The greatest hits of the audio segments of the modern computer and consumer electronics industries–the iPods, MP3s, bookshelf stereos and the rest–have brought unrequited pleasure to millions of people all around the world. If you’re one of them, this story isn’t for you.
If, by contrast, you harbor secret doubts about the quality of sound you’re getting out of your computer, MP3 player or living room stereo, and if you are willing to put in a small amount of money but possibly a large amount of time improving things–sometimes, without even the guarantee that it will actually make a real difference–then read on. You have the potential to become an obsessive audiophile.
This guide is aimed at people who have a collection of digital music and a home stereo system, and who want to make them sound as good as they can. Some of the ideas involve spending money. Most don’t.
Gear
Speakers, as you have surely heard before, are the most important part of any stereo system. If you are in the market for new ones, you’ll need to fortify yourself for the task. There are thousands of models to choose from, and the process for picking a pair is entirely subjective.
If there is an audiophile store in your area–not a big box chain, but the sort selling equipment with unfamiliar brand names–then head out to it with three or four of your favorite CDs in tow. (Don’t be surprised if you are having trouble finding such a store, as they too are becoming victims of e-commerce and a poor economy.)
Listen to speakers in your price range; make sure they are at the same volume. Whole books can be written about what technically to be listening for in a speaker. An excellent bit of non-technical advice comes from Jim Smith, author of “Get Better Sound,” who says that in doing your evaluation, you should let your ear be your guide.
“Listen for the speaker that is the most involving, the one that lets you pay attention to the music itself, rather than the speaker,” advises Smith. “Ask yourself, ‘Am I being emotionally involved in the music? Or being bored by it?’ ”
Another decision you will have to make involves whether you’ll buy a traditional pair of stereo speakers, or if you’ll opt for the five- or six-speaker ensemble associated with home theaters. More people are choosing the latter; indeed, the traditional two-speaker stereo system is increasingly an endangered species. However, many surround-sound customers say rear speakers are over-rated, since they get used only in occasional scenes and only in a certain breed of action movies. Even with a big-screen HD television, a pair of good stereo speakers can often deliver all the sound thrills the movie needs. That’s especially true if a sub-woofer is added to help punch up the occasional explosion or rocket launch.
But if you don’t have the budget for new speakers, you can get better sound out of the ones you have by–if your room allows it–moving them out away from the walls. Being two or three feet from a wall helps open up the sound; speaker stands are one way of managing this. Make them good and heavy, but padded from the floor below so they don’t vibrate and distort when bass notes are played.
Since bare walls and hard edges are bad for sound, adding a few rugs, plants and wall hangings will also make your room more music-friendly. A good rule, says Smith, is that if the room is acoustically enjoyable for a conversation, it will probably work for music, too.
There is a similar bit of housekeeping you can do in your car. Sean Olive, director of acoustic research at Harman International, recommends getting rid of anything in the side pockets of your front doors that might be rattling whenever the speakers are playing bass notes.
Speakers aren’t much help if you’re stuck in an office cubicle, or listen to lots of iPod music on the run. Consider, though, an upgrade to the standard-issue earbuds that come with the device. “People need to listen to what a difference better earbuds can make,” says Michael Fremer, Stereophile magazine columnist. He recommends buds from Shure, Etymotic or Future Sonics. You can spend anywhere from about $50 up to many hundreds of dollars on a new pair.
And don’t be afraid of using regularly sized earphones with your iPod; you’ll never be cast in an Apple commercial, but you’ll get great sound. Fremer’s recommendations here are AKG, Grado Labs and the Sennheiser HD line.
If you send music from a notebook or desktop to your home stereo system, there is another bit of gear you should consider: a specialized DAC, or digital-to-analog converter. This is the device that converts digital bits into analog sound waves.
Jeff Bridges, who handles National Semiconductor’s chip lines used in audio equipment, said that cheap components, including seemingly innocuous items like the output jacks for headphones, can subtly degrade sound quality. You can bypass these with a specialized DAC; they start at around $100, and are available from many companies, including Avid’s M-Audio and Musical Fidelity.
Mark Williams, of Avid, likens the experience of a good DAC to the view through a just-cleaned window. “When people are speaking, you go past the words to hear the timbre of the voices. With music, there will be so much detail in the midrange that something that sounded flat before will sound rich. With high notes, there will be an airiness and openness; they will seem to go on forever.”
Playing digital music on your home stereo also means connecting a computer to your receiver. That’s not a problem if they are in the same room, or you can run a cable between them. If that’s not the case, you can connect over your home’s wireless system with products like Apple’s Airport Express, or the SqueezeBox from Logitech.
