endorka Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 Thanks, will give that a go! Jennifer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
charic Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 If your going to listen through your computer you'll need a really decent soundcard for the quality your after. Kinda entry level IMO: [url="http://www.dv247.com/computer-hardware/digidesign-mbox-2-mini-usb-powered-audio-workstation-including-pro-tools-8-le--37080"]http://www.dv247.com/computer-hardware/dig...ols-8-le--37080[/url] digital village wont steer you wrong if you contact them though. Possibly the best customer service around. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
endorka Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 Foobar2000 does the business, thanks for the recommendation :-) Jennifer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
muttley Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 [quote name='Beedster' post='1341081' date='Aug 15 2011, 08:04 PM']Alternatively, are there any online sources where you can buy better quality music files than iTunes?[/quote] Yes. Amazon, Play, CDWow etc etc... BUT, you have to buy CDs, not downloaded stuff... Just rip them into your preferred format and you can use them [u]anywhere[/u]. How much is a downloaded track these days? Multiply that figure by the number of tracks on the CD and I think you'll find the CD is often better value, especially when you consider that you are getting full 16-bit/44kHz. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigRedX Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 I'd be looking at spending the same kind of money on your soundcard/DA convertor as you were going to spend on a CD player. Of course if you're using a Mac you can use the built-in digital output and connect direct to the digital in on a good quality HiFi amp. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sonic_Groove Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 [quote name='muttley' post='1342926' date='Aug 17 2011, 11:32 AM']Yes. Amazon, Play, CDWow etc etc... BUT, you have to buy CDs, not downloaded stuff... Just rip them into your preferred format and you can use them [u]anywhere[/u]. How much is a downloaded track these days? Multiply that figure by the number of tracks on the CD and I think you'll find the CD is often better value, especially when you consider that you are getting full 16-bit/44kHz.[/quote] + 1000 Until streaming formats become ubiquitous you are in Phillips 2000 (not even Beatmax territory) and could be investing in something that will be useless very quickly. Brendan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balcro Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 (edited) [quote name='51m0n' post='1342786' date='Aug 17 2011, 09:48 AM']As for the difference in sound between the 70's 80's and now, a huge amount of the issue is the way things are mixed and mastered now. Everything is a competition for loudness and punch, even in folk music! Its a breath of fresh air (sorry, no, its less common than rocking horse poo) when you get an artist whoi wants a mix that is all about the song and emotional content and not just being as loud as the next CD. Blame the marketing hype, the artist, the mix engineer, the mastering engineer, radio station, but ultimately blame the stupid consumer for buying stuff more when its louder. Oh hold on, its just a fact, the human ear perceives louder as better in the short term every time. Thats a sorry but completely true fact about psychoacoustics for you. And that is ultimately what drove the horrendous loudness wars that we are still coping with now. It is a damn shame though![/quote] FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) for a digital format. If you can't get WMP to accept Flac's, try the JetAudio media player. Further to what 51m0n said about sound engineers, give your ears a treat here:- www.sheffieldlab.com Limited range I know, but just check out the catalogue and many of the artists have three 30 second sound samples. Balcro. Edited August 17, 2011 by Balcro Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odub Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 [quote name='cytania' post='1342684' date='Aug 17 2011, 08:12 AM']I have no plans to go 'non-physical'. It strikes me that the reasons for going 'all MP3' are flawed. Ok so a house fire could take my CD collection. But wouldn't the iPod or Sonos also burn? Indeed one small electrical disaster could wipe out everything. I was on an IT course earlier this year, most of the guys there had gone to hard drive for movies and music. When I asked most of them admitted to losing all their stuff previously due to a hard drive failure. How many now had cast iron backup? Surprisingly few. My theory is that deep down people have grown to relish losing everything. It gives them a chance to redefine their musical tastes by the process of repurchasing. Gives them a killer collection when I still have a seven inch of the Goombay Dance Band somewhere. At this point the hippy skinflint in me rebels. "Hey dude's why you giving all your bread to The Man? Oh and it don't sound as good neither." Don't follow the crowd, you can get the CD off Amazon cheaper than the total album download cost.[/quote] No beause it's all ging to be "in the cloud" innit. You don't hold mp3s you just stream off spotify or wherever. And you don't pay a penny for it either (well ok spotify you pay £5 if you don't want adverts). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
