Integration of a home theatre isn’t a trivial task. This is an area where local guys can hang on, because they offer a service, and a service that is worth having. Big discount chains and internet purchasing has wiped out a lot of the speciality stores, but HT is an area where the value add is real.
There are two sorts of compressed sound. Digital compression of audio for storage purposes is remarkably benign. Some of the new codecs can do a really remarkable job, so that you would be very hard pressed to hear the difference on even high end systems. The other form of compression is the evil one. That is removing the dynamic range in recorded music. There is plenty of music out there that isn’t compressed into oblivion. It depends upon your taste. Just don’t expect any modern popular music to be listenable - simply because of the production. But classical, jazz, older rock and roll, blues etc, much wonderful music, and well recorded.
I actually bought a quadraphonic processor though I owned no quad records.
I had a receiver and a spare amplifier and had to grab my trusty soldering iron and “break” the signal path in the receiver so that I could feed the audio from the FM out of the receiver, through the quad processor and bring the front two channels of the quad back into the receiver while feeding the back two channels to the spare amp.
My nerd friends and I would then sit in my room (drinking very nasty wine) for hours waiting for the local rock station to play Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein and crank it up to hear the drum solo spin around the room.
[QUOTE=Capt Kirk]
S. “but you see I have these digital speakers, they are much better”
M. “so they put out ones and zeroes?” PIC almost chokes
[/QUOTE]
Many years back, one of the electronics hobby magazines had plans for digital speakers - one S/PDIF input, and the amp put out a PCM stream of pulses to the drivers, which mechanically integrated the bits into sound.
(C) just listening with some snacks. This was NOT a generation of kids who sat around in a group texting other people who weren’t there. We didn’t suffer from ADD and could actually sit still long enough to enjoy music. It was a social event to go to a record store and buy music. Yes, we actually paid for music. We’d come home and play it which was almost a ritual unto itself. Albums had graphic artistry and liner notes. The records would be cleaned with special cloths or a spinning dust collector. I had a “good” phono cartridge that I used as well as an “every day” cartridge needle. the turntables had built in strobes so you could adjust the platter speed precisely. And just for shits and giggles I built a 2’ x 4’ color organ. You could see the beat of the music. The lights were staggered in the box with various shapes hung in front of them. It created moving shadows against the front prism and I had different prisms which produced different light patterns.
A lot of it had to do with the music of the time. We weren’t getting together to listen to disco, but generally concept albums. Few people make them any more, although Kate Bush’s Aerial qualifies.
This seems to be morphing into a discussion better suited to Cafe Society - “Did you sit and listen to full albums with friends?”
At one point in my life I had a pair of Bose 901 speakers that I bought for $400 from a Foreign Service nerd who had no idea what they were worth (at that time), and the other pair were a set of Cerwin Vega D7E studio monitors that weighed about as much as a ‘57 Chevy. Talk about shakin’ the walls.
I’ve looked at the sound bars that are made for TVs, but a lot of them get poor reviews. I’d really like to find a decent iPod dock that provides better sound than this POS I’ve had for many years now.
It’s funny you say that, because I am a CRT monitor nerd. I think flatscreen LCDs, Plasma, they are all pretty much garbage. I have in my ENTIRE LIFE, seen one flatscreen TV I thought had an impressive picture, it was and 80 or bigger inch Mitsubishi Diamond grade TV someone imported from Japan for tens of thousands of dollars to bring to a game tournament to play on the grand finals.
Flatscreens have to deal with lag, post processing adding garbage to your picture, the color trueness is trash compared to CRTs, response time is awful, dot pitch is terrible.
Literally flatscreens ONLY have advantage in size and weight. My main television is a Mitsubishi Megaview RGB CRT monitor which weighs a little over 200lbs (I’m scared of moving in march ). It can sync beyond 1080p, and xbox 360 looks better on it than my previous LCD monitor which was well known for having extremely minimal lag (around 1 frame behind every minute or so, not detectable by humans). My megaview through the RGB inputs can sync to ANY analog RGB picture, I’m not boxed into VGA 31khz or HDMI or DVI, if I make a cable that has RGBGS, it will auto-detect what frequency it needs to sync to unlike flatscreens.
