kde Posted February 26, 2006 Share Posted February 26, 2006 Is it worth buying longer cables, etc to connect my 300 disc cd changer that I hardly listen to, or is it time to just buy an ipod and connect it to my receiver? I like to idea of getting the klipsch ipod station for another room... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay481985 Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 no for the iPod.... It just does not sound as good as real cds Buy the Klipsch iFi or iGroove at the klipsch store on ebay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldbuckster Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 no for the iPod.... It just does not sound as good as real cds Buy the Klipsch iFi or iGroove at the klipsch store on ebay NO Ipud's; they do have a place, but not replacing your cd player. They do not sound as good or better than a cd. When they first appeared they were sold as,"good as cd", now I see that they are,"cd LIKE sound". If you are just starting a music collection, and have no music, or equipment, that might be your answer. If you travel and want to take your music with you, they're great. What the hay, hook up your cd player, and buy the Ipod too. You never have enough music!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobbyT Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 Apple has a lossless encoding that does sound as good as CDs. But it decreases the amount of CDs you can fit onto the ipod. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RTTR Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 Apple has a lossless encoding that does sound as good as CDs. But it decreases the amount of CDs you can fit onto the ipod. I've done some extensive testing with ripping to Apple Lossless through iTunes and found that it actaully degrades some of the high frequency range, if you use a program like EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to convert to WAV then import the WAV files into iTunes then convert to Apple Lossless the problem goes away, but you have another problem of consuming a lot of time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rplace Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 Is it worth buying longer cables, etc to connect my 300 disc cd changer that I hardly listen to, or is it time to just buy an ipod and connect it to my receiver? I like to idea of getting the klipsch ipod station for another room... I would vote for none of the above. Ditch the CD changer that is so 1990s [] Forget the ipod that is so high tech geek [8-|] but no high brow hi-fi.[6] What you need to do is rip all of your CDs to various formats. MP3 for portability and small file size. FLAC for lossless compression for critical listening and WAV just so you have them in the total original format for future use. Once you have those 3 formats covered you are set IMO. The real pain is the actual ripping of the CD if you have hundreds like I do. Fortunately there is a program called MAREO that when used in conjunction with EAC you can put your CD in once and rip to a dozen or so formats. I am in the process of doing that right now. With Gigabytes and Gigabytes of numerous formats of music on your HDD, all you need to do is set up a music server. Something like an Audiotron or Squeezbox will do nicely. You also might look into a Windows media PC. Just be sure and back up your music once you have it digitized. I did not and had a HDD failure. So now I am ripping all my CDs AGAIN![] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobbyT Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 There are also several digital music servers on the market, including one from McIntosh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CAS Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 I agree with rplace. It's a pain ripping all of the CD's but it's worth it in the end. This all depends on how many CD's you have. If it'll take a year to back all of them up (a couple friends of mine have 1000+ CD's) then you may want to get to that later and enjoy them in their current mode. You can also pay someone to do this but that gets expensive. P.S. How do people have time to listen to 1000+ albums of music? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rplace Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 The pain indeed is in ripping them. What I wanted to point out is if you are already going through he process of taking every CD out of the case/ripping/replacing/storing then you might as well convert them to several file types. This might keep you from repeating the process down the road when you decide you don't want MP3 for a certain application or FLAC won't play on a particular device. Hard drive space is cheap these days...your time (CD jockeying) is precious. I think the most versitle, but largest, file format is still WAV as they are the exact track from the CD and there will always be a WAV to <insert future format here> converter. As an added bonus I find I listen to a lot more obscure tracks then I typically did on CD. With about 5000 tracks on my hard drive and random playing I can constantly rediscovering tracks I had long since forgotten about. I am at a loss as to how someone could obtain 1000+ CDs and actually listen to them. I thought I had a lot at 300-400 or so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrWho Posted February 27, 2006 Share Posted February 27, 2006 HTPC Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coreyc Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 "Time to convert to digital music?" Yes "time to just buy an ipod and connect it to my receiver?" Maybe, but I wouldn't "no for the iPod.... It just does not sound as good as real cds" The format/bit rate is way more important than the player I'm pretty