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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?
[url= http://www.russandrews.com/category-Firestone-Audio-pfirestone.htm ]
Firestone Audio[/url] 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:
and some cheap wharfedale diamonds, for example:
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 - MemberTroll 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...
looks like a half decent mini hifi with some decent headphones is around £300ish
my question is really can I make my computer sound as good as the Denon compact above (for example) for less money?
HIJACK!
I'm about to archive my vinyl onto my HD...is the soundcard that came with my cheap Dell desktop gonna make it a waste of time..if so what can I get that's reasonable?
All for playing lossless through itunes, airport express and proper hifi DAC.
It is in a Hush ATX computer which is a German thing in a case with heatsinks all down the side:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article151-page1.html
I am about to put an SSD drive in it to elimitate the only slight noise you can hear - the hard drive spinning. There is no fan on the video card.
The power supply is a low power affair - 240W I think and probably switching.
I can't notice any noise, the only problem is that the dynamic range on the card is too much for my little LS3/5as to do justice to - it would be better if I ran them with the band-limiting AB-1 but I use expensive external crossovers which would be compromised by the AB-1s.
I am using a Tact pre-amp but will soon go back to my Music First preamp which is a transformer based passive pre-amp which 'sounds' superb and has an effect of making things sound better - for instance I remember being very excited by a new Jose James track that was coming from the DAB radio and would have sounded flat on the Tact. It makes the MF/Quad 909 monos sound like a very good tube amp in terms of smoothness, but without any humming from the power supply or tubes that need replacing 🙂
8)pick up decent power amp off ebay ([b]Quad[/b] 306/606 II/707 if you're lucky, or maybe something nad or rotel)
why would that be then - Mr Woppit?
Briefly, CDs are digital. The way you convert the digital to analogue is important, there's a massive market for DACs (Digital Analogue Converters). Decent sound cards will have better DACs than onboard sound. Really good CD players have really good DACs.
Edit: Whoa, Refresh fail!
looks like a half decent mini hifi with some decent headphones is around £300ishmy question is really can I make my computer sound as good as the Denon compact above (for example) for less money?
Do you want to improve ALL the audio of your laptop, or just music? ie, is ripping music to hard disk and using a network player an option?
timc - Member
as a rule of thumb for your average joe, he's not far off really...
Disagree with that. Talking of bit rate without specifying encoder is like judging a bike based solely on its head angle without considering any other details.
Like I said, 320kbit in Apple's mp3 encoder = poo, 320kbit in LAME = overkill
my question is really can I make my computer sound as good as the Denon compact above (for example) for less money?
my suggestion will sound an awful lot better than the denon with good sources.
However there is another side to the equation - a hi-res system can make listening to low quality sources less pleasurable, so according to how you are going to use it the Denon might make more sense.
That is why I suggest the NAD amps earlier - the 3020 had a uncanny ability to make everything sound 'good' - not some things excellent and others rubbish.
You can get good results out of the Denon - although if you are feeding it from the laptop you will still want something like the Echo card to feed it from - the internal sound system of your laptop is not likely to be very good and is also likely to be very noisy (the echo in contrast is in the same laptop but is very quiet).
is the soundcard that came with my cheap Dell desktop gonna make it a waste of time..if so what can I get that's reasonable
yes - try something m-audio or echo - even some of the latest creative stuff is quite decent.
Really good CD players have really good DACs
but some of the much cheaper pro stuff also has this same dac quality - for example the Benchmark dac 1 or Lavry DA10 which are both around the £1k mark
(my recommendations are old now - I haven't kept up 🙁 )
Lavry DA10 which are both around the £1k mark
I'm using a DA11 at the moment, I guess you can't call it cheap, but compared to what Linn / Naim offer, it's a total bargin. Local Naim dealer who sold both DA10's and Naim thought it outperformed a CDS555 (I think they are mega money 10K?)...plus you don't need a preamp...and it includes a headphone output.
Most importantly, you can't attach any additional 'upgrade' power supplies...it's a proper product 😀
I'm using a DA11 at the moment
told you I was out of date !
I was thinking of getting one when I get rid of my Tact 2.2xp and upgrade my MF pre-amp to remote control.
are you pleased iwth it, what else did you try or did you just go on recommendations.
Turner Guy, tell me more about this Laptop soundcard.
I've got a full Audiolab set up with B&W speakers but my 8000DAX is on its last legs and puts digital static through the speakers when I'm listening to CD's so I've been using the DAC in my Yamaha surround amp instead.
I've been looking for a digital media solution for a while but don't want to lose sound quality
stop it all of you, you're making a sound engineer laugh 🙂
I will +1 BigJim and his M-Audio 2496 Audiophile, ****ing awesome little card. I use one hooked upto a Yamaha O2R96v2 with some Genelec 1031's.
I'm way more awesome than you lot 🙂
retro83 - MemberDisagree with that. Talking of bit rate without specifying encoder is like judging a bike based solely on its head angle without considering any other details.
Like I said, 320kbit in Apple's mp3 encoder = poo, 320kbit in LAME = overkill
Average Joe doesnt know what your talking about & thats why they work to that rule... simple though isnt it, you can do better that 320, but for most 320 is sufficent
the echo indigo is something like £120 and comes in a few flavours - the IOx has an input for recording and also has a volumne controlled output. The headphone output is very high quality though.
The cards are now Expresscard - if you want the older cardbus you will have to buy 2nd hand from ebay for £50-60 - but the echo site has the current drivers.
Whether it is better than the Audiolab I couldn't tell you, but I had a demo with an expensive Cyrus DAC and it equalled that, plus it was better than my previous CD setup and an m-audio firewire 410.
There is a DJ version on ebay at the moment I am watching that comes with an express card adapter.
If you are in near Horsell in Surrey I can demo one - although I can't lend this one as the connector got a little damaged and I don't want to remove it from my lappy as I might have to glue the bent bit down again!
My other one is on a lappy in Cardiff.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr04/articles/echoindigo.htm
are you pleased iwth it, what else did you try or did you just go on recommendations.
I tried a Benchmark DAC-1 and the DA-11....prefered the Lavry (just). I don't use a preamp, just straight into some active monitors (it has a remote control for volume).
Pleased with it? I think it was the final nail in the coffin for 'hifi' products. I'm ashamed of how much time and money I wasted on the british hifi industry.
If you are in near Horsell in Surrey I can demo one - although I can't lend this one as the connector got a little damaged and I don't want to remove it from my lappy as I might have to glue the bent bit down again!
In Glasgow but thanks for the offer!
.
.
precisely - spot on.