A Music Lover’s Guide to Computer-Based Music (TAS 197)
November 18th, 2009 -- by Steven Stone
Source: The Absolute Sound
Source: The Absolute Sound
What is a CD, really? It’s a bunch of digital music files on a disc. Why not eliminate the disc, put the music files on a computer’s hard drive, and play the files via your computer rather than through a CD player? That’s what computer-based audio is all about.
Once you have a computer, music playback software, and storage for your music files, you need a way to move the digital music files so they can be played over your stereo system. If your computer is near your stereo you can connect the computer to your system by one of several methods.
Because there are so many ways to get from point A to B to C, creating a comprehensive and totally up-to-date guide that includes every permutation of hardware and software available is nearly impossible. Instead this primer will explain and describe categories of software and hardware needed to accomplish the job along with a smattering of market-leading products.
Just as with analog audiophilia, the world of computer-based audio can be as simple or as complicated as you choose to make it. For some folks computer audio is an all-consuming hobby, while for others it’s merely another, more convenient way, to access their music libraries.
The Basic Building Blocks of Computer Audio
In computer audio the first and most obvious component is a computer. Computers come in two primary varieties—PC and Mac. Despite what competing commercials would have you believe, both are fully capable of working equally well as part of a digital music-delivery system. Which one is a better choice comes down to your personal priorities and budget.
Mac-based systems are ideal for someone who wants to keep life simple. Mac’s iTunes software was designed for the Mac and works seamlessly with other Apple devices such as the Airport Express, Airport Extreme, and Apple TV. The primary advantage and disadvantage of a Mac is that you have fewer options in terms of software and hardware. As you‘ve probably learned from Microsoft’s attack commercials, Apple hardware is more expensive, but not prohibitively so—a Mac Mini, which works very nicely for computer audio, has a base price with a 120GB drive of $599.
PC-based music systems are available in a mind-numbing variety of configurations and prices. Both the least expensive and most expensive computer-based music systems use a PC chassis. The differences in price are due to both hardware and software options, as well as how much customer support and initial set-up help comes with the system. With skills and patience you can literally build a music-server PC piece by piece, carefully selecting every component, at substantial savings over a similarly featured turnkey system. But given the nature of computers, doing it yourself will involve far more time and effort and the end result may still be less user-friendly and potentially less reliable than a completely preassembled system. Some especially computer-savvy audiophiles have built music systems based on Unix or Linux operating systems, but this is only for those who really love working with computers.
The music playback software you choose will have a profound effect upon the quality of sound you’ll hear from your computer-based music system. It also has a major impact on the ergonomic elegance of the system. As I mentioned earlier, with a Mac your options are more limited than with a PC. Most Mac users opt for iTunes, but there are other options including MPE Player, VLC Player, Real Player, and Audacity (which is also a very good recording program). If you go with a PC the list of music playback programs goes on and on. Almost every week there’s a new piece of software for music playback available.
Regardless of what flavor of system you chose, you need a place to store your music files. Hard drives have become so inexpensive that storage space has become infinitely expandable. Most computer music systems employ at least a pair of 500GB drives so that one can serve as a backup for the other. Hard drives can be mounted inside the computer or externally via USB, Firewire, or Ethernet connections. Recently SSD (solid-state or silicon) drives, which can replace moving-part hard-drive discs with physically static memory chips, have come down in price to where they are also a viable storage option. Since SSDs have no moving parts and generate no physical vibrations or heat some computer audiophiles feel they offer a sonic advantage over hard drives.
Ready-to-Play Systems
Some music lovers have the money, but neither the time nor the inclination, to assemble their own computer-based music system. Fortunately quite a few companies offer complete “turnkey” systems. One of the better-known options is Olive (olive.us). Olive offers units with built-in CD trays for CD ripping, a built-in hard drive, and provisions for multi-room wireless or wired setups. Its base unit, the Melody N2, is priced at $1499. Another company, Qsonix (qsonix.com) offers several models of music servers that will support up to 192kHz music files. Its Q105 2-zone system’s base price is $4450. Moving up the price ladder, Soolos (meridian-audio.com/product-model/sooloos-media-system.aspx) offers an ergonomically elegant system that uses a touch-screen 17-inch LCD to select music from its library as well as a proprietary metadata database which permits users to do exacting searches of their music libraries. A basic Soolos system starts at $12,000.
