[Edwood]

Quote:

This was meant to be a gauge of our prejudices/beliefs on this site....

I think that one is already answered.......

Fewtch is right on the money.

I wonder how many people know that the beloved Meridian 588 rips cd audio tracks, processes the audio and stores it in a buffer to play back?
Now if only Meridian would flip the bird to the RIAA and put hard drives in their machines and store the processed music permanently.

I don't know about the new G07 and G08, but I imagine that they do something similar to their predecessor.

And as for the shortcomings of computer audio in many cases due to budget constraints of the engineering. Many of those are easily overcome with a soldering iron.

-Ed

 

[fewtch]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edwood Fewtch is right on the money. I wonder how many people know that the beloved Meridian 588 rips cd audio tracks, processes the audio and stores it in a buffer to play back? Now if only Meridian would flip the bird to the RIAA and put hard drives in their machines and store the processed music permanently.

I think they should go all the way, and provide a keyboard and monitor for it too. Why sell a cut-down computer at those prices?

 

[pbirkett]

Quote:

Originally Posted by halcyon Most good sound cards I've heard border on over-analytical, clinical and artificially clean sound. IMHO, partly devoid of life, intimacy, presence and naturalness.

My soundcard aint perfect (what is?), but I can say for certain it suffers none of those ills. I replaced a hifi DAC with it and it sounds more musical, bouncy and fun. However, I am repeatedly led to believe that it is a crap card, and that my ears were lying when I tested it against some reasonably priced CD players.

But frankly, I am past caring

 

[cjr888]

cjr888--or anybody--have you actually heard a Lynx soundcard in a good setup? I'm very curious, mainly due to the huge price difference between even a top quality soundcard and some of the ridiculously expensive CD rigs out there (Audio Aero Capitole, Theta Gen VIII DAC, etc.)

I haven't, but friends have. Hopefully I can provide comments shortly once I can hear their systems, or when I pull the trigger on a Lynx card, and can provide better input in comparison with a full system that I am more familiar with.

Most good sound cards I've heard border on over-analytical, clinical and artificially clean sound. IMHO, partly devoid of life, intimacy, presence and naturalness.

Regarding this comment -- first, I usually seperate the description of "over-analytical" and "clinical and artificially clean sounding." When I think of analytical, I think of the goals of a studio (and some home audio people as well). To me something described as analytical does its best to pass whatever it is fed. So if you have an awful recording, it is represented as an awful recording. If its thin or muddy, it is represented as such. If it is an amazing recording, it is represented in all its glory.

When I think of "clinical and artificially clean sounding", I think of a component that leaves this signature on all music, regardless of quality.

For analytical, I can think of the times I had a modified SACD-1000 into an Audio Consulting Silver Rock silver-wired transformer based passive (www.audio-consulting.ch) into an Acoustic Reality EAR2 ICEPower amplifier (www.acoustic-reality.com) into a pair of heavily modified Eminent Technology LFT-VIIIa hybrid planars (www.eminent-tech.com). Good recordings were amazing, but bad recordings good be painful -- too many components that provided the truth.

It comes down to preference -- do you like things analytical? do you want the bad to sound good? do you like everything with a touch of pixie dust? If you want everything to carry a certain signature, where do you allow it to happen? At the source? At the preamp? At the amplifier? Do you change tubes, do you swap out output transformers, do you play with software settings?

From there we're back to defining what's best, which is my mind has to be discussed from one of two angles (1) technical perspective and passing on whatever its given, or (2) preference and opinion.

Either way, back to the original question:

Anyway, do you believe the best computer sound card, regardless of the computer it is stuck in, can stand up to the best stand-alone CDP?

Still believe yes, but at the top end of the game. Below that, I'd probably put my money on the CDP. Whether you're going with a digital out or running one box, I think half the issue ends up being transport related though.

 

[Scrith]

I am just a newbie here, so please forgive my ignorance.

But I am not a newbie at using/building computers, which leads me to this comment.

A computer, as a digital source using a losslessly encoded music track that has been verified (via checksums or whatever) as 100% accurate and is output, as a digital signal (like what a hard drive sends to a computer) is a *perfect* source.

I think the question should be reversed...is there any CDP out there that can guarantee (after reading an entire CD track and verifying its checksums and so forth, before playback, for example) that the digital signal it is creating is anwhere near the quality of a computer source?

