I listen to music mainly threw Youtube (which cant be the best of quality even in HD)

I believe the best option is a HIFI with good speakers & a CD?

however I have none of the above.

my question is – is there something I can buy for my computer that will produce good sound in conjunction with some good headphones? like a good sound card?

or is the HiFi still be the best option?

Tbh, if you’re just listening to Youtube clips then I think you’ll be wasting your money on anything other than a basic sound card & speakers.

If you want to up the quality, then look at your source files first…is that an option?

lets say I throw a cd in my computer – will a good sound card be as good as a good hifi?

I can’t answer your question, but I do know that upgrading my soundcard improved the quality of recordings I make from LPs to my hard disc.

+1 you really need 320kps files to get A reasonably high fidelity sound

Depends… 😀

Big can of worms here, but doing digital to analogue conversion inside a PC is generally not a great idea. If you can get bit-perfect output from sound card to an offboard hifi/DAC, that’s preferable. Even better in my experience is to use something like a Squeezebox with lossless flacs on your PC hard drive.

I guess we should get this out of the way…how much can you spend? 😛

well if you want a hifi then NAD amplifiers, like the old 3020 amps, have a reputation for making dodgy source material sound good.

You could pick one of these up and some old wharfedale diamonds for not a lot.

If you have a laptop then an Echo Indigo soundcard is an excellent sounding card – even with the volume controlled output versions. You would be looking at £1k of CD player to better it. But it might show up youtubes sound quality.

all about the quality of your source file as stated above!

lets say I throw a cd in my computer – will a good sound card be as good as a good hifi?

yes – the old RME 24/96 PAD had a good reputation and the Lynx Two was a studio quality card.

Book an afternoon in a decent HiFi shop with a listening room. In my experience the staff will happily set up equipment for you to listen to your favourite or selected test music through.
After straining the music through either YouTube or even the CD rom drive in your PC you will either be blown away by the difference and need hifi stuff or if you don’t notice a big difference and realise that you ears aren’t all that sensitive anyway.
I would recommend that you listen to your stuff through a proper set up first so you can really see if you are missing out or not.

As above, how much do you want to spend and what quality are your source files?

Firestone Audio have a good rep but aren’t particularly cheap.

all depends on your budget and also your room size…

realise that you ears aren’t all that sensitive anyway.

they don’t need to be sensitive, just not badly defective.

a good hifi will make things sound more realistic, like vocals. Everyone will be able to hear this difference.

Often it is best to drag your wife/girlfriend into a hifi demo and consider their judgement, as blokes often get too hung up on things like bass quality or some other techy bit but miss the ‘big picture’ of whether it actually sounds better/more realistic.

what quality are your source files

as the OP said – mostly youtube sources.

So I vote for a USB soundcard (the inbuilt sound on your pc/laptop is nearly always very poor and also very noisy) or preferably an echo indigo soundcard from ebay (£50ish) into a NAD amp:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NAD-3020-SERIES-20-LEGENDARY-RETRO-AMP-WORKING-WELL-/280749800043?pt=UK_AudioTVElectronics_HomeAudioHiFi_Amplifiers&hash=item415dfdfa6b

and some cheap wharfedale diamonds, for example:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Wharfedale-Diamond-4-speakers-diamond-IV-and-Speaker-Stands-/180734460866?pt=UK_AudioVideoElectronics_HomeAudioHiFi_HiFiSpeakers&hash=item2a149d03c2

joolsburger – Member

+1 you really need 320kps files to get A reasonably high fidelity sound

Troll or just wrong?

Lossless is by definition the best, but assuming lossy encoding, the encoder not the bitrate is the most important thing.

LAME is transparent to me at about v4 (roughly 160kbps) and Apple iTunes AAC encoder is transparent at about 140kbps. Blind tested using Foobar 2k ABX plugin.

Conversely, 320kbps AAC encoded with FAAC sounds rubbish.

Secondly, most decent encoders, NERO, iTunesAAC and LAME give their best output in VBR mode, not CBR (constant bit rate) as they can use more data where required.

Back to the OP, Spotify is a better quality alternative to using YouTube for music.

sorry the youtube thing muddied the water.

can I get cd’s to sound as good on my computer or will a hifi always win

obviously there is a cost element to this – I was looking at £300-£400 (with speakers or headphones – but just wondered if I could make my computer as good for a lot cheaper?

is it a PC or laptop?

as I said – a laptop with an echo indigo playing CDs will need about £1ks of CD player to match it, based on some dems a while ago, my discarded micromega that is sitting in the loft, and my Lynx Two B soundcard in my silent Hush PC.

