Are CDs on the way out?

MLZ

bikezappa:
My doc said the same thing - not much to do, it sometimes goes away or I ignore it.

But I will always remember our Fraternity walkout in 1967 to UW-Madison where I first saw the Mothers of Invention, the "Anti-Military Ball" in 1968 at Purdue Memorial Union where I was 20 feet from the Greatful Dead and all their audio gear + other rock concerts I truly enjoyed in the 60's & 70's.

George Grand

I'm 54, deaf as a stick, and lived on The Mothers from the late 60's through the 70's. I can't tell you how much I miss that man.

bikezappa

I miss Zappa's music and his comments on the government and people and life.

George Grand

I miss some of the social commentary, but it pales in comparison to the amount that I miss the music. I was always hoping that there was another Hot Rats in him. Both his birthday and day of departure are coming in December.

MLZ

bikezappa wrote:

MLZ


Any comments about the sound quality of the computer or Olive?

I found some time today so I just did an A/B test by:

• Playing the same piece of music (Fred Hersch "In Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis"), by hitting start on the CD player and Windows Media Player 11 at the same time
• By ear, setting the volume in Media Player to match the CD
• Sat in my usual listening position and used the remote control to switch between CD to Tape 1 (RCA analog input to which I connected the Revolution sound card.)

and I hear no difference in quality of sound.

Also, this was an interesting and easy thing to do. Thanks for the idea.

MLZ

The more I listen to my M-Audio sound card, the mote I hear noises on some tracks but not on others (i.e. on Fred Hersch "In Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis", I ripped it to WMA Lossless and when played through the sound card there is sometimes a brief scratchy noise "reoccuring" every three seconds or so.) This does not always occur - I first noticed it midway through the second track on this solo piano track.

When I play the same CD from my computer through my Roku SoundBridge 1001, it sounds fine.

When I play the same CD through my Sony CD player, it sounds fine.

On some other music files I get the same noise, but not all music files. FYI: Noise occured on Sinatras "In the Wee Small Hours" track 13 "It Never Entered My Mind" but track 14 "Dancing on the Ceiling" played fine.

So I filed a bug report with M-Audio. If they don't get back to me by Tuesday, I will return it and look for something that works.

MLZ

M-Audio got back quickly, said it was an IRQ conflict (M-Audia and another device was sharing IRQ 16) so I moved to another PCI slot and it's own IRQ and it the noise appears fixed.

Flash21

George Grand wrote:

I miss some of the social commentary, but it pales in comparison to the amount that I miss the music. I was always hoping that there was another Hot Rats in him.

Hot Rats...one of my favorite albums of all time :cool:

MLZ

The more I listened to my M-Audio 5.1 sound card, the more I heard noise - much occuring when my PC was doing I/O to my second hard drive. M-Audio customer support wanted me to reload Windows with different settings on how it set IRQs. So I returned the Revolution 5.1, did some more research and purchased a SilverStone EB01 USB DAC.

Since it is USB it is isolated and there is no noise I can hear. It has a Burr-Brown DAC and just 2 channels out, but 2 channels was all I wanted.

It sounds very much better than the onboard sound card and is also an improvement on the M-Audio card.