[jopi]

Hello everybody,

I'm travelling a lot and got a portable Panasonic 580 CD player with Etymotic 4Ps and I'm very happy with the sound. Only drawback is lugging around all the CDs for my trips.

Question: Will any of the hardrive based mp3 players come close to the sound of the CD player? My reasoning would be: What you loose on the format you could win on a more powerful amplifier. My CD player's output is rated 8mW and all the more recent mp3 players have 50mW and more.

I almost exclusively listen to classic and jazz.

Thanks for your help
Joerg

 

[davo]

By definition, sound quality on MP3's is not the equal of CD's. While there are lossless formats, in order to gain the kind of efficiencies MP3 offers and most people seek, the music is compressed using a lossy format and by so doing, content is lost. Whether or not that loss can be heard (at certain compression levels) is a subject of much controversy. I suspect younger folks can hear the differences more readily than "mature" ears.

On the other hand, the trade-off is that one could carry 10's or 100's of CD's worth of music in a very compact MP3 player.

For my uses in a noisy environment (gym, jogging, etc., etc.) the MP3 player is adequate. At home, in a quiet environment, it's CD's all the way. I hear and sense a loss in the dynamics and the "texture" of the music in MP3's more than a loss in high or low frequencies. It loses the drama that is exhibited in CD's and is most apparent in classical and some jazz music.

An amplified output signal (either higher power output of the headphone jack on an MP3 player vs. on a CD player, or a headphone amp) does not recover the lost content. It only amplifies the audio signal from the source, MP3 or CD. In both cases, an amplifier would, however, result in a sound with crisper highs and more extended lows at the same given volume level as an unamplified output signal.

 

[millerdog]

I use a slimx and listen to mostly rock ripped at 160kps. For some of my jazz i noticed a difference and now rip vocals and jazz at 192... at 192 and above I have a hard time hearing a difference.
I think I can live with slightly degraded sound on the go for the trade off of having ten cds burned on one disc. I listen with open phones and with all the ambient noise, I don't think I could tell the difference anyway.
just a thought,
md

 

[gaineso]

I have yet to see ANY portable player of any kind with 50 mw output. Somebody please list them so I can stop carrying an amp and player.

 

[DeanA]

Okay, I’m one of the member’s with “mature” ears (age-wise not audio-wise). I’m also a survivor of the “CD sound can never match LP sound” wars. And the new “MP3 sound can never match CD sound” cry is not a whole lot different. I have the NJB player with all my CDs ripped at WMA 160 and I’m very fond of the sound it produces. Is the sound 100% of the portable CD sound (I’m not comparing it to a component system)? Maybe not at this stage in technology, but it is darn close. Close enough where I don’t miss my PCDP when listening with my SR325 headphones attached to my Total Airhead while sitting on the porch swing enjoying the night breeze. Like the early CDs, both the ripping technology and hard drive players will only get better. The battle between CD and hard drive music sources is no different than the current battle in the camera war between film and pixels. A 5 mega pixel camera may be able to produce a printed picture as well as a ranger finder, but not as good as an SLR. But they are getting closer all the time.

 

[sohcahtoa]

I have a Rio Volt sp90 and I have found its headphone jack to be exceptional (can't say so much for its line-out jack tho). It really kicks my panasonic sl-ct570's butt. It can power my Grado sr80s easily. And to top it off, they can be bought really cheaply now, $80 or so. Worth a shot, if you just want to give mp3s a try.

(also, you can update the firmware of the sp90 with the sp100 firmware...)

 

[gaineso]

Originally posted by DeanA

Quote:

A 5 mega pixel camera may be able to produce a printed picture as well as a ranger finder, but not as good as an SLR. But they are getting closer all the time.

Evidently you aren't familiar with the older Leica, Nikon and Canon Range Finder cameras.

The optics are as good as anything on the market today, just more limited in apertures and focal lengths. They don't have TTL metering, and a S*** load of other bells and whistles to break.

They just take incredibly good pictures with smaller, lighter, QUIETER, equipment. Listen to the noise made by an old Leica III and compare it to the newest from Nikon, Canon or Olympus. The SLR will sound like a train wreck. Very convenient when you want to be unobtrusive.

Major downside, you REALLY have to know what you're doing. Nothing automatic.

 

[davo]

Good points Gaineso...