Formats
If you are checking in on the digital music scene after being away for a while, you’ll notice, besides MP3s, all manner of new acronyms: FLAC, APE, WavPack and more. The latter are formats for storing uncompressed music, which, unlike an MP3, is identical to what is on the original CD. These “lossless” files tend to take up roughly seven times the room as MP3s, which squeeze bits out in the interest of smaller files.
Can you hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed? It’s a tricky question. Almost surely not if you only listen to pop music on an iPod with its regular earbuds. Even with a well-equipped home system, it may be tough. David Bryant, the programmer responsible for the WavPack lossless system, says he is usually unable to discern the difference between a 320 kilobit MP3 and a lossless file, despite the considerable audiophile gear in his house.
Audiophiles insist there is no debating the point: Uncompressed music sounds more three-dimensional that what they regard as flat MP3 music. There is free software you can download to see if you can tell them apart; read about it here.
Actually, you might as well use uncompressed files, since disk storage is now so cheap there’s hardly a reason not to. A one-terabyte drive now costs less than $100, and can hold well over 3,000 uncompressed CDs of popular music. And Bryant notes perhaps the best reason: the peace of mind you’ll get from knowing there’s no possibility you’re missing out on something because you’re listening to an MP3 instead of the original.
Both iTunes and Windows Media player let you rip into uncompressed formats. Their methods for doing so, though, are proprietary, and while there are often workarounds, using Apple or Microsoft’s proprietary approaches tend to lock you into using the companies’ software and hardware.
All of the other programs like FLAC, by contrast, are open source, meaning the files they create can be easily moved from one format to another with absolutely no degradation of sound quality.
Indeed, the open source lossless formats have some very influential fans. FLAC developer Josh Coalson proudly notes that among the many users of his software–perhaps the most popular of all of them–are the Beatles, who used FLAC for the digital part of the release of their remastered catalog.
No matter who they are from, all the lossless programs all do exactly the same. Matt Ashland, who works on the APE lossless project, compares the programs to what WinZip does with word processing documents. The differences among the programs are tiny, and involve how quickly and efficiently they can encode or decode music. Some are eaiser to use than others, though all of them tend to be designed with experienced computer users in mind. That might be another reason you’d want to stay with iTunes or Windows Media Player.
One big disadvantage of the open source files is that the iPod won’t play them, at least without a software modification like RockBox, which works on some brands of the device. RockBox doesn’t make any permanent change to your iPod, so you can remove it if you don’t like it.
Another disadvantage is that portable music players don’t yet have as much storage space as desktop PCs, and can’t hold as many lossless files. A work-around is to make a second special, smaller file out of anything you want to be able to load onto an iPod.
Most of the CD-ripping process is straightforward, though one step in the process involves some amount of uncertainty: the actual scanning of the CD drive. Because there are so many different models of computers and hard drives, it’s hard to know if the process has been error-free. As a practical matter, programs like iTunes invariably do a perfectly fine job on this, especially with disks that are clean and unscratched.
But if this is something that will worry you, you can take advantage of free software like EAC or dBpoweramp, which take special precautions in the ripping process. They also check the results with a centralized database to see if your results were the same as what others reported for the same CD.
The Future
The specs for the compact disk were developed in line with the capabilities of the digital hardware of a generation ago. To make a CD, an analog sound signal is sampled 44,100 times a second, with each sample containing 16 bits of information.
During the 1990s, the consumer electronics industry developed higher-resolution CDs, like DVD-Audio, which sampled 96,000 times a second at 24 bits a pop. While the files took up more space, they produced what audio fans said was a richer, fuller sound, though on account of the laws of acoustics, the improvement was nowhere near twice as good, as the raw numbers might have suggested.
The new formats, though, went nowhere, perhaps because the required consumers to upgrade their CD drives. Now, though, thanks to the Internet, high-definition digital music is having a resurgence in the form of downloadable digital files that bypass a plastic disk entirely. Think of them as uncompressed, high-resolution versions of the MP3s you find everywhere.
Sites like HDtracks, Linn Records, HD Giants and 2L sell 24-bit, high definition music. Traditional audiophile categories like classical and jazz are well-represented; a typical hour-long “album” of high-definition music might run you $17.
Before buying, you’ll need to check if your equipment can handle it; Mac and Windows operating systems of the last few years have the ability to, though different sound cards, motherboards and DACs might not.
There are any number of sites on the Internet to help you sort out these issues. They include Hydrogen Audio, Head-Fi, Audio Asylum, AudiKarma, ComputerAudiophile and Well-Tempered Computer.
Just like there were vinyl records before CDs, so too did audio magazines precede Web sites and blogs. Some of the venerable ones include Stereophile magazine, along with Gramaphoneand Hi-Fi News, both from England. Start reading them, though, and you may find yourself ditching digital music entirely and going back to vinyl.