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Comments
I went for simplicity, so I have a MacMini, an external HD, and an AirPort Extreme which allows wireless streaming of my ripped or purchased MP3 or Apple Lossless files to my Audio system. Total investment was less than $700, and I have immedite real-time access to any of my 600+CDs' worth of music.
To make a semi-controversial comment, to my ears the Apple Lossless digital files sound AT LEAST as good as (and to my ears often better than) the sound from my previous CD player.
I have been using the exact same setup since Oct. 06, and I absolutely love it. I have my Mini hooked up to my tv, and use it as a media server. Movies from Netflix and iTunes, all my music and the internet. With the new graphics upgrades, the Mini is even harder to beat as an all in one media solution. Add an AirPort and an iPod Touch or iPhone with the remote control app, and you have a system for the whole house.I have noticed a substantial upgrade in sound since iTunes 9 was released. I agree, tracks from Apple Lossless sound better than my CDs. If Apple would add Blu Ray and HDMI, , the Mini would be just about the greatest product on the earth.
Hi: I've been thinking about doing with the same type of computer-based playback as you have with the MacMini. WHat do you use to control playback from the MacMini? I'm thining of using an iTouch.
The MacMini comes with a very simple (TINY!) remote, so I use. It's infrared, though, so won't work through walls.
As was mentioned, though, an iPhone or iPod touch can also be used, or a universal remote like a Logitech, as far as I'm aware. MacMini also included software called Front Row that makes accessing the various file types (music, video, etc.) very straightforward.
however you are forever limited to using these files in an Apple device. FLAC processing is also freely available and gives you true ownership of the music....
I'd like to know the details, since I'm in a similar situation. Can't put the Mac in the living room near the pre-amp, tho. Need details on the wireless interconnect mechanism and DAC location. Could you reply directly to me with a complete description of your set-up?
Thanks in advance.
Tery C. Moore (not verified) -- Mon, 12/07/2009 - 10:13
I'd like to know the details, since I'm in a similar situation. Can't put the Mac in the living room near the pre-amp, tho. Need details on the wireless interconnect mechanism and DAC location. Could you reply directly to me with a complete description of your set-up? Thanks in advance.
Not sure who your question was intended for, but my setup is really simple:
MacMini in the kitchen (has built-in 802.11G wireless)
AirPort Extreme base station plugged into an outlet behind my A/V receiver in the family room
TOSlink (Optical digital) cable from the AirPort to the A/V receiver
I can use the MacMini remote to access the music, but most often I just use the mouse to go directly to iTunes.
That's it. Works great in my situation. If you wanted to be able to browse your music on a TV or monitor in a room separate from the MacMini, you'd need something like Apple TV.
F Y I PS Audio is working on a turn key solution. No reason to think it will not be priced reasonably and be good value for $$. No,I am not associated with them in any business way.
If I understand this correctly, all PC based music file formats (MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIF etc) are not a bit-for-bit transfer of the CD file, but "interpretations" of the original CD file (some may say "corruptions"). In effect, PC based music systems today attempt to replace both components of a traditional CD player - the transport and the DAC. Great if you want to hear music through a set of speakers connected to the headphone output of the PC but not so good if you want audiophile quality sound. Therefore the introduction of this article is not literally correct.
Is there a solution out there that will purely transfer the digital file from the CD (encapsulated for the PC geeks) to the hard drive, use the metadata (album, artist, song title, playing time etc) to present an iTunes style friendly user interface/jukebox on the PC and then to play just transfer the original source data (bit perfect) from the hard drive to an external DAC that is just like the one in a traditional CD player? Thus bypassing all of the PCs internal "music system" (DAC, amp etc) and the need for spending lots of money of clever sound cards etc. Just do what PCs are good at - storing, presenting and transfering data. Surely this would then be audiophile nirvana!
