The pros and cons of digital music

[taterguy]

We recently loaded all our CDs onto hard drives and disconnected all the CD players in the house. Everything we listen to is either played on a computer or a device connected to a computer. I'd like to hear from others who have done this and what they like or don't like about it.

[Fire Walk With Me]

1. Do you have an audio card to get better quality than the standard audio outs?

Highly recommended. And different players have different fidelity, so be choosey. (mp3 players too.)

I'm using my DVD player to play CDs over the stereo as it sounds better and has more headroom than my now-defunct CD player. Makes sense, with more bits to burn.

[MissMillie]

2. Just remember to back up often

so that you don't have to spend the time to upload all of that music should something happen.

[Fire Walk With Me]

5. Yeah. As they say, digital data is one step from oblivion.

Back it up.

[Pierre.Suave]

3. I did it

There are some things to be aware of.

First is the BitRate you copied the CDs to your harddrive, the smaller the bitrate, teh worse the sound quality, but the more you can fit on a hard drive of a given size.

Second, how are you getting the music to the stereo? Wireless or a cable of some sort?

Third, did you know that a Digital/Analog converter can increase the sound quality of the digital music if you have sampled it in a high enough bitrate.

Personally, I have my music ripped in a lossless format, not small file size, but also no loss of audio quality. I run it into D/A converter, then into the Stereo. The sound quality is great.

I also used a lot of HDD space.

[taterguy]

6. Tunes get to the speakers via the Xbox

One of the only reasons we have an Xbox is that it lets our computer communicate with our TV and SurroundSound system

[Pierre.Suave]

7. Wow

never heard of that before.

[taterguy]

10. Part of the whole Microsoft plan to control everything

But it's great fun and makes it much easier to convince a spouse that a videogame console is a good addition to the house. We can torture guests by making them watch our digital photo slideshows on our TV.

[styersc]

4. I'm an old fart, I know. And I have relented and have a CD player

and I-pod but there are days (usually late on a lazy Sunday), when I long for the gentle hiss and pop of the old albums played on a turn table. It takes me back to the days of my youth.
Something a little off about listening to Gram Parsons and old school Emmy Lou Harris on electronic devices. It doesn't seem quite Kosher.

[triguy46]

8. I'm going 180 degrees opposite:

Just built a small stereo tube amplifier, my son just gave me a home built tube preamp. Getting the vinyl back out. Trying to get the real sound, not the digital. See link below to join the tube movement:


http://store.tubedepot.com/diy-k12m.html

With the preamp its plenty of power for our infinity speakers. tubes rock.

[Fire Walk With Me]

9. Truth, truth, truth.

I wish I had the money to get my two Eico tube amps repaired.

Or to get the Manley Labs 250 monoblocks.

[triguy46]

11. I wish my brother in law would adopt me so I could inherit his 1975 McIntosh system.

[Joe Fields]

16. I used to have an amp/pre-amp set-up. Dynaco, with a rabco turntable

and electro voice speakers. It was sweet.

[Fire Walk With Me]

18. The Dynaco ST-70 (?) is one of the more popular tube amps these days.

There are many sites with information on swapping out the parts with modern equivs, etc. Hearing some music on one opened my ears to the tube thing.

[Joe Fields]

19. This was from 1970-about 1975. Then I got a new system.

I cannot remember the model number. But I kept my turntable and speakers. I finally upgraded to some phenomenal techniques speakers that made the electro voice sound puny.

[Xithras]

12. Years ago. Movies and music.

I've ripped all of my movies, photo's, and CD's to a computer system available from my home theater system. They can all be accessed directly by a network share from any computer or wireless device in my house, or loaded and viewed on my TV using a MediaPortal powered HTPC. It works beautifully, and I don't have to worry about scratched disks. As an added bonus, MediaPortal can one-click burn any music on the system to disk. When I want to take an album with me and don't feel like loading it onto my iPod, I just pop a CDRW into the HTPC, browse to the CD in MediaPortal, and tell it to burn the music to disk. A couple of minutes later it spits our a disk that will work fine in my car or the CD player in my office. I use RW's exclusively because a single disk can be erased and re-recorded hundreds of times before they wear out.

I have a box of disks and tapes in the closet that I keep for a backup, but most of the DVD's have only ever been used once...when they were loaded into the HTPC and ripped. Nowadays, I don't even buy DVD's...I just Netflix the movie and rip it when it arrives.

[mikeytherat]

13. Data storage is cheap. Rip lossless is you can, high rate if you can't.

Data storage is cheap as chips these days, so if you must compress the files, rip them at 320 kbps. They'll eat more storage, but they'll sound much, much better!

mikey_the_rat

[Xithras]

14. Indeed. 500Gb drives are $99 at NewEgg right now.

Just bought four to expand capacity on my HTPC. I have 500Gb TOTAL right now...can't wait to get the new disks in :)

[mikeytherat]

15. It's almost criminal, ain't it?

Friggin 500 GB externals for peanuts! Sometimes it is faster to "sneaker-net" a drive to one of the other computers in the house than grab files remotely!

mikey_the_rat

[Xithras]

17. A fast network fixes that

I have Gigabit ethernet running between my HTPC and my file server just because the wireless was too slow (you cannot stream HD content over a G network). My home has a wireless LAN running in it, but I also have a few gigabit jacks placed strategically for those occasional large transfers onto my laptop.

I've considered going with external drives, but gigabit ethernet is actually faster than the 1394 slots that most external drives seem to use.

It is nuts though. It seems like just yesterday that I was shelling out $300 for an 850 megabyte hard drive, and I wasn't sure what to do with all the space. When I get these disks installed, I'll have a terabyte running in a RAID1 array, and I'm already wondering whether it's enough!

[mikeytherat]

22. Oh, I have Gigabit Ethernet throughout the house (wired the place myself),

but with some HUGE files it almost seems faster to hop up the stairs to load files from the external (not that I ever really do this - I didn't wire the place to run around the house all the time!).

The only wireless networking I have in my house is from two neighbors' unprotected routers ;)

mikey_the_rat

[Maestro]

20. I've done basically the same.

With a decent sound card and good speakers, it rivals my home stereo.

[mainegreen]

21. Hmmm. I'm going both directions.

I rip everything to the network and all the computers are connected to stereos across the house, but I also rip all downloaded mp3s to cd and maintain a growing vinyl collection.