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First, refer to post #11 from zori, it also has some 80-90% of what I wanted to say. But here's what I have to add:
1. CDs
CDs are, in my opinion, because of the pit/land structure, a horrible storage media. If you look at how the 1s and 0s are stored, you can see how they are prone to errors of all sorts. Most importantly, unlike hard drives, CDs don't operate in a closed environment is vulnerable to shocks and dust. There are also quality control issues for replicating CDs -- you have no guarantee that the replicas would be 100% identical to the master.
2. Hard Drives
Hard drives, on the other hand, operate in a closed environment (for magnetic drives, that is, and certainly not a problem for SSDs). You don't have problems with dust (if you do, your drive is dead, end of story) and hard drives are generally more shock resistant than CD readers. For hard drives, you have, for the lack of better words, certainties of 1s and 0s -- you can make exact replicas of digital files to the very bit.
3. Sampling Rates
As zori has pointed out, with CDs, you are capped at 16-bit/44.1kHz. So there's loss of info (or what some of you will refer to as "details") vs. the 24-bit/96kHz or 24-bit/192kHz masters. And here's the funny part that most people forgot: when you are playing a CD and your CD player/DAC claims to upsample to 192kHz, it's essentially interpolation (i.e. an educated guess). On the other hand, digital files can, technically, handle higher bit resolutions and sampling rates, depending on the format. So for practical purposes, don't get obsessed about this 24-bit/192kHz over USB thing.
4. CD vs. Digital File
And some of you are going to say "details" are lost when you rip the CDs into digital files. It's true, but it's also misleading. It's true because whenever you read a CD, there might be dust or vibration or a faulty cable involved and you miss a thing or two here. It's also misleading because you are somewhat susceptible to the same problems/limitations when you play the CD. The ONLY way to get a true lossless file is to get the master digital file from the studios. For practical purposes, ripping a CD at home, with a decent CD/DVD drive and proper software, is as good as you can get.
5. Ripping...
Software: Yes, you need to use the right software -- but bigger doesn't usually mean better, sometimes it's the exact opposite. Some think you should rip multiple times, compare the checksums online, etc. Go play in your sandbox and enjoy yourself.
Drive: Some people think you should use an external USB drive with external power supply to avoid all sorts of interference inside your PC. Yes and no: yes in the sense that you can avoid whatever interference you have in mind, no in the sense that you are susceptible to all sorts of vibration with a standalone drive outside of the case. In my opinion, it's perfectly fine to use a CD/DVD drive that's securely installed inside a heavy case (shield the drive if you really want to). And if you want to be really anal about it, use an external case that's super heavy.
6. Format and Player...
FLAC vs. WAV... Don't give me that bullshit like "WAV sounds better"... FLAC is just a simple compression mechanism. If decoding FLAC becomes a resource problem for your PC, you need a new one.
For the player, first and foremost, I use foobar2000 on Windows. Why? It's freaking free and I am a strong believer that if you use a piece of software that loads hundreds of MBs of drivers/libraries, the drag on the system way overshadows any benefits (if any, that is) from better written software/ algorithms. I would even argue that the sheer size of the software shows that it's either poorly written (in a terribly inefficient way) or it does too many things you probably don't care about. Remember, decoding digital music files is a VERY simple task. For all practical purposes, foobar2000 does a reasonably good job and is highly customizable.
8. Computer...
Use a simple no-bullshit PC. Install plenty of RAM, use a SSD if possible, don't install any unnecessary bullshit software. The machine shouldn't be doing anything other than playing music. You don't need it to be ridiculously fast. In fact, you don't want it to have too much power so that you don't have to worry about heat dissipation. And if you can get away with not installing fans, skip the fans. (Let's leave it at that for my music PC, I can unplug the fan if I want to, and that wouldn't have made much of a difference to the performance of the PC, but that would remove ALL moving parts in the box) Also use an external power supply if possible. And no point in spending $ on a massive media player from one of those big name audio equipment manufacturers -- the bulk of what they put into those boxes aren't that different from what you can get from the computer malls, if you know what you are doing, that is. (You think they will make their own drives/RAM/processors?)
Just my two cents. |
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發表於 2011-8-19 19:50
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