No, Wayne, you do not understand correctly :)
Like other media (eg, images), there are lossy and lossless storage formats. Lossy formats (eg, jpeg for images, mp3 for audio) use processing algorithms to selectively discard info that is less likely to be missed by the user/data consumer. Lossless formats, as their name implies, do not discard any data. Lossless audio formats incude .wav, .flac, .alac, .aiff and others. wav and aiff are uncompressed, while flac and alac are losslessly compressed, meaning they are compressed in a way that does not lose any original data (like zip files, but optimized for audio). they are bit-for-bit representations of the pcm audio data from whence they came.
baald
Then perhaps I have already reached Nirvana (for now at least). From an old clunker PC (in another room of the house) with 500GB of Apple Lossless music managed by iTunes, I stream via an AppleTV over ethernet to my amp connected by HDMI. To my ear it sounds better than the CD player but perhaps a little too bright. I though this might have been the result of the music delivery process but perhaps the DAC in the Pioneer amp may be to blame. Thanks to the contributors above for setting me straight on the music file formats.
WAV files are direct, near bit for bit, copies of the original. The reason I say near is that I am not sure what type of headers are contained on red book cd. The audio is a PCM encoding identical to what is contained on the disc. The digital PCM values could be directly transferred to the DAC. This format is about 700 MB per CD. It is a good thing that hard drives are cheap these days.
FLAC, Apple Lossless, and WMA Lossless are all digitally compressed and reduce the file size considerably. However, upon playback the files are uncompressed and no data is lost. This is similar to how Zip files compress your documents but the contents remain intact. Exact Audio Copy will produce WMA Lossless and FLAC files; I think you may be stuck with iTunes for Apple lossless. Other compression algorithms use psychoacoustic filtering to reduce the fidelity.
I use an internal sound card from Auzentech, the X-Fi Prelude. This sound card is fantastic. There is a lot of hype regarding USB DAC’s, but you would have to spend a lot of money on one to match the sound quality of this card.
Of course TAS wants to convince you that every part of the computer music chain matters. Except it doesn't. Using digital music files as a source is a brilliant idea, but using a PC or Mac as an audio component is really counter-productive. Why start with a noisy environment and then spend a fortune trying to deal with the noise?
You don't need a multi-thousand -dollar computer front-end. There's this technology called NETWORKING, that completely isolates the noisy computer from the listening room. Throw the files on a big hard drive and stick it in an old PC. Then use wired or wireless networking to stream the files to a simple, inexpensive, quiet playback unit in your listening room. I suggest a Squeezebox. For $300 you can have a great-sounding music jukebox. Stop obsessing over hardware and just enjoy the music.
This is a great article but I was dismayed when it started heading off in the direction of "we'll hold your hands if you've got the money" solutions like Sooloos. Most of us have all we need already. That's a network disk attached to a wireless router. Copy your CD's to wav files on the network disk so there's no lossy compression. The media player on your laptop computer can play your files. Lastly put a $500 DAC between the laptop's USB output and your amp and now listen to your whole music collection in CD-player quality. No need to spend more. Worried about this mysterious alchemy called "jitter" so beloved of audiophile purists? Do the A/B tests between your CD-player and the PC+DAC and see if you hear any difference. I couldn't. The computer has replaced the whole front-end of the audio industry in living rooms. This is progress.
A SPECIAL THANKS TO STEVEN STONE FOR HIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE. FOR THOSE OF US WHO HAVE NOTHING OR AT MOST, VERY LITTLE AND SEEKING FOR OPTIONS TO ENTER THIS FASCINATING ASPECT OF MUSIC, THIS IS A REFERENCE ARTICLE ! MOST COMMENTS SEEM TO BE FROM THOSE WHO ALREADY HAVE SOMETHING THEY LIKE BUT FOR ME, YOUR ARTICLE HITS THE MARK AND GIVES ME SOME DIRECTIONS TO CONSIDER!
I can see all kinds of benefits to HDtracks - IF ONLY they would allow their music to be purchased and downloaded from Canada. C'mon HDtracks, get with the program - in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason not to allow someone outside the U.S. to purchase what you're selling!!
Personally no trouble dowloading their music on cdn soil.