BBC did blind listening tests and reckoned 256bit MP3 was the point where people couldn’t distinguish the difference.

Also people used to always rave about the quality of the proms broadcasts on radio 3, but these were 44k, 14bit to the transmitters I think, then encoded to VHF, and decoded again at the consumers radio.

So there is more to perceived sound quality than just bit/sample rate.

laptop

You could buy the echo card new or 2nd hand if it has an express bus slot, or you will need to go 2nd hand if it is cardbus.

I bought my last two for around £50.

If you live in surrey I could demonstrate how good this card is, but you would need to spend a lot to better it. It was aimed at the pro market and ime the best value is to be found in pro market, with stuff like the Echo, Lavry or Benchmark.

You would have to give me notice so I could get my best Music First pre-amp out 🙂

Well if 140bit works for you then horray but personally I’ve only liked 320+ in my system and lossless all the more. Low bit rate sounds crap to me but then I’m no expert on codecs and all that.
Then again I like vinyl better than anything digital I’ve heard so I’m probably some kind of weird luddite.

live in Bolton mate (home of Warburtons bread) 😐

retro83 – Member

Troll or just wrong?

Lossless is by definition the best, but assuming lossy encoding, the encoder not the bitrate is the most important thing.

LAME is transparent to me at about v4 (roughly 160kbps) and Apple iTunes AAC encoder is transparent at about 140kbps. Blind tested using Foobar 2k ABX plugin.

Conversely, 320kbps AAC encoded with FAAC sounds rubbish.

Secondly, most decent encoders, NERO, iTunesAAC and LAME give their best output in VBR mode, not CBR (constant bit rate) as they can use more data where required.

Back to the OP, Spotify is a better quality alternative to using YouTube for music.

as a rule of thumb for your average joe, he’s not far off really…

140bit

I meant 14bit as it sample depth, not bitrate.

My mate has a Technics SP10 with SME V arm and a tube amp stage and it sounds so much better than his expensive CD playback setup.

But it probably to do with things like reduced channel separation, dynamic range, a bit like the radio 3 broadcasts.

who cares as long as it sounds better – we had the LS3/5a room at the HFN shows in 2000 and 2001 using 28 year old speakers and 25 year old power amps and our room was rammed with people saying that this was the best sound in the show.

sefton – Member
lets say I throw a cd in my computer – will a good sound card be as good as a good hifi?

No.

I care if it sounds better!

Should never have sold my 3/5a’s I even had the matching AB3’s with them.

There are numerous ways to skin this particular cat, and here’s another one. Since you’re listening at a desk (I presume…laptop & all that), then you may want to consider some active monitors. Imho one of the audio bargains of the century is the KRK Rokit 5. Get a pair for £250, hook them up to a nice DAC and you’re away. Since moving house & massively downsizing my listening room, I’m now using these monitors through a CI Audio DAC and a Squeezebox, and for the money spent I’m well impressed.

live in Bolton mate

you’ll have to trust me then 🙂

your laptop with an echo card with the volume control would make a very solid base for several thousand pounds worth of speakers/amps – as long as your laptop doesn’t have a noisy fan that runs most of the time.

See if your laptop has a cardbus or express card slot – if cardbus I could lend you one after Xmas as mine is with a mate who is digitising his record collection with it.

You would not then need a pre-amp as the card has a high quality volume control, so you could pick up decent power amp off ebay (Quad 306/606 II/707 if you’re lucky, or maybe something nad or rotel) – for maybe £200/250, and then go to a hifi shop that would give you an initial demo of their speakers and then let you have a cooling off period at home if you found that they sounded very different (which they can do because of room shape/furnishings).

Cheap van Damme 2.5mm speaker cable from maplin and some half decent basic stands and you would have something for £400 which would sound excellent and you would have to spend a lot more in the hifi shop to better it.

No

why would that be then – Mr Woppit?

why would that be then – Mr Woppit?