I ask this question after losslessly encoding many CDs using EAC on a computer, wherein sometimes, in order to get around surface problems on the CD (which often are not visible to the human eye), it takes quite awhile to extract a "true" copy of the data...is any external "audiophile" CDP attempting to do this kind of thing?

I am assuming that the output from the computer is digital to an external DAC (I won't get into the power conditioning theories and so forth regarding the potential problems of DACs located inside a computer case).

And this idea that somehow a digital signal from a computer is not pure...how would hard drives, USB devices, network interface cables, etc. be working at all if we weren't sure that the digital data moving through the many computer cables in a system were valid? And the transfer rates of all these devices is much higher than what is needed for music playback, is it not?

Again, I'm just a computer user/programmer/builder, but the idea that moving digital audio data from a hard drive to DAC doesn't seem particular difficult in the context of all the other data transport requirements of a typical computer.

 

[Welly Wu]

I vote NO because of these reasons:

1. "Audiophile" companies are not producing droves of products tuned for the personal computer as compared to their "traditional HI-FI" equipment. This is the biggest challenge facing PC audio enthusiasts: they have to court the Mark Levinsons, CARYs, NAD, and McIntoshes of the audio industry to design and engineer products to cater to them. They have to convince the heavyweights of the audio industry that they are a large, vibrant, and lucretive segment of the market worthy of attention and R&D dollars.

2. The sonic improvements of Super Audio CD cannot be accessed on a personal computer. Regardless of whether you believe that the high resolution format is going to survive or die, the SA-CD format is far superior to Red Book CD. It does sound a heck of a lot better. However, I would not recommend that you hold your breath until SONY or Philips decide to allow it to be accessible on personal computers.

3. While DVD-Audio can be read on computer DVD-ROM drives, the sheer multi-task roles of modern computer operating systems and hardware design do not make it the best platform upon which to extract maximum sonic performance of the said high resolution format. Furthermore, I firmly believe that computers are for computing and HI-FI equipment is for music reproduction. Converging entertainment and computers may be the wave of the future but I do not believe that the costs of merging HI-FI and computers are justified in terms the money, time, and energy required to tune it for maximum sonic performance per dollar.

4. Computers were never designed for HI-FI because of the enormous complexity of their design and engineering along with the roles which users ask of them. Personal computer users require their machines to perform too many roles including surfing the Internet, e-mail, office software, etc. Hard drives, RAM, CPU, cooling fans and pumps, etc. make it more difficult to extract maximum sonic performance from a personal computer platform than separate pieces of HI-FI equipment. I have learned that the Keep It Simple Stupid principle applies to HI-FI equipment: the best audio equipment I have ever owned have had the best balance between simple ideas and great execution of those ideas in design and engineering. Computers are too complex in terms of design and engineerin along with the demands asked of them to make for the simplest and best executed platform to build a HI-FI system.

5. Lastly, I have noticed that computer users who build a HI-FI system around their machines are more so technical geeks first and foremost and music lovers / audiophiles second or third. (I'm joking).

 

[mulveling]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scrith And this idea that somehow a digital signal from a computer is not pure...how would hard drives, USB devices, network interface cables, etc. be working at all if we weren't sure that the digital data moving through the many computer cables in a system were valid? And the transfer rates of all these devices is much higher than what is needed for music playback, is it not? Again, I'm just a computer user/programmer/builder, but the idea that moving digital audio data from a hard drive to DAC doesn't seem particular difficult in the context of all the other data transport requirements of a typical computer.

Jitter.
USD/PCI/drive devices, etc, are designed such that the "timing" between the arrival of bits is of no consequence (anytime the data hits a buffer, jitter is eliminated). A digital audio output, on the other hand, serializes the bits and sends them out with a slightly imperfect, inconsistent timing between individual bits. The DAC on the receiving end of th bitstream is genrally at least somewhat sensitive to the timing of these bits (as is my understanding). So it's not just that the right bits need to be sent out, but they also need to be sent and received at exactly the right time (we are talking picoseconds here). Since the "bits" sent over the cable are electrical pulses (taking the case of digital coax) with a rise and fall time that isn't perfectly square and controllable, it can take equipment that costs lots of $$$ to get the timing is as accurate as possible. Soundcards do not all have great jitter measurements; power supply and grounding issues are usually blamed.

At least, that's my current understanding of the issue.

