CD playback through computer

[soulforged]

I was wondering if anybody ever compared the quality of a CD played using the optical drive of a computer with an external DAC vis-a-vis a standalone CD player. Is there a massive difference in how they sound?

I understand technically that a good transport + DAC in a good standalone player would score higher on paper but what I'm trying to explore is whether a computer with a decent optical drive and a good s/w (like Foobar or jRiver) feeding a good DAC (say a MF M1 or a Benchmark) can replace a CDP.

 

[joyous]

Good question, I guess only manual testing can judge

 

[soulforged]

Good question, I guess only manual testing can judge

Right!

I plan to test it at home over the weekend. Wanted to know if someone else has had an experience in this...

 

[reignofchaos]

You wouldn't want to play directly from the cd drive in any case. You'd want to rip the CD and dump the cd image somewhere on your hard drive and then play the image. This way you take out the cd drive from the equation.

From a dump on the hard drive, with a good mechanism for digital out, the difference between the computer playing and the cd transport playing is academic. I can't hear any difference.

 

[ranjeetrain]

I won't suggest that route. And not only because of the usual gripe against the digital playback such as noise et el. Here are my reasons why you should not:

(1) Computer Optical Drives made these days are crap for audiophile application. Manufacturers have been busy making them FAST, not ROBUST, nor RELIABLE. Older optical drives made by Creative in early 90s were decent. After that the world was taken over by Samsung, LG, Sony and dozens of others who flooded the market with inferior products that could run faster read faster.

Marketing sells! What would you buy, an optical drive reading/writing at 4/2x or one with 52/8x? Higher number on the box helps sell a product faster. And causes upgraditis to otherwise happy customers. In order to attract customers with high numbers, manufacturer forgot the most important aspect of an optical drive, reliability. Old drives were a lot more reliable than the recent ones.

(2) This route would make the path between the Disk and the output terminals of the sound card a bit too long. Not in terms of hardware, but in terms of software. And of course, purists will take this opportunity to blast this method on the basis of the digital cable running between the output terminal of the optical drive and sound card being susceptible to noise and interference. It may not be proven, or may not heard, but it plays on your mind anyway.

(3) It will be a thousand folds better if you use the optical drive for spinning a disk just once. After that it goes into your storage as WAV/FLAC and then on you are a happy audiophile enjoying the digital awesomeness.

 

[kaushik]

NOT even close to cdp..
cdrom play via software is also no way good than files from hdd

this is how the data is picked up in each case:
cdrom>digital data >sw buffers >player>os>dac etc
HDD>digital data >sw buffers >player>os>dac etc

after the player>os the same hardware/timing and other issues do the damage


it is like if you cut the banana in chocolate shape it will not taste as chocolate.
for this people tried to eliminate pc:there are cd-rom converter kits and millions of Diya forum pages none give a good o/p

however the modified boom box is a real good(Diya forum)

 

[rallynut]

I have been using a digital source for playback since more than 2 years, my setup was intended to be that way from word go.

My chain:
Foobar (FLAC)/ KECES DA151 Mk2 (USB DAC)/ Harman Kardon HK6350R (Integrated)/ Mission M35i.

Otherwise, Cambridge Audio DV99/ Harman Kardon HK6350R (Integrated)/ Mission M35i, on occasion for redbook playback.

The comparison between the two chains is somehow :indifferent14:. The small nuances (if any) are lost on me, both routes sound fantastic to my ears.

Again, mine is no way considered even a mid-fi rig, am sure there may be variance in higher budget/ resolution setups, so IMHO.

Cheers

 

[musicbee]

Guess I will try it too over the weekend. Have never tried it but it should be a fun experiment.

Don't know of any "high end" CD/DVD reader/writer though... I've bought the usual 2K ones and they have worked great till date to rip all of my CDs.

I have a LightScribe that is more expensive, but I don't believe it rips or burns any better than the Sony DVD Writer I use.