I will answer for him if that’s OK main reason would be electrical noise generated by the PC. Even though it has to pass EMC emissions tests to get CE marked its still not going to be as electrically quiet as something that is designed to be quiet. You could use it with an external DAC I suppose that would give better performance. Also in the past the error detect/correction strategies were not as good in cheaper. Also the quality of the transport (disk spinny thing and laser etc) would mean more bit errors in the first place.

But ….. Probably would sound good enough for 90% of us 🙂

main reason would be electrical noise generated by the PC

depending on the quality of soundcard and the engineering behind it this is not the case – check out the old Lynx Two card review in a pro mag:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar02/articles/lynxtwo.asp

“Like the Lynx One before it, the Lynx Two proves that a soundcard with internal converters can provide superlative audio quality on a par with many stand-alone converter units if well designed with absolutely no compromises”

bear in mind that the converters he was talking about would be considerably more expensive, and the ‘consumer’ equivalents (dCs) would be even more expensive.

The cheaper RME cards also produced good results.

You could use it with an external DAC I suppose that would give better performance

When using an external DAC you still have the problem of needing a high quality soundcard to produce a well clocked signal, and then the DAC has to be able to cope with any jitter it is feed.

A firewire linked audio interface may be a good compromise – or an RME multiface which was suppossed to sound good.

Also the quality of the transport (disk spinny thing and laser etc) would mean more bit errors in the first place.

Many of the transports used in expensive consumer CD players were in fact the same drives used in computers – Meridian for example.

Also when playing from computer it is likely the CD will be ripped to HD, avoiding the attempts of a dedicated CD player to real-time correct any playback errors.

depending on the quality of soundcard and the engineering behind it this is not the case – check out the old Lynx Two card review in a pro mag:

Its not just down to the quality of the sound card though its down to the quality of the PC as well. If you have the analogue stage inside the PC case it will be subject to the noise from the PC no matter how clever you are with the screening and filtering. Its a compromise from the start.

Its a bit like a 911 Porsche have solved the problem but they have made it hard for themselves 🙂

You are right about audio sources ripped to hard disk, probably the best source you can have.

I am not saying you can’t get great results with a setup like this but if you want it to be really good its not quite as simple as banging a high quality sound card in any old PC.

might throw something like this & some good headphones on my Christmas list http://www.richersounds.com/product/mini-hifi-systems/denon/dm38dab/deno-dm38dab-sil

Personally i don’t rate mp3 at all: the perceptional layer of the codec throws away the stuff that it thinks you wont notice, and even at 320k I hear a big difference. FLAC files on a computer or mp3 player offer the best size/fidelity compromise ime.

I use an external DAC with a USB interface (musical fidelity V-DAC, about £150). It retimes, upsamples and digitally filters the computers PCM output giving better sound than on my CD player that cost 4x as much. You can also play upto 24bit 192KHz WAV/FLAC files.

@TurnerGuy: Why would firewire be better? is it just specified for less jitter?

Also an external DAC means that you can easily remove any noise due to the power supply in the PC. This is probably the primary reason that an external can be made to sound good more easily.

That Denon is ok for what it is, but with your brief I’d go for a Squeezebox Touch. I’ve had the previous model, the Squeezebox 3, as the front end to a really nice headphone system. The Touch is meant to be an improvement, particularly with regards to it’s on-board DAC (I always used an external one). Plus it’ll handle 24/96 kHz bit perfect.

Why would firewire be better? is it just specified for less jitter

I don’t think there is a clear difference now – early USB had problems and firewire has the advantage of not sharing the interface with the mouse (used to be a popular critism), but it is down to implementation.

Also an external DAC means that you can easily remove any noise due to the power supply in the PC.

I don’t think is so much an issue with a decent card – the video card might be producing more noise. It seems to me that one of the big issues is jitter and internal cards have an advantage as everything is in one place – which is probably why the echo indigo sounds so good.

Originally I had a micromega leader which cost £800 and sounded very good and was used in 2000 in that ls3/5a hifi room – then I upgraded a fair bit with a reclocking ‘upsampling’ box and an m-audio external dac, but the echo sounded way better. My Lynx is better still.

TurnerGuy

Do you have this in a bog standard PC or have you done anything else to make it electrically quiet. Are the silences free of artefacts?

I really am interested by the way and I am not Trolling.

I use an M-Audio Audiophile 2496, but if you are only listening to Youtube, anything will do really. If you are on a laptop I’m not sure what is best. I have an Edirol UA1X I don’t use lying around somewhere…