Back to the topic of this thread, I don't have much experience with high end sounces/soundcards, but from what I have owned, I just get the feeling that soundcards will never, ever catch up to standalone players. In standalone players, the engineers heave control over *everything*, and the can optimize and compromise accordingly. That's a huge advantage. Plus, while there is enough of a market to support high end players, there is really not enough market demand for truly high end soundcards to make it worthwhile (IMO).

 

[markl]

Quote:

A computer, as a digital source using a losslessly encoded music track that has been verified (via checksums or whatever) as 100% accurate and is output, as a digital signal (like what a hard drive sends to a computer) is a *perfect* source.

This might be a valid argument if all there was to a CD player was a DAC chip and we could somehow listen to a pure digital signal straight off the DAC chip. But the DAC hands off that "perfect" digital signal and converts it to analog to be passed through the output section that enables us to hear it. On a computer sound card, you have very little real estate available to put together a fantastic quality analog section, and it's also not something people pay a lot of attention to, they put all the focus on the whiz-bang features of the DAC, yet it's just as crucial in producing the sound you hear. In a stand-alone player, much higher quality and more expensive analog output section can be used, op-amps eliminated, etc, and it can be isolated and kept on a separate board with its own dedicated power supply separate from the digital section which can often "pollute" the system when they share the same power supply. Also, as has been mentioned, the quality of a power supply in a high-end CDP will be much better than the el-cheapo stuff used to power your PC that isn't designed for audio. Quote:

I am assuming that the output from the computer is digital to an external DAC (I won't get into the power conditioning theories and so forth regarding the potential problems of DACs located inside a computer case).

Ah, well now you're cheating by using an external DAC.

This is not about using the computer as a transport, but as a complete source using the computer's sound card only.

 

[Scrith]

This is educational, thanks for the great responses, everyone.

Regarding jitter from a computer source... Again, I look at something like a DVI (digital video interface, used to drive an LCD monitor with digital data, for example) and I see zero jitter; any jitter whatsoever on my computer monitor (which is receiving a 32-bit 1920x1200 signal at precisely 60 frames per second, or an astonishing 32x1920x1200x60 bits per second) would surely give me a headache within a very small amount of time (i'd be seeing color fluctuations on a per-pixel basis if even one bit were corrupted). How is it that an audio signal method has not been created to get around these timing problems?

And, back to the lossless encoding of CDs. Even a brand-new CD, just unwrapped and taken out of the jewel case, is susceptible to surface imperfections that require my software (EAC) to read sections of tracks on the CD repeatedly, sometimes at a rate of as low as 0.1x playback speed, in the worst cases. How can any real-time CD player give performance matching something that has been meticulously pulled off the CD and verified as valid and then saved in a lossless audio format that has checksums in order to identify subsequent corruption (such as due to a hard drive failure)?

I think the weak link in any CD system is the CD itself, which is tremendously vulnerable to physical damage (and/or manufacturing flaws). The computer-as-source model eliminates this problem (or at least makes it known, in the case of error reporting of unrecoverable errors at recording time). Am I being reasonable in asserting that not even the most expensive CD player will pause playback (and notify you of an error condition) in order to ensure a 100% authentic dataflow?

 

[Scrith]

Yes, I am cheating, because I'm just talking about using the computer as a transport.

But, isn't that how many high-end CD-based audio systems work? They have a CD player as a transport with a (super-expensive and complicated, of course!) external DAC for doing the number crunching?

The idea is that, if it is indeed the case that the best DACs are external (and not internal to CD players), then the best transport is a computer (or something like it) and not a device that is trying to read a CD in real time.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

I would like to address a few of Welly's comments:

1) Just because so-called "audiophile" companies aren't building the top soundcards does not mean those cards won't sound good. In fact most of the high-end card are built by companies that make equipment used to record some of those precious "audiophile" recordings. I trust they know what they are doing as least as well, if not moreso, than the "audiophile" companies. Shouldn't the "audiophile" companies be the ones building the recording gear, if they know so much more about good sound?

2 & 3) I think this doesn't really matter to MOST people so far, due to the very limited range of selections offered in DVDA and SACD. Maybe when labels start remastering thousands of old albums on those new formats, I'll start to care. But by that point, if high-rez went mainstream, I'm sure enough people would want to use it on their computers for a solution to exist for that use.