51m0n Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 [quote name='Beedster' post='1341081' date='Aug 15 2011, 08:04 PM']Alternatively, are there any online sources where you can buy better quality music files than iTunes? Chris[/quote] Chris, get over to hdtracks.com check out their catalogue, and listen to snippets in all sorts of lossless formats and quality levels, it will really help you decide if its worth your while taking this path - IMO hihg quality FLAC (anything from 88.2 upwards @ 24bit) is a big step up from CD... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
51m0n Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 [quote name='Sonic_Groove' post='1342967' date='Aug 17 2011, 12:13 PM']+ 1000 Until streaming formats become ubiquitous you are in Phillips 2000 (not even Beatmax territory) and could be investing in something that will be useless very quickly. Brendan[/quote] I dont understand what you mean by this. FLAC is a Free (open source) Lossless Audio Codec It is not going away anytime soon, it is supported by a large number of software players, it is not going to disappear in the way of Betamax, since it is not any more dependant on specific hardware than your average PC. It is available on Mac, Linux (more correctly POSIX like systems generally), and Windows, on hardware systems and so on - for free.... Any file server can have a FLAC read from it with the right software (given its open source nature that will not change), its merely data after all, the interpretation of the data by a software decoder into a standard WAV (albeit of very high quality) is assured as a long life solution. A high quality DAC turns that into something your amp can use. What is to Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigRedX Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 I don't agree. Lossless audio codec of all kinds will soon be a thing of the past. The space savings that they give you are entirely dependent upon the dynamic range of music, the less dynamic range the less the compression possible. Also every extra bit of encoding and decoding that an audio file undergoes increase the chances of errors in the audio stream which decreases audio fidelity. These days hard disk storage is ridiculously inexpensive and solid state storage is getting cheaper all the time. When most people's audio storage is measure in Terabytes, what's the point in increasing the possibility of errors to save a few megabytes? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve-soar Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 Watch all parts, very interesting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
51m0n Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 (edited) [quote name='BigRedX' post='1343488' date='Aug 17 2011, 06:29 PM']I don't agree. Lossless audio codec of all kinds will soon be a thing of the past.[b] The space savings that they give you are entirely dependent upon the dynamic range of music, the less dynamic range the less the compression possible[/b]. Also every extra bit of encoding and decoding that an audio file undergoes increase the chances of errors in the audio stream which decreases audio fidelity. These days hard disk storage is ridiculously inexpensive and solid state storage is getting cheaper all the time. When most people's audio storage is measure in Terabytes, what's the point in increasing the possibility of errors to save a few megabytes?[/quote] Errr I dont think that is actually very accurate. Data compression has nothing to do with dynamic range at all, it works on an entirely different principle. FLAC is a form of data compression. The more repetition in the file you are compressing (of any part of the data) the more compression it will give you. FLAC is a data compression system optimised for a specific form of data (audio in this case). ZIP is optimised for text pretty much, JPEG is optimised for photo style images, GIF for simple diagrams. It has nothing to do with dynamic range, that is a different kind of compression. Even by todays standards of cheap storage, very high quality wav files (192KHz by 24bit) are big, too big to be happy backing up several hundred albums when each one is roughly 10x the size of the CD. Its not just storing them you see, its being able to back them up, each album weighs in close to a DVD in size, how many of you feel like uploading 150 DVD on to a cloud storage solution with your crappy ADSL upload speeds (note, upload, not download, very very very different!!!), not many I think, so what about backing each one up to a DVD? No takers??? I am not surprised. Yet 192 24 sounds sublime, and FLAC does make it significantly lighter weight. And FLAC is LOSSLESS, that is the point, the result of unpacking a FLAC file is the exact same wav as you had before you packed it up as a WAV, it is a perfect replica, every single bit is the same, there is NO change. Same as with any other lossless compression format. The files are identical (this is trivial to prove, and FLAC has a complete test suite for you to do your own research with if you doubt the validity of these claims). Some interesting reading about [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_audio"]lossless audio[/url] and some [url="http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_format_overview.html"]geeksville about FLAC[/url] in particular Edited August 17, 2011 by 51m0n Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