 

[musicbee]

I won't suggest that route. And not only because of the usual gripe against the digital playback such as noise et el. Here are my reasons why you should not:

(1) Computer Optical Drives made these days are crap for audiophile application. Manufacturers have been busy making them FAST, not ROBUST, nor RELIABLE. Older optical drives made by Creative in early 90s were decent. After that the world was taken over by Samsung, LG, Sony and dozens of others who flooded the market with inferior products that could run faster read faster.

Marketing sells! What would you buy, an optical drive reading/writing at 4/2x or one with 52/8x? Higher number on the box helps sell a product faster. And causes upgraditis to otherwise happy customers. In order to attract customers with high numbers, manufacturer forgot the most important aspect of an optical drive, reliability. Old drives were a lot more reliable than the recent ones.

(2) This route would make the path between the Disk and the output terminals of the sound card a bit too long. Not in terms of hardware, but in terms of software. And of course, purists will take this opportunity to blast this method on the basis of the digital cable running between the output terminal of the optical drive and sound card being susceptible to noise and interference. It may not be proven, or may not heard, but it plays on your mind anyway.

(3) It will be a thousand folds better if you use the optical drive for spinning a disk just once. After that it goes into your storage as WAV/FLAC and then on you are a happy audiophile enjoying the digital awesomeness.

PC technology has actually improved and gotten better with time. Cheaper does not mean bad just as in audiophilia expensive is not always better.

Just speaking from personal experience... 10-12 years ago bought a ton of blank DVDs to burn Divx movies and nearly 90% of them failed to burn. Also, a DVD player that my brother bought for his multimedia company cost 95K (when I was a kid and yeah more than most audiophile CD players) but did only 1x or 2x and nearly 60% of the time the result was an error or the DVD would not be read on other systems or with other company DVD readers. My brother used to send DVDs to clients in the US and Europe and that was the major complaint.

Today, we never come across such errors. No DVD + or - and no incompatibility with one company media to another company reader/writer and none of my backups fail these days.

PC technology has improved and become affordable unlike audiophilia which has not improved but become prohibitively expensive!

 

[ranjeetrain]

PC technology has improved and become affordable unlike audiophilia which has not improved but become prohibitively expensive!

I would wholeheartedly agree to the cost trend angle. However, my reasons for not suggesting the Optical disk playback were different than cost.

 

[canchi]

I have done a limited comparison between a flac file on my laptop -USB out to a DAC vs PS3 as CD transport (see this thread) and found no great difference.But this may be different if a top of the line cdp is used?

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

PC technology has improved and become affordable unlike audiophilia which has not improved but become prohibitively expensive!

Love it! :clapping: I think what has improved and come down in cost is low-to-mid-end hifi, some of which is probably "audiophile" compared to years previously. But that's another story.

The theory says that a single-box CD player has all the advantages, especially with its closely-linked transport and DAC. Probably what counts more than anything else is the quality of that DAC and its analogue circuitry.

The theory says that a PC CD drive has all the disadvantages. Probably, though, what counts in the end is the quality fo the DAC, whether sound-card/interface or standalone.

Different CD players don't sound the same: different PC/DACs are not going to either. One may be better, another may be better.

It is probably pure habit/prejudice, but, for regular CD playing, my choice would be a CD player. There is theory, there is choice, there is practicality...

At the moment, I don't actually have a working CD player. I'm quite happy to play my CDs from the PC (via Squeezebox, over the network, too), even, for an occasional disc, without ripping.