You can purchase HD Tracksoutside the US. I live outside the US and have purchased and downloaded tracks from them.
You need to fill in a US address in the registration form (I bet you have a US based friend who wouldn't mind you using his/hers). But the site doesn't check your IP or where the file is being downloaded to, once you've purchased it online.
Enjoy!
I would like to replace my CD player with a hi-end, stand-alone DAC. I dislike being forced to supply a CD player with its appetite for 0’s and 1’s via the shinny disk. A CD is merely one of numerous storage mediums. So why limit your storage capacity by the few lossless songs that can fit on a 700MB disk and have to constantly change disks?
The problem I am looking to solve is a way to use a laptop PC to feed the 0’s and 1’s via a CAT5 Ethernet connection to a quality (or hi-end) DAC, and use software that is on the laptop to control what is being played.
For example, if I wanted to take the sonically inferior route of connecting the analog output of the laptop to my pre-amp, then all I have to do is start-up Windows Media Player (comes bundled with Windows) and press play. But I do not want the crummy DAC in my laptop to be sending the analog signal to my pre-amp. I do not want my laptop or PC playing any role in feeding my stereo an analog signal.
So how do I tell my laptop to simply transfer data (the 1’s and 0’s) over a TCP/IP Ethernet connection to a quality DAC, and let the DAC feed my pre-amp?
A lot of articles and discussions focus on all of the different and sometimes pricey software that is available for this or that. Can I not use Windows Media Player instead? It plays the songs that I ask it to play. What else is it supposed to do as it relates to playing the songs I desire it to play? I do not need it to rip, download, double as an instant messenger, e-mail client, or interface with facebook. I just want it to play the songs that I tell it to play.
I also prefer to organize my music myself. I do not want to figure out how the various software packages organize everything (some automatically – so what does that mean? How do I know that I will agree with the software author’s opinion of organizing my music files?). My music files are already organized.
I have a music folder (or directory) and scores of sub-folders; each sub-folder is the name of the artist or band. So I quickly and easily know where everything is, and can play any individual song or entire folder, or its parent folder with ease. So why the need for all of the after-market stuff? I just want to press play and let a hi-end DAC feed the song to my pre-amp.
Can anyone let me know if there is a way to tell Windows Media Player to play a song, and the laptop then sends that song (or file), via TCP/IP over an Ethernet cable, to the stand-alone quality DAC?
Then there are articles that discuss various cables or types of cables that offer better sonic results than others. Here, too, I am confused. We are transferring 0’s and 1’s between a computer and a DAC (via error correcting TCP/IP). Whether the source of the data is a CD, hard drive, floppy drive, thumb drive, or any other medium that stores computer files, what difference does it make? If I give you an Excel spreadsheet, or a digital photo, and it is on a floppy disk or a thumb drive, it is the same exact file - down to the last byte.
I would think that aside from having a quality, lossless, .wav or .flac file, the PC contributes zero to the sound quality if it is only copying the data from its hard drive to the stand-alone DAC. The sound quality would be with the DAC that you are using to feed your pre-amp, etc, but not upstream from the DAC (meaning the laptop). The DAC is what is actually creating the sound where there was no sound. It reads the millions of 0’s and 1’s and converts them to an analog signal. You are hearing "sound" that is created, from nothing, by your DAC, or am I mistaken?
I agree that cables used to connect analog signals between components (interconnects) clearly contribute to the overall sound. But digital, Ethernet cables that are transferring a file from point A to point B? I do not see how the Ethernet cable between a laptop and a DAC can sonically contribute anything. It is not sending an analog signal. If you download a music file from a friend or commercial web site, you end up with "exactly" the same file that was on their side, and the transfer from them to you is over both their and your Ethernet cables (and countless other “internet service provider” cables, routers, switches, etc between them an you). Yet, regardless of the cables that all of the above are using, you get an exact, byte for byte, copy of the original file.
What am I missing?
Any help or clarification on whether or not it is possible to set-up the type of “laptop to DAC” connection I discussed above, and control what is being played via the laptop, is both welcome and appreciated.
BTW, vinyl rules! ;-)