I have a Leica IIIG as well as an M3. When walking the streets of foreign cities and want to take candid shots of the residents doing their thing, the Nikon SLRs stay in the bag and the Leica rests off my shoulder hanging under my arm and I take shots without ever bringing the camera up to my eye. f2 50mm Summicron takes great shots this way...not always perfectly framed, but with focus set at a hyperfocal range, captures the image quite nicely.

 

[DeanA]

Quote:

Originally posted by gaineso Evidently you aren't familiar with the older Leica, Nikon and Canon Range Finder cameras.

You are comparing apples to oranges. My son-in-law an older Leica Range Finder, a very sweet, simple camera that took terrific pictures. He also got $2200 for it on eBay. That is a heck of a lot more then the price of a top of the line pixel range finder. And that is a lot more than I would pay for a current 35mm or pixel ranger finder camera. But then, I wasn't really trying to compare cameras anyway, only sitations.

 

[James]

I was thinking: a current-generation hard drive player with 20GB of memory and WAV capability could hold and play at least 35 average-sized CD's (80% full, say) worth of music. Maybe next year, a 120GB player could hold 210 CD's worth of music. A few more years after that, using MP3 to compress CD sound would seem rather too much work, no?

Of course, by then, we'll be trying to shoehorn our collections of SACD/DVD-A's into the players ....

I'm really looking forward to HeadRoom's lineup of MP3 players at their Chicago stop. Perhaps they will fill some of the hard drive models with some full-blown WAV files for comparison!

 

[fredpb]

Quote:

Originally posted by jopi Hello everybody, I'm travelling a lot and got a portable Panasonic 580 CD player with Etymotic 4Ps and I'm very happy with the sound. Only drawback is lugging around all the CDs for my trips. Question: Will any of the hardrive based mp3 players come close to the sound of the CD player? My reasoning would be: What you loose on the format you could win on a more powerful amplifier. My CD player's output is rated 8mW and all the more recent mp3 players have 50mW and more. I almost exclusively listen to classic and jazz. Thanks for your help Joerg

I also listen to quality classical and jazz music on my portables.
It is not a good idea to carry around you masters on trips.'
I have used MP3/CD, MP3 jukeboxes, and Minidisc.

I suggest a good quality MP3 Jukebox, encoded with at least 128kbps WMA or 256kbps MP3 (Lame encoder). This will give fairly good sound, espeically the Lame MP3. MP3 jukeboxes sound different. The Archos is terrible. The Treo is ok. I hear the PBJ-100 sounds the best. My Nomad sounds very good, especially with an amp. My first choice for an MP3 jukebox would be the PBJ100, then the Nomad Jukebox 3, just out. Stick these in an airbag with a good total Airhead or a Supreme and you will have some good sounds. Better than most home systems people use today. The Current crop of Nomad Jukebox v1, with the AA Nimh batteries just don't have the battery life to be practical as a portable. 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours. But you can carry many spare batteries and charge them on good external chargers. 6gb is not a lot of music. But the jump to 10 is. 20 gb of music is awesome, and 40gb totally incrediable.

Get a good mp3 jukebox.

 

[jopi]

Thanks for all the responses, I've decided to stick with my cd player for now.

I've ripped and encoded a couple of CDs onto my notebook and I'm not too thrilled with the results. Sure, my soundcard is probably pretty bad and there might be better encoders out there, but it's getting too much work for too little result.

Thanks again

 

[r3cc0s]

dude you are getting a md player!

 

[jona]

mp3 does not equal CD & never will. mp3 is a compressed medium, and compression yields only an approximation of the original. To use the photo analogy, a 1 megapixel digital photo will never quite equal a 5 megapixel photo regardless of the equality of the interpolation. OTOH, one can handle alot more 1 mp photos than 5 mp photos on a given size storage media (or across a given bandwidth in a reasonable time). mp3 shines for carrying alot of tunes in a small device (think iPod), but CD (& super CD) are capable of better absolute sound reproduction- assuming equal quality recordings/mixing/etc. When we get to a multi-TERRAbyte iPod, the need for mp3 will cease to be.

jon

 

[DeanA]

Quote:

Originally posted by jona mp3 does not equal CD & never will.

And back in the early 80s the battle cry was "CDs will never equal the sound of LPs". MP3-type music is in its infancy. It will be interesting to see what the recording landscape looks like when it grows up.