What Does It Take To Turn The PC Into A Hi-Fi Audio Platform?

[nocona_xeon]

I greatly appreciate the work that the author did for this article. But, I disagree with one aspect of his analysis and that is what I would consider the best product to purchase.For probably 10 years now, I have used an E-MU 1820m bit-perfect DSP processing card plus the accompanying DAC audiodock device in a PC that can feed pristine analog signals into amplifiers. You won’t find the 1820m for sale as it was discontinued a long time ago but its specs are still spectacular to this day. Especially 10 years ago! And, of course, I have used EAC’s audio copying software to “bit-perfect” copy my purchased CD’s to HD units. I used to have around 4 to then 8 80GB HD units back then to store the uncompressed audio and please kill the MP3 format so the kids don’t ruin their ears with such inferior audio! Support Neil Young’s project (I admit I don’t know everything about it but lossless is always the way to go). Bring a college/young adult into a listening room with flat and full range response speakers and he/she will NEVER want to go back to iPod white earphones (or blast them).BTW, I have a Supermicro C2SEA machine with the Realtek ALC888 chip and the chip picks-up network and hard disk data MOBO traffic. I can hear it in the background say when I’m listening to DSOTM with headphones. Very poor shielding.My hope is that a company like E-MU will come out with a “1010” DSP processing card that can handle much more filtering (information) at one time meaning the ability to process each input channel with any and all effects and then feed those signals that have not gone through the digital-analog-filter-digital stage (I admit with my 1820m that I use the frequency filtering effects mostly so each speaker gets its proper range – an active crossover). And then E-MU could perhaps change from their Cirrus Logic DAC’s to the ESS ES9018 DAC’s.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Earbuds are crap. We all know that.

However, crap earbuds are not the same as crap MP3s. If you use a high enough bitrate, it should be practically as good as lossless.

Also, hearing machine-related noise through the audio outs tends to be caused by a crap power supply.

 

[cypeq]

Earbuds are crap. We all know that.

However, crap earbuds are not the same as crap MP3s. If you use a high enough bitrate, it should be practically as good as lossless.

Sorry I have to disagree. I also prefer sound and feel of big drivers and open headphones, but 'crap' is over statement. I have pair of nuforce 770 and I absolutely love them. You can't forget what a bang for the buck are good IEM's

EMU0404 ($99) +Senheiser HD203 ($40) + Win7 . Nothing to complain here. Thank you.

nothing outside of low end headphones.

 

[eriksquires]

Nice article, I'm glad you took the time, but there are two problems I have with it. 1. Your choice of materials was really odd to me. Why not get some really good 96 KHz / 24 bit sources which have not been oddly converted? 2. Your claim that there is no difference between CD sound and hi resolution sound was not directly tested. A better test would be to take a really good 96 kHz source and use a utility to downsample it, then try to compare the versions. I do applaud your posting information about the loudness wars, however. Other articles have also shown that DSD versions of the same tracks are often "juiced" in different ways as well and so can not always be directly compared either. 3. It might have been useful to should have done some analog measurements to see if you could have had a universally bad experience. More, below. 4. A major real problem with DAC's that your test design avoided is ground loops. PC's are notoriously bad causes of ground loops. Anyone who has connected the line out from a PC to a stereo has probably encountered this problem. It's completely obvious in the analog domain, but nefarious in the digital domain because it's hidden. I am of the belief that testing a DAC for publication should always use a desktop PC and check the output for jitter.

 

[powerhouse32]

Nice article, I'm glad you took the time, but there are two problems I have with it. 1. Your choice of materials was really odd to me. Why not get some really good 96 KHz / 24 bit sources which have not been oddly converted? 2. Your claim that there is no difference between CD sound and hi resolution sound was not directly tested. A better test would be to take a really good 96 kHz source and use a utility to downsample it, then try to compare the versions. I do applaud your posting information about the loudness wars, however. Other articles have also shown that DSD versions of the same tracks are often "juiced" in different ways as well and so can not always be directly compared either. 3. It might have been useful to should have done some analog measurements to see if you could have had a universally bad experience. More, below. 4. A major real problem with DAC's that your test design avoided is ground loops. PC's are notoriously bad causes of ground loops. Anyone who has connected the line out from a PC to a stereo has probably encountered this problem. It's completely obvious in the analog domain, but nefarious in the digital domain because it's hidden. I am of the belief that testing a DAC for publication should always use a desktop PC and check the output for jitter.

I too felt the choice of music was rather odd, but for different reasons. One is that multi-track studio recordings mixed down to stereo are useless for auditioning purposes. Live recordings are much more helpful in giving an idea if the audio equipment is actually capable of reproducing music faithfully. Also, I doubt the authors/testers have selected even one recording where the recording venue is familiar to them. While high bit-depth material may or may not add audible information that regular CD recordings lack, it's the comparison to the real concert music that I find totally absent in the article. I couldn't care less if equipment A sounds different from equipment B (A-B comparison), what I really care is if the audio equipment is capable of reproducing a real concert. Naturally this requires the auditioner to be able to compare the music played back on the stereo with a real concert, which is only really possible if you are familiar with the concert venue and the music. To really audition stereo equipment takes a long time, listening to entire recordings (CDs) to identify the subtleties and perhaps what's missing, what we don't hear. Sometimes I won't be able to identify any fault with the sound, only to discover after a lenghty session that the stereo equipment strains me and makes me tired, instead of the music engaging me. I agree with you that ground loops and/or jitter should have been checked. But what strikes me most is that the editors/auditioners couldn't hear a difference between so different DACs - that alone should ring an alarm bell. I have currently 4 different DACs (incl. the on-board Realtek one) at my disposal and I do hear differences between them, though it takes time to identify them.