much in rplace's camp, or on the edge at least. Hard disk space is cheap, but not free. EAC is a good place to start, as you get a good digital image of your CD. With it, I use the LAME mp3 encoder, with the exterme preset, which gives me VBR mp3 files that average about 210 kbps. Variable Bit Rate uses a higher bit rate where it matters most, and a lower bit rate when possible. Few people can tell the difference between 192 kbps CBR (Constant Bit Rate) and WAV files, so I feel OK at 210 VBR. Your mileage may vary. Keep in mind that when most people go off on mp3 files, they're refering to 128 kbps (or less!) files that were ripped off a scratched CD. The above scheme gives about an 8:1 compression ratio, which means I can fit about 8 CD's worth of music on 1 mp3 disk. Pretty much all DVD players play mp3's, so drop one into your home system, set it on random play, kick back,...., you get the picture. If you don't want to burn mp3 CDs, you can hook up a Digital Audio Receiver to your receiver/preamp. The LinkSys Wireless-B Media Adapter I use is only $50 or so and sends all my mp3's & jpg's to my HT. You can also, if you haven't yet, swap out the head unit in your car and/or boat to one that plays mp3 CD's; and you can copy them to your portable mp3 player, be it iPod or whatever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rplace Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 Coreyc, so you like the VBR MP3s? What sort of comparison are you doing to compare them with CDs? I am also using the LAME encoder with EAC but choosing to go the 320 constant bit rate because I am not too worried about the size (again hard drive space is cheap). On quality equipment I notice a substantial difference between 192 and 320. I have not had much chance to do detailed analysis on the FLAC vs. actual CD, but based on my limited testing can tell no difference at all. My current music server (Audiotron) does not support FLAC. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay481985 Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 VBR is better quality as they give more emphasis to music as opposed to quiet parts in the soundtrack Also with the codec being the most import part..... An iPod internal amp is no where as good as say a cd player's output and amp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rplace Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 VBR is better quality as they give more emphasis to music as opposed to quiet parts in the soundtrack Please tell me what I am missing? I was under the impression that the VBR makes a "guess" for lack of a better word at what you might not notice and in those places take up less space. Everything I have read says the VBR if done properly will take up less space, but might be noticeable. CBR ensures that you are getting the rate you want. In my case I am using a CBR of 320. How could something that varies between 192 and 320 be "better" then something that is a constant 320? Better I know is a subjective word...if you can't hear the difference it does not matter. I understand the argument that it will be using a lower bit rate when it does not matter i.e. quieter parts. But that is making a huge leap of faith that the algorithm is implemented correctly. If you are concerned about file size (for portability or $$ concerns) I agree VBR might be a great trade off. But if you have no concern for the file size what would or could be the advantage of VBR over CBR? Either I am misinformed or not understanding your post [:^)][*-)] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay481985 Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 actually I find VBR usually taking more space then a constant rate Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrWho Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 actually I find VBR usually taking more space then a constant rate well that's impossible, unless you're picking a constant rate much lower than the maximum rate for the VBR. I dislike the sound of VBR and can usually pick it out over constant bitrates...then again, I dislike the sound of mp3's too [] To be honest, I see absolutely no reason to consider compressed music...You can get harddrive space at under $1 per GB, and even on my college student budget I have no problem ripping all my CDs to raw wav files. And then there are dozens of ways one can connect a computer to their HT. And if you absolutely must have portable muzak, you can still fit quite a few songs into 40GB. A normal CD is about 700MB and if you figure about 500MB worth of music on it, you can fit two entire albums for every 1GB. (that's an extra 50 cents to the cost of every album you own). I dunno about you guys, but 80 albums is a crap load of music and I can't imagine taking a trip so long that I would get tired of hearing the same 80 albums over and over again, lol. I've done some extensive testing with ripping to Apple Lossless through iTunes and found that it actaully degrades some of the high frequency range, if you use a program like EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to convert to WAV then import the WAV files into iTunes then convert to Apple Lossless the problem goes away, but you have another problem of consuming a lot of time. You sure you were originally doing a lossless conversion and/or doing it correctly? It is impossible for a lossless compression format to lose or change data (it's how it got the term "lossless"). We have used apple's lossless format in the studio to save on disc space for the archiving of older stuff - and we wouldn't be doing this if it changed anything. It sounds to me like you've got a hardware issue that EAC is compensating for. I have a friend with similar symptoms caused by a player that didn't read audio discs correctly (probably some stupid piracy scheme) - it was fixed by moving to an older cdrom. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rplace Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 DWho, I agree totally with you on not using compressed music unless you have to. MP3s on a potable player or car ripped at 320 sound fine to me. There is so much else going on...like driving[]...that it is not an issue IMHO. When I get my lazy a$$ around to building a HTPC, then my problems will go away. For the time being I have a large file server on one floor of the house and my music room with 2nd room pre and amp (billiards table) is on that floor as well. This 2nd floor is not wired with CAT5 so I have to get my music from one floor to another via a wireless bridge. My current music files consist of FLAC, WAV and 320 CBR MP3. My audiotron (read no computer) won't play FLAC files and I find the wireless bridge will not keep up with WAV files streaming to it. That leaves me with the old school method of playing one CD at a time or having all my music at my disposal but only in mp3 format. Just like in the car or for casual listening, the room where my pool table is does not lend itself to critical listening. Hard to pick out the subtle difference over the drunks, dropped cue sticks, smashing balls and general fun time being had by all (after all music shoud be fun). There is a convenience factor that is the trade off. 4000+ songs randomly playing and access to any individual song in about 5 seconds is well worth the sound of MP3s. So did we conclude if a given CBR is "better" then a VBR thats max rate is equal to that of the CBR? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrWho Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 Just like in the car or for casual listening, the room where my pool table is does not lend itself to critical listening.... Well I consider that muzak and not really music - which lends itself to the feasability of other compromises. And everyone is going to have their own personal benchmark on how good the muzak needs to be. I'm not sure how valid of a claim this is (considering how the mp3 compression works), but I find that after listening to any faulty medium for a while that one obtains the ability to hear-through or simply stop noticing the flaws (just to poke a lil fun - just look at all the guys that just love their turntables!)[] Gotta love our ears. But with VBR, the flaws associated with the medium are constantly changing so I have a harder time ignoring them. Maybe I'm a bit more sensitive to the idea because I'm always trying to drill this concept into the amateur bands I mix for, but the power and life of music resides in the silence and space between the "perty" notes. Yet the fundamental trick of the VBR scheme is a reduction in information storing the quieter parts! (thus less resolution during the space)....I suppose in a noisy environment this is pretty much inaudible, but the idea still drives me nuts. You can pretty much take all the suckiness of modern music and boil it back down to the space issue - and here we have a medium intentionally making the space even worse. Heck, even the CBR mp3 compression scheme does this too. And now that I'm done ranting, allow me to mention that I listen to mp3's in the car too...though I still need to figure out how to make a fully compatible mp3 cd so that I can listen to every song on the CD. Right now I only get about half of the CD... [:@] (and just haven't had the time to bother trying to figure it out). I should mention another funny story too...on one of my first ever official studio recordings I emailed myself an mp3 which I then burned to a CD at home so I could reference the mix. After burning the CD I was comparing between the mp3 and the original wav file on every sound system I could get my hands on - and I noticed that the mp3 sounded better! I go back to the studio and had the same results and went to another studio and again had the same results. In the end I simply turned in the mp3 as our master for that song (after converting back to wav of course) and the song proceeded to make radio airplay...It was only just the one song on the album though - and I still haven't figured out why it sounded better when all the other songs didn't. (5 of the songs were laid down at the same time too...so it's not like anything was setup differently). I bring this up to point out that we can talk theory all we want, but we shouldn't let the theory turn our ears into tin. Because in the end it's about enjoying the music anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coreyc Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 If file size is no concern, 320 CBR wins over 220 VBR hands down. If you're just looking at keeping music on a server, I think 320 CBR is a great way to go, as it avoids the VBR "guessing". I make a lot of mp3 CDs, and 220 VBR gives me about 7 hours / CD as opposed to 5 hours of 320 CBR. It's not that I need more than 5 hours of music at a time, but that I can have a more random sample. If we're all playing our mp3s from DVDs next year, I'll probably wish I'd gone with 320 CBR. Maybe I'll switch now. I'm planning to upgrade my front 3 speakers pretty soon, maybe after that I'll make some test CDs and set up some blind tests. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ranjith Posted March 1, 2006 Share Posted March 1, 2006 How decent is the LinkSys Wireless-B Media Adapter? It retails for fairly cheap, its what I call a student-friendly price I know it doesnt play FLAC or ogg, or even internet radio. Is it worth the $69.99 or so? By the way, in the middle of audio format talk, anyone here use "ogg"? How do you like them in comparison with mp3 and others? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.