 

[Staxxx]

@soulforged: I went through endless months of testing before settling on my HDD driven rig as my primary system for music listening. There is no doubt in my mind that a well put together "computer" rig is more than good competition for a standalone CDP.
Other than the poor quality of using the CDP drive as a direct transport (which as explained above is inadequate), major advancements have been made with reducing jitter to minimal levels with appropriate buffers that can be set up with the right software, and the benefit of this is subtle but quite audible compared with playing CDs "directly" via a drive. (Some CD players like Chord do so "on the fly").
In fact as I have been quite satisfied with my "computer" rig (actually a dedicated music server with HDD drives) I have not yet even hooked up my Esoteric CDP back after the comparison testing that I was doing some months ago. However, I will categorically state that the drive on the music server is very ordinary (when compared with the mechanism in the Esoteric which is said to weigh over 10 kgs on its own) but that does not appear to be detrimental to the output at the end of the chain.....
As you are in Bangalore you can PM me if you are curious to A/B this on a good rig.

 

[musicbee]

Love it! :clapping: I think what has improved and come down in cost is low-to-mid-end hifi, some of which is probably "audiophile" compared to years previously. But that's another story.

The theory says that a single-box CD player has all the advantages, especially with its closely-linked transport and DAC. Probably what counts more than anything else is the quality of that DAC and its analogue circuitry.

The theory says that a PC CD drive has all the disadvantages. Probably, though, what counts in the end is the quality fo the DAC, whether sound-card/interface or standalone.

Different CD players don't sound the same: different PC/DACs are not going to either. One may be better, another may be better.

It is probably pure habit/prejudice, but, for regular CD playing, my choice would be a CD player. There is theory, there is choice, there is practicality...

At the moment, I don't actually have a working CD player. I'm quite happy to play my CDs from the PC (via Squeezebox, over the network, too), even, for an occasional disc, without ripping.

PCs are never manufactured as audiophile devices... more like multitasking devices that will let one browse the net, watch movies, listen to music, video chat with friends, record and catalog data, run a home office, maintain inventory, save on paper, and do another 1000+ tasks based on any individual's needs.

Now if PC manufacturers... or even one company decided to make PCs for the sole purpose of playing music... I'd be willing to bet they would in 5 years time come out with technology that would outperform most/all CD players and transports many times their budget and still be affordable to the common man. Unfortunately, its the audio guys who are making PC builds to play music and charging exorbitantly for glorified storage boxes with nothing but a DAC.

One should check out Computer Audiophile for many such music specific PC builds... they call them C.A.P.S. They are more affordable and according to the guys building them outperform their other audio gear too. I just have not gotten around to building one for myself but I did build a HTPC and it beats pretty much every Blu-ray and DVD player for both PQ and SQ and it cost me less than 30K. I am sure a similar build for music will outperform most transports and CD players and still be within budget. Now if only I get the time to build one...

 

[deba]

Standalone CD player better then Computer Drive Optical Out to external D/A converter........ placebo ??

 

[raz_737]

I've tried comparing laptop with standalone cheap bluray player both played using the same equipment.I noticed that sound played from laptop is significantly inferior to the bluray player.

I guess a decent CD player will easily beat the high end pc interms of transport.

 

[ranjeetrain]

I guess a decent CD player will easily beat the high end pc interms of transport.

Would you please define a "decent CD player" in more concrete terms? And how easily will it beat the "high end PC"? Like the SQ difference day and night?

Please also mention the equipments you have used for coming to such conclusions.

 

[raz_737]

Would you please define a "decent CD player" in more concrete terms? And how easily will it beat the "high end PC"? Like the SQ difference day and night?

Please also mention the equipments you have used for coming to such conclusions.

A decent CD player would be the entry models from companies like Marantz,Cambridge Audio or NAD.

My equipment details used for testing.
1. Acer Laptop->Audioquest USB cable with Foobar->vDAC2->NAD c316 AMP->KEF q700 speaker.
2. cheap LG Bluray player->coaxial cable>vDAC2->NAD c316 AMP->KEF q700 speaker.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

In that "high end PC" there would only be two bits that really matter for CD playback:

--- The CD drive, and they are probably all much the same

--- The sound card or DAC, which might not even be part of the PC itself.

 

[Oakley]

Pathetic is the word I use, for cd playback from optical drive

Oak