source, but I don't see how this solution eliminates read errors. Not that I think read errors are an issue. Or maybe your post had nothing to do with the read errors and I just assumed?

I think you're missing his point. He was trying to say that the critical part in digital audio reproduction is in DAC stage. The one that he pointed out just happend to be a USB DAC used for PC. But they do come in other variant. Like the McIntosh MDA1000 for example are designed for its own CD transport. It also upscale the signal to 768 kHz at 24 bit. For what it's beyond me.

 

[KimB]

Rip to FLAC/ALAC.

iTunes should also switch to lossless formats.

No such thing. The very process of recording the sounds is lossy, no matter how good your equipment. So I don't see the point in going for lossless data compression, not when we can do much better.

 

[RudeCurve]

I think you're missing his point. He was trying to say that the critical part in digital audio reproduction is in DAC stage. The one that he pointed out just happend to be a USB DAC used for PC. But they do come in other variant. Like the McIntosh MDA1000 for example are designed for its own CD transport. It also upscale the signal to 768 kHz at 24 bit. For what it's beyond me.

I've read that upsampling CD audio makes it sound better with the right equipment. Toshiba had CD upsampling using SHARC DSPs in it's highend HD DVD players.

The best digital audio is of course bit for bit identical copies of the 24bit audio masters played back using Dolby TrueHD or DTS MA.

 

[_xxx_]

I have an upsampling CD-player by yamaha and in some cases it really can produce (an illusion of) better sound quality with upsampling. In most cases the difference is not noticable though.

 

[_xxx_]

No such thing. The very process of recording the sounds is lossy, no matter how good your equipment. So I don't see the point in going for lossless data compression, not when we can do much better.

Lossless refers to the difference between the original master recording and the used consumer format, nothing to do with the original instrument sound. "Lossless in comparison to the CD" if you so wish.

 

[KimB]

Lossless refers to the difference between the original master recording and the used consumer format, nothing to do with the original instrument sound. "Lossless in comparison to the CD" if you so wish.

Naturally, but it's somewhat pointless when the original lossiness of the recording often is very orthogonal to the sounds our ears hear. In this sense, MP3 has it right, at least in terms of the philosophy of how it does the compression. Perhaps there are better ways to do said compression, but relying upon selective filtering of sound information that we tend not to hear anyway is the right way to go.

Unless you just don't want to worry about compression much at all. Because the lossless formats have a pretty difficult time compressing audio very much (looks like FLAC only gets like 50% or so).

 

[RudeCurve]

50% is significant imo which both FLAC and WMA lossless could achieve. You get to store roughly twice as many songs into the same storage space.

 

[KimB]

50% is significant imo which both FLAC and WMA lossless could achieve. You get to store roughly twice as many songs into the same storage space.

Since you can get 10x or more compression out of a lossy technique, I beg to differ. Compared to that level of compression, lossless compression might as well not be used at all.

 

[pcchen]

Since you can get 10x or more compression out of a lossy technique, I beg to differ. Compared to that level of compression, lossless compression might as well not be used at all.

I think you have a point if you use lossy compression with better sampling rate/bit depth. For example, compared to lossless 44.1kHz @ 16 bits CD Audio, you may be able to achieve, say, 96kHz @ 24 bits with half the bitrate. That'd be much more efficient than a lossless compression, and will have better quality.

Unfortunately, almost all lossy compressed audio we can buy are still in the plain old 44.1kHz @ 16 bits format. In this sense it is inferior to uncompressed CD Audio or lossless compression.

This is just like, say, if we use lossless compression for video, it'd take about 14Mbps bitrate for a 320x240 30fps video. However, if we use a clever lossy compression such as H.264 or VC-1, 14Mbps is more than enough for a 1280x720 30 fps video, which is definitely much better than any lossless 320x240 can do. However, if all you have is lossy compressed 320x240 video (i.e. VCD), then it will be inferior to the lossless compressed one.

 

[pcchen]

I've read that upsampling CD audio makes it sound better with the right equipment. Toshiba had CD upsampling using SHARC DSPs in it's highend HD DVD players.

In theory, 44.1kHz or 48kHz is more than enough for human ear. However, since DAC are not perfect, it's quite possible that upsampling may be able to make it sounds better. That's because, in a sense, it's easy for a DAC to produce a better analog signal with higher sampling rate than with lower sampling rate, and as long as you use a very good algorithm for upsampling, which is not difficult given current technology in high speed DSP, you can get better result from upsampling.

 

[Gubbi]

In theory, 44.1kHz or 48kHz is more than enough for human ear. However, since DAC are not perfect, it's quite possible that upsampling may be able to make it sounds better. That's because, in a sense, it's easy for a DAC to produce a better analog signal with higher sampling rate than with lower sampling rate, and as long as you use a very good algorithm for upsampling, which is not difficult given current technology in high speed DSP, you can get better result from upsampling.

The reconstruction filter can introduce phase shifts in the audible frequency range. Upsampling allows you to shift the reconstruction filter frequency upwards.

Cheers