Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] "optical digital sound cards" OR "what's the best way to play MP3 files on stereo system?"

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sat, 1 Sep 2007, Jack Smith wrote:

> Another option is to use some sort of USB speaker system. The signal 
> from the computer to the speakers is digital and the speakers have an 
> internal ADC that they use before they can output the signal. I wouldn't 
> think there is any quality difference between digital data sent over a 
> USB cable or an optical line as both are digital.

Right.  And this again brings up the question of whether we want to use 
the DAC in that USB speaker or the DAC on the sound card.  As Mark pointed 
out, it is not necessarily better to transmit digital data from the sound 
card because it will only be converted at a later stage.


> Most music encoded in 192 kbps MP3 and decent speakers sounds close 
> enough to the original CD that I can't tell the difference. 128 kbps is 
> all right, but it can sound a little "fuzzy" at times. Anything below 
> 128 kbps is crap. I use Ogg Vorbis much more than MP3 and Ogg is a 
> little better, with a 160 kbps Ogg Vorbis file being pretty much 
> indistinguishable from thee original CD to me.

Have any of you seen results of a blinded, randomized test?  That's really 
what is needed.  Some special precautions also have to be taken (e.g., 
volume control).  It's tricky.  I feel the same as you, Jack, but it's 
hard for me to know what people really can here.


> I have most of my music ripped as FLAC. It's not that I can really hear 
> a difference between a 160 kbps+ Ogg Vorbis and FLAC but that I can 
> recreate the original WAV file from the FLAC files and burn a perfect 
> copy of the original CD if I lose, scratch, or otherwise maim it. Any 
> lossy codec like Ogg or MP3 will not give you back your original data, 
> so a CD burned from Ogg or MP3 files loses quality if it gets ripped 
> again, like doing serial copies of cassettes.

Very true, but if I just rip to MP3, I never need to make a CD and rip it 
to MP3s.  If I wanted to give it to someone, I could make a mixed CD with 
both audio tracks and MP3 files and that way they wouldn't have a problem 
with lossy encoding.


> FLAC files are large, but I don't see my computer lagging at all when 
> playing them. My old and now-dead 5-year-old laptop with a 2.2 GHz 
> Pentium 4-M didn't use more than about 10% of its CPU while playing FLAC 
> files and my desktop with a 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 X2 uses only a few percent 
> of one core. I think your problem might stem from the fact that FLAC is 
> a much higher bitrate and thus needs to read much more from the HDD than 
> MP3, so if you're fighting something that is HDD I/O heavy, you'll hear 
> that much more in FLAC than MP3 audio.

That's a very good point and I'll bet you are right.  My computer is new 
but not bleeding edge.  It usually plays FLAC fine, but it was probably an 
HDD competition thing that caused the jerkiness.

Mike

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