4) How many times must this old argument be rehearsed? I guess until everyone hears my modded EMU.

Until then, though, Kmixer bypassing card -> optical output -> power-conditioned data buffering/jitter killing DAC, is the answer to this argument, since it should have just as few, if not fewer jitter/transport issues than virtually any CD player. Optical output makes the computer's dirty ground a non-issue, as does the DAC for any "oh my god computers have so much electrical noise, it must have like 10000% jitter" issues.



Right now, I doubt there is a stand-alone computer soundcard (unless one of the extraordinarly expensive high-end, zillion-channel pro-audio solutions) that sounds better than the best CDP out there, simply due to the time spend developing both, and the cost. I love that I can get superb sound quality from a $350 modded soundcard, but I wouldn't fool myself into thinking that it beats a $8,000 or $30,000 CDP. And I also use the soundcard only solution currently because it is the best that I can afford. If I could, I'd have the optical out -> power conditioned high-end jitter-killing DAC mentioned earlier

Because of the old-school audiophile prejudices against computer audio, as evidenced in this thread, I bet it will be quite some time before an "audiophile" company starts building soundcards, or they start approaching the price and or performance of "audiophile" CDP's, simply due to the market for them. Who has the most money to spend on uber-high end sound gear? Mainly older folks. Who knows the least about computers? Mainly older folks. Perhaps when the people of my generation are a bit older (and wealthier) computer-bound sources will swing to the to of the audiophile order. Until then, they are merely a great performance/price point and a great starter source.

 

[taylor]

I think sound cards will catch up. Internal? probably not. External? definetly.

The space, power constraints, power noise, and EMI in the case is too much.

Here's what I think would work:
Sometihng just like the Meridian 588 Ed mentioned. Except throw in a 250gb hard drive, with plenty of RAM for buffering. Then add in a USB conenction to the PC. Except, there is no music sent across the USB. The PC can look at files in the Meridians hard drive, then tell the meridian to play them. The Meridian would also have firmware similar to EAC that lets them rip CDs in lossless.

You get the foobar window, but no music is stored on the PC. It's all on the Meridian, the PC just controls it.

I've just gotten a desire to learn PIC and try and design the USB section i've been blathering about. Good summer project, eh.

 

[markl]

Quote:

Who has the most money to spend on uber-high end sound gear? Mainly older folks. Who knows the least about computers? Mainly older folks.

Who are most susceptible to the "if it's newer it must be better" argument? Younger folks.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by markl Who are most susceptible to the "if it's newer it must be better" argument? Younger folks.

What exactly are you trying to say by that? I mean, that can go both ways, it is just a matter of spin, i.e. older people are backwards-thinking and reactionary becuase they are fighting against the natural progress of time. Or you could say they are wise because they know how much better it used to be. Just depends on how you look at it, as it is a purely subjective matter, and no one answer is ever really right.

However, the original point I made is somewhat more objective, as in general older people have more money than younger people, and are less knowledgeable about technology, two factors which I think are retarding the growth of the audiophile soundcard market. Perhaps soundcards will never be as good as the best sources. What I am saying is at least, in the future, there will be a time when higher demand will somewhat level the playing field and make it possible for soundcards to get closer to stand-alone players, mainly because people will be more open to the idea of hifi-via PC.

 

[Jasper994]

Quote:

Originally Posted by markl Who are most susceptible to the "if it's newer it must be better" argument? Younger folks.

I don't think any of us have said the computer sources we use are better than the best standalone CDP's, young or old. More than anything, I think we're trying to determine how for PC audio has evolved recently to determine where we stand. I think it's entirely possible that future PC audio gear will stand neck and neck with the best stand alone sources. Also, because of us young people who favor ease of use are becoming such a dominate force I would guess that machines that only serve one purpose will eventually go away. This can be viewed as both good and bad. The good side of course is that we will get more utility out of each machine and of course convenience. The bad side is that we often make compromises initially that hurt us in the long run. We can see evidence of this in MP3. Because size initally was such a big deal, low bit rates took hold. Even now, the online distributors are selling 160kbps files... While many of us refuse to use MP3 regardless of the bit rate, it would have been nice if they had at least used 256kbps and made it possible to get lossless files as well. We can also see the evidence of this from the high levels of compression in today's recordings. Many people attribute this to making the songs sound as good on the radio as it does on the CD...