51m0n Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 Oh, and Bob Katz knows his *&^@!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cytania Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 (edited) Anyone remember the Real Audio format? Sounds like this forum is ready to throw MP3 in the same dumpster. The only real argument is between wav/aiff and flac. Nobody has really tried to convince me to stop spinning CDs but most are drawn to computerizing their music. Back in the 70s/80s people got turned on to Hi-Fi by hearing some else's system or hearing one in a specialist shop. No one mentioned backup or convenience. The sound was an instant seller. By the way, if the Sonos goes up in smoke does home insurance cover the downloads in it? More to the point has anyone here lost a physical record collection and got the cost back on their insurance? Edited August 17, 2011 by cytania Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
51m0n Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 (edited) [quote name='cytania' post='1343666' date='Aug 17 2011, 08:58 PM']Anyone remember the Real Audio format? Sounds like this forum is ready to throw MP3 in the same dumpster. The only real argument is between wav/aiff and flac. Nobody has really tried to convince me to stop spinning CDs but most are drawn to computerizing their music. Back in the 70s/80s people got turned on to Hi-Fi by hearing some else's system or hearing one in a specialist shop. No one mentioned backup or convenience. The sound was an instant seller. By the way, if the Sonos goes up in smoke does home insurance cover the downloads in it? More to the point has anyone here lost a physical record collection and got the cost back on their insurance?[/quote] Ogg can sound pretty darned good too (although it is largely a lossy format it does have a lossless wrapper around FLAC for storing the metadata we are so used to now). You couldnt back stuff up in the 70s/80s so it wasnt relevant (except by copying to a crudy cassette). The sound of high quality (88.2 and above 24bit) source is significantly better than mp3 or CD on a decent system. Like it or not convenience seems to be the largest factor governing how we buy and listen to our music. High quality be damned if it isnt convenient. For the record I spend more time listening to CD or CD quality rips (of my own CDs) than anything else on my stereo, and it does sound good, but I also check mixes on that stereo, sometimes at significantly higher than CD quality, and it does sound better, particularly wiht the top end and the sense of the space the recording is perceived to be in. I have also listened to plenty of higher quality mixes both commercial and not and there is a very real difference. Edited August 17, 2011 by 51m0n Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigRedX Posted August 17, 2011 Share Posted August 17, 2011 (edited) Actually it is. The amount of compression achievable by a lossless audio codec is inversely proportional to the amount of audio compression applied to the track. You can test this very easily yourself by taking a track and applying varying degrees of audio level compression to the track and then running each version through a lossless codec and comparing the resulting file sizes. You will find that the more you reduce the dynamic range of the audio the smaller the amount of file size reduction. All lossless compression works by pattern recognition and the removal of redundant and repeating data. Audio files tend to have very low instances of both and therefore don't compress very well. The smaller the dynamic range of the audio the less redundant data there is to remove from the digital audio file. When dealing with high quality (greater bit depth and higher sample rates) audio files you will get better results simply because first of all there is more data to compress and secondly because this kind of audio is less likely to have the extreme kinds of audio compression applied to it that your average modern CD has. In theory a lossless codec will uncompress to the same bit state every time, but in practice it doesn't. Most of the time the bit errors are trivial but if you are into audio fidelity why introduce another potential source of error into your audio output? BTW your image compression codecs are bad examples as they are both lossy and work in entirely different way. Edited August 17, 2011 by BigRedX Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
99ster Posted July 3, 2012 Share Posted July 3, 2012 And a very interesting development from Linn records - '[url="http://www.linnrecords.com/linn-what-is-a-studio-master.aspx"]Studio Masters[/url]' Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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