Has Computer Audio Reached Mainstream?

[Thad E Ginathom]

Not technically... lossless means exactly that, lossless and any lossless rip can replicate/duplicate the CD the same as the original.

I was thinking along technical, rather than musical, lines. I am with you on lossless meaning lossless, and the music from a FLAC-->CD disc should be identical, which is what matters. My thinking, though, is that only an iso would produce a perfect image-to-image content, including all the non-musical information and formatting.

Purely an academic, technical, and, perhaps, completely unimportant piece of hair splitting on my part

 

[crosstalk]

Not technically... lossless means exactly that, lossless and any lossless rip can replicate/duplicate the CD the same as the original.

I am not sure how much of an improvement a virtual drive offers over playing ripped files, but along those lines arguments have been made in favor of RAM discs to improve playback/SQ. I have tried it with Foobar and its hard to say... some files I perceive an improvement in SQ and then others I don't. Hard to say unless a blind test can prove it conclusively.

Just to clarify once more, a virtual drive does not improve any sound quality. It is a virtual CD drive that loads a CD image. A CD image is a exact image of a CD (not ripped). Audio CD images are mainly BIN CUE files and not ISO files. Alternatvely they can be Nero NRG files. I use this method as it is convenient to me, and everyone should stick to their convenience.

 

[crosstalk]

Sounds good until you start talking of 2000, 3000... 50,000 CDs, unless of course you have reached Nirvana with your existing collection and don't intend to add more CDs.

PS - After crossing 8 TB with my Blu-Ray rips I realized the solution is not to keep adding HDDs... not unless I want to maintain a mini server farm. Again perceptions vary... but a 4-6 GB rip (with DTS) looks the same as a 20-30GB Blu-Ray rip and most will not be able to tell a difference... hence nothing wrong with "economical" rips of Audio CDs and movies.

I have around 850 CDs imaged. Each is roughly 700 mb in size. That would be 595000 mb ~ 595 gb and yet to fill up my 1 TB HDD.

Nirvana or not, I have not bought anything new for the last 10 years.

No clue about blu-rays though.

 

[ntomer]

I am planning to go this route; using an Asus Xonar Essence as the sound source. Amplifiers is Sonodyne SiA 102R and speakers Boston Acoustics A25.

How good/bad this combo will be? Recommended?

 

[reignofchaos]

I am planning to go this route; using an Asus Xonar Essence as the sound source. Amplifiers is Sonodyne SiA 102R and speakers Boston Acoustics A25.

How good/bad this combo will be? Recommended?

Should be pretty good bang for the buck. Make sure you setup your computer properly for audio.

 

[venkatcr]

Just came across another product in this series. This product is being crowd funded.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-core-wireless-speaker-system

 

[Staxxx]

As this appears to be turning into a fairly general discussion about computer audio, I am wondering if anyone has looked into isolating the power supplies for each of their components within their CAPS or equivalent.
This seems to be a fairly big topic on the Computer Audio Forum (which sometimes gets very extreme)! I am planning to get two battery packs for the SSDs - one of which will solely hold the OS and the other used for playback and isolating the Lynx sound card with its own PSU. Not sure what all this will result in but the idea is only to reduce any contamination with noise.
I also have started unplugging my individual USB external hard drives from the CAPS in an attempt to avoid the drives spewing back any noise into the system.
Would love to hear if anyone else has gone down this route as yet please....

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

isolating the Lynx sound card with its own PSU. Not sure what all this will result in but the idea is only to reduce any contamination with noise.

Lynx engineering: Just trust it! Really. They were probably doing audiophile before anyone thought up the word. Well, metaphorically, at least --- but they do go back a long way, and this is studio-quality stuff.

I wouldn't worry about noise on a Lynx card unless I had a really bad power supply, to which the fix would be fairly obvious.

However... I can and do worry about stuff that happens with USB-powered DACs.

 

[arj]

As this appears to be turning into a fairly general discussion about computer audio, I am wondering if anyone has looked into isolating the power supplies for each of their components within their CAPS or equivalent.
This seems to be a fairly big topic on the Computer Audio Forum (which sometimes gets very extreme)! I am planning to get two battery packs for the SSDs - one of which will solely hold the OS and the other used for playback and isolating the Lynx sound card with its own PSU. Not sure what all this will result in but the idea is only to reduce any contamination with noise.
I also have started unplugging my individual USB external hard drives from the CAPS in an attempt to avoid the drives spewing back any noise into the system.
Would love to hear if anyone else has gone down this route as yet please....

Staxxx, one thing to do is to have only one device on as USB..ideally the Dac. everything else can be wireless.
The more the number of USB devices the more spread out the processor time.

Also try using a separate USB card..the usual ones are not great. I foud that out with Firewire..the quality of the card makes huge difference. Much more than the DAC or Amp

 

[Staxxx]

I will look into a separate USB card. I used to have eight devices plugged into the music server!
The DAC is fed directly of the S/PDIF output of the Lynx card.

 

[arj]

I will look into a separate USB card. I used to have eight devices plugged into the music server!
...

The Firewire is actually a better bet in these cases..you can daisy chain them and each has its own controller so no load on the processor
else go Wifi with shared disks

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Also try using a separate USB card..the usual ones are not great. I foud that out with Firewire..the quality of the card makes huge difference. Much more than the DAC or Amp

Firewire audio has the added difficulty that some interfaces only work with a couple of brands of firewire chip. That has caused a lot of anguished trouble-shooting and pulling out of hair --- but the answer is often in the manual!

 

[bootlegger]

I don't know about HD audio going mainstream yet but having purchased a USB DAC and a small Windows tablet, I've my own computer audio portable and more "mainstream" now that it's free from my computer & home Hi-Fi, as I posted elsewhere on the forum:

I recently finished putting together my new portable HD audio player using a HP Stream 7 with Windows 8.1 ($100), a AudioQuest DragonFly rev.1 USB DAC ($100) and a pair of Grado Labs Prestige SR80 headphones that were also $100. Loaded the free Media Monkey app from the Microsoft store, as well as, a decktop version of Media Monkey to the "desktop" mode of the tablet. A micro SD card is loaded inside the HP is where my music lives and the whole rig sounds awesome, even with lowly mp3 files! Certainly I could have purchased a Pono player ($400) or the high end audio Astell&Kern player for up to $2500, neither of which include the headphones, so I did save quite a bit of $$$ and had fun putting together and configuring the system!