Once I find a comparable CRT in widescreen, I will never have reason to use a flatscreen monitor at home again. There is no reason to not use a CRT except for size and weight, they are superior in ever other attribute…plus they will last you 30 years unlike disposeable flatscreens. People nowadays act like they can’t complain when their 1000 dollar flatscreen makes it 5 years, I have a Sony PVM from the early 90’s that still looks brilliant. :mad:
/rant
plasma sets are still phosphor-based like CRTs, so theoretically they should be capable of the same color reproduction as CRTs. Biggest difference is that they have a fixed grid of pixels, unlike CRTs.
are you sure you’re not confusing that with PWM? Class-D amplifiers are PWM/switching amplifiers, and early designs indeed used the speakers as low-pass filters to filter out the switching frequency.
For those of you who might like to explore some of the more enjoyable aspects of ‘Old School’ stereo -go to http://audiokarma.org/ . The guys (and gals) there are much like ‘audio’ Dopers; willing to discuss and inform and occasionally rant about their favorite vintage gear/music.
And by the way, HTIAB is fine for its purpose but for music reproduction I prefer my $15 system:
“Solid state” capacitors usually refers to electrolytics with a solid conductive polymer electrolyte (usually aluminum, but tantalums can also be called “solid state”); these capacitors are pretty popular in computer equipment because of their reliability and much better performance (for example, these capacitors have only 5 milliohms of ESR, far less than any comparable wet electrolytic (and 6.6 amps of ripple current rating, also far superior to wet electrolytics); they cost more (but much cheaper than even a few years ago) but I find them ideal for high current switching regulators, where less capacitance can be used since ESR and ripple current are more important, which also reduces the price differential). Of course, traditional 50/60 Hz transformer power supplies need huge amounts of capacitance, so you still need traditional electrolytics (no reason why a SMPS, with a few precautions to suppress noise, can’t be used though).
I still use a CRT monitor on my computer as well, still running perfect after 10 years (while other people toss them out in still working condition (I take them, if just for the parts in them) just because they have to have a fancy flat screen, which I also often find tossed out but because they failed, often due to underrated capacitors (multiple capacitors burst open), which is much rarer to see even in much older CRT displays).
I had a Pioneer quadraphonic tuner/amp (747?) that I bought in the 70s. Damn thing had all kinds of bugs, the worst of which was that the speakers would cut out. You could fix it sometimes by jiggling the speaker on/off buttons, but risked a blast of static. I also had huge quad headphones and four circa 1970s Sansui speakers that ended up doubling as end tables. What a waste of money that setup was. I did have a nice Technics turntable, though, that I bought a really nice cartridge for.
You want geeky? I just spent the last two hours disassembling, repairing and re-assembling my new HP laptop. Yeah, that’s how I spent New Years Eve. Do I party like a mad-man or what?
(I love this laptop, but I got it as a refurb and the problem had never been fixed. HP sent me parts, and I fixed it.)
I have a Pioneer SX-1250, with a Cambridge Audio Azur 840C CD player, and a Wadia i170 transport for my iPod. (The 840C has an on-board DAC) I have around 1100 CDs on the iPod which I leave on the transport as my server/library.
It’s driving 4 Totem bookshelf speakers (Totem Rainmakers) and a Totem powered “storm” sub.
The list started out SO… nice the Old Silverface Pioneers are as good as they come (the 170 WPC model (SX-1980) sells for $3000 on ebay). I’m stuck with my 1970 Sony STR-6045.
And then crashed - an ipod for library - I once built an array of 12 cd players as a jukebox - I can’t program PC’s, so never came up with a way to catalog what was in it. At least that would have had the benefit of .WAV over .MP3.
I see the 50 - 100 Cd changers in Goodwill all the time - any transport weighing less than 3 pounds has got to be flaky at best, and the display is crap.
If only someone would re-master the original tapes and offer the music in a lossess format - the cost of storage is such that everybody could be happy (except those who think that switching out a chip every single day is too high a price for having no-repeat music tracks at their whim.
Anybody familiar enough with the lossless compressions algorithms to calculate how many megabytes would be required per hours of music?
How many chips would raindog’s collection fill at 32gb/chip? At $20/chip for the fast stuff (these are photo chips, in case anybody’s wondering)
Replace the ipod and its dock with some device with a flip-up 12"-16" display and basic jukebox software. If we replace the chips with solid-state drives, it would seem possible to have a box with nearly unlimited music - want to switch formats?
swap out the drive with 100,000 top 100’s with one containing Bach and Beethevon.
Lossless compression, by its nature is variable in its required rate. Simple sounds, such as solo acoustic instruments or music without percussive or noisy elements can get down as low as about 450kb/s, more complex stuff, say jazz, orchestral, and the like will run n the vicinity of 600 to 800kb/s. Noisy stuff, and stuff with lots of percussion will push 1Mb/s - such as a lot of rock and roll. So you have a 2:1 variation.
