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accastil
04-04-2006, 07:39 PM
is it better to play music through a computer's HD than using physical CDs and a CD player? if so, what tweaks can i do with the PC's hardware for the sound to get even better? do i have to upgrade the sound card?

Wireworm5
04-04-2006, 09:22 PM
One of the advantages of computor HD is the ease in which you can queue up playlists and songs. Sometimes too you have a cd that skips in a cd player with a computer cd-rom you may be able to tranfer it to HD without any skips. I was able to do this with a Led Zep cd that skipped the first time I played it. Tranfered it to HD and burned a new copy.
Your computer already has a soundcard in the motherboard. These are better than they use to be. But if you are going to use it for hi-fi then you probably want to upgrade to something like the Creative Soundblaster X-Fi.
I have the Audigy Platinum II. Initially I thought my universal dvd sounded better. But when I tweaked the soundcard settings as best I could. I could barely distinguish the difference and the difference was I had an soundcard set to a instrument soundfield.
The disadvantage of a computer HD is you may get a virus on your computer or your HD could malfunction and you will lose all your stored music. Not a problem if you have everything backed up. But its a tedious process to re-copy everything and can take several days depending on the size of your music library. Or someone else maybe using your computer and you can't access your music. And usually you have to compress cds to mp3 or some other codec to conserve space even with plenty of memory as wav files take too much memory. This degrades sound quality to some extent and maybe unacceptable if you have audiophile standards.
With the new portable HD you can carry your music with you making having cd's only necassary for backups. Myself I have gotten away from using the pc only cause I haven't set aside the time to re-organize and re-copy all my music to hd. With 280 gigs set aside for music storage I can leave the majority of my cds in wav.

teledynepost
04-05-2006, 12:26 AM
Best way is to
1. get a soundcard with optical out, and
2. compress in flac, which is a loss-less compression (such as zip, just tailored for audio files).

Rycher
04-28-2006, 08:10 PM
Best way is to
1. get a soundcard with optical out, and
2. compress in flac, which is a loss-less compression (such as zip, just tailored for audio files).


Exactly! Rip in lossless FLAC and use a soundcards digital out. I have my DIY music server hooked up to my McIntosh pre using the digital out from the soundcard - very nice. The front-end (the program you will use to control your media) is very important. I use Meedio. It's simply the most customizable and easiest front end to use - and it's now FREE!!

http://www.jimmyneutron.org/DSC07531.JPG

http://www.jimmyneutron.org/DSC07600.JPG