New Alpine Headunit

cam5860

The Alpine IDA-X001 is all about the ipod no cd player built in. But it has a 24 bit burr brown DA converter built in with a nice tft 2.2 screen. Pretty nice if your a ipod lover.

exalted512

different. I like it. In fact, thats probably the only Alpine I would ever consider based on cosmetics
-Cody

bknauss

Its a cool idea. You could rip your songs into the Apple lossless compression and have a ton of songs in the palm of your hand. Its currently on my possible upgrade list.

1996blackmax

The major problem with that unit, besides no cd player, is the lack of processing features. I had hoped it would have both of these features .

Jack from Indo

Questions:

1. Will this unit allow you to control the ipod from the ipod itself, if you want to?

I've tried HU's that are designed with special Ipod in cable, but you have to give up using the ipod screen and touch wheel, which is a pain in the a**, and not nearly as good as using the ipod itself.

engtaz

Yes but do you have to bow down to ipod format or does it do all formats?

engtaz

howie777

Well the whole point of the center wheel control in this HU is to mimic the Ipod's click wheel. So it should be just like controlling the iPod. The menu's work the same too (or so Alpine says).

So it "should" not matter that you can't controll the iPod itself while its docked to the HU.

I hear you though. I hate my 2004 Alpine's iPod controls. And for processing, I was trying to figure out about Alpines new imprint tech. I assume you would need to buy their imprint module to get those features with this HU

Howie

Jack from Indo

Ok, what I mean is that I can hold the ipod right up to my eyes, (provided I have a decent length aux in cable) and fiddle it while driving.

Sure, you shouldn't do that, but we are all gonna do it anyway, no matter how many times our mother tells us not to. Try looking at the HU screen and go through your playlists or genre's while driving. Ain't gonna happen.

When you can hold the ipod up to you eyes though, you can.

Thom

With last year's ipod cable, the ipod says "Alpine" on the screen when it's plugged in. But it was so easy to control on the W200 that I wouldn't want to use the ipod itself to control it. In my car I've got an older RF head unit and I have to use the aux in, and I hate having to use the ipod controls while driving...

Jstas

I doubt many people would be using Apple's lossless compression so a 24 bit Burr-Brown is a waste on an MP3 player. I agree with blackmax. There is a lack of features and having no CD player REALLY limits that unit's marketability.

DRM is going to kill the iPod and it's imitators. There has already been an alarming 17% drop in sales over all music media in the last 6-8 months. They attirbute it to everything from pirating to economy but the number don't lie and the companies hardest hit are those heavy on the DRM BS.

Jack from Indo

Jstas wrote:

I doubt many people would be using Apple's lossless compression so a 24 bit Burr-Brown is a waste on an MP3 player.

Um, how come? What if you using MP3's ripped at high bi rate, like 320?

MacLeod

I dunno John. Ipods are exploding and MP3's in general seem to be all the rave.

They may be taking a downturn but I bet its only temporary.

I myself buy pretty much all my music off of Itunes now.

PoweredByDodge

FYI on MP3.

90% or more of the mp3's you see 'out there' ('out there' meaning from the places that we all get mp3's but don't admit to getting them from those places) and even on pay sites like the new napster or i-tunes, are ripped with Lame (Lame Ain't Another MP3 Encoder), a Sourceforge.Net project, at 320 k VBR (variable bit rate - usually 320 max with 128 min).

The pisser is that there exists an arbitrary 15 - 17 k Hz filter in Lame, and an undisclosed 20 to 50 Hz low end roll off.

The result? Crappy output that has come to be accepted as 'great stuff' because no one wants huge file sizes.

I've been ripped strictly with the Blade encoder @ 320 k constant bitrate. Many other purists who use MP3 format have also done the same. There is no rolloff, unless you specify one, and the quality is noticeably better than that of Lame. However, the Blade project went in the tank some odd 5 to 7 years ago due to legal battles over the MP3 format, and its sole author not wanting to be sued. The Lame group pushed forward regardless and has yet to be dragged into court.

But I digress. Ogg Vorbis is an admittedly better format, with shockingly smaller files, but nothing plays it 'out of the box', except a few Sanyo products.

Then, of course, you'll have the lemmings converting their mp3's to ogg's thinking it'll sound better --- forgetting that going from one lossy codec to another is just making room for more 'loss'. A, derh!

As far as DRM... digital rights management... bah I say, bah humbug.

Linux solved that years ago.

Ever since migrating to Linux, I've not had to use any special programs or goofy 'cracks' to rip DVD's, rip CD's, or do anything else like that. Just drop the disc in, hit 'go' and you're done.

An innumerable number of nerds in their basements will never submit to adding bullsh** DRM code into their operating system or programs. And, IF by some freak of nature the RIAA or MPAA manages to engineer something that causes trouble for existing Linux users... the same innumerable number of nerds in their basements will have a bug-fix out in less than a day.

Currently, such wonderful anti-piracy measures that keep you from playing a downloaded WMA or MP3 or ASF song or movie file on any computer other than the one you purchased the download for, are rendered useless under Linux. Well, what if you download it under Linux and want to play it on your Windows box? Just re-rip it... convert it to wav and then back to mp3 on the linux box and you're good to go. Same deal for movies.

DRM will be crushed, as will any other attempts at keeping people from sharing information.

We are strong, we are Penguins.

cam5860

There ain't no doubt in my mind that headunits have gone to **** in the last few years. This years line up of headunits look terrible also check out the clarion line gez give me a break.

The kenwood excelon line is really the only line of headunits worth buying these days for sound quality. Besides maybe the pioneer 880. Alpine still makes decent decks they just are not high end stuff these days.

I don't care how many advances they make in mp3 players they will never sound as good as cd's. I mean they don't sound bad at all with apple lossless and BBE. But they still are not cd quality stuff.

ilikesound

MacLeod wrote: »

I dunno John. Ipods are exploding and MP3's in general seem to be all the rave.

They may be taking a downturn but I bet its only temporary.

I myself buy pretty much all my music off of Itunes now.

why buy music, again?:rolleyes:

1996blackmax

cam5860 wrote: »

There ain't no doubt in my mind that headunits have gone to **** in the last few years. This years line up of headunits look terrible also check out the clarion line gez give me a break.

The kenwood excelon line is really the only line of headunits worth buying these days for sound quality. Besides maybe the pioneer 880. Alpine still makes decent decks they just are not high end stuff these days.

I don't care how many advances they make in mp3 players they will never sound as good as cd's. I mean they don't sound bad at all with apple lossless and BBE. But they still are not cd quality stuff.

In my opinion, the offerings from Eclipse in the past few years have been pretty strong in the SQ department.

Jstas

Jack from Indo wrote: »

Um, how come? What if you using MP3's ripped at high bi rate, like 320?

Besides what PoweredByDodge already said, it's simple.

Digital recordings of any kind are sampled analog recordings. They basically take a number of points along an analog sine wave and then build a stepped wave signal as the digital signal. The higher the bit rate that is done at, the better because a higher bit rate means more data sampling points which means a smaller amount of information that has to be recostructed during playback.

During playback, your DAC (digital to analog converter) reconstructs that analog signal by using the data maps of the original