If you assume an average of about 800kb/s = 100kB/s (to make the numbers easy) you get 6MB per minute, and 360MB per hour. (Actually the rule of thumb I use is about 2:1 compression ratio from the CD, and assume about 300MB per CD of storage. It works pretty well.)
I have a large fraction of my CD collection on an iPod Classic (160GB) ripped lossless. About 500 CDs. There is actually a fair bit of crud in here that I just don’t listen to from one year to the next, and I suspect many people would be the same. An iPod Classic would be quite satisfactory. On my laptop I have the same music, also lossless. I stream it over WiFi to a number of Airport Expresses. Your simple streaming jukebox is actually a bottom of the line PC or laptop. It would be very hard to replicate for less. raindog is going to need about 400GB to store his collection lossless. Flash memory is about $1 per GB, disks a small fraction of this. A single 512GB solid state memory store will have the entire collection, lossless, in your pocket for $500.
Both an iPod and an Airport Express are capable of delivering the original 44.1/16 bit exact to the CD digital stream over S/PDIF. For the iPod you need a dock capable of performing this, which costs about $150. The Airport Express has an optical output. So, if you find the internal DACs in these devices less than satisfactory, you can use a standalone DAC.
Remastering from the original tapes is something that does occur, but not often enough. There are tricks that allow better than ever heard before quality of music to be extracted from the tape, so it can be a bit of a revelation. There are two things that might happen - actual remastering where the multi-track original can be re-mixed (depending upon the desk used there might be auto control tracks available that replicate the mixdown settings, or the tracks could be hand mixed a process that may result in a different mix - and thus not exactly what you heard.) The alternative is to go to the two track master tape, the one used to cut the master pressing disks (or more often used to create the sub-masters that were distributed to the record pressing factories.) This doesn’t get you quite the level or new information, but is still very good.
I read that the DAC on the iPod was suspect, but I learned that my CD player had a very good DAC on board. (The 840C had excellent reviews)
So I got the Wadia, as it is more than a dock. It bypasses the on-board iPod DAC and utilizes the on-board DAC on the 840C.
I downloaded the CDs at the higher bit rate. The iPod classic advertises 40,000 songs, but with the higher bit rate my classic (mine anyways) will top out around 17,000. (there’s around 12,500 now)
I’m not opposed to buying a dedicated laptop or netbook and use it as my library.
Is lossless that much better then my current set up? What is lossless? How would I convert? Would I need to re-rip to a laptop?
If you are happy with the sound, the answer might be nothing.
When you say higher bit rate, I guess you mean 256kb/s AAC. This actually gives a very good sonic result, one that is very difficult to pick from lossless. When I say difficult to pick, I mean that if you know what to listen for, you can pick out the artefacts, but if you don’t know what to listen for, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference, even in an ABX test. The compression really is that good.
Right now, if you really did want to go for lossless, your cheapest option is probably to buy another couple of iPods. But that is a pretty brutal solution.
Since you are using an iPod I assume you ripped everything in iTunes. I’m a Mac user, and don’t do PCs, and I’m going to bet you have a PC. From what I hear, the Windows version of iTunes isn’t exactly great, but I’ve never used it. But I would hope it has the option to import CDs in Apples lossless format. It is just a setting under Import Settings: Apple Lossless Encoder. The example numbers I gave were based upon this codec, however FLAC and the others don’t seem a great deal different.
Sadly you can’t usefully convert to lossless. The information is gone. You would need to re-import each CD. Having done 500 on my machine I know 1100 is in the “just say no” category. When I started importing I knew it was going to be a big job, and not wanting to ever do it again, is one reason I chose to use lossless right away.
What you have is a very good setup. If you are at all worried, rip a CD or two in lossless format and see if you can tell the difference. If I don’t tell you what to listen for, I bet you won;t be able to tell. And even if I do, you won’t usually be bothered.
). It can sync beyond 1080p, and xbox 360 looks better on it than my previous LCD monitor which was well known for having extremely minimal lag (around 1 frame behind every minute or so, not detectable by humans). My megaview through the RGB inputs can sync to ANY analog RGB picture, I’m not boxed into VGA 31khz or HDMI or DVI, if I make a cable that has RGBGS, it will auto-detect what frequency it needs to sync to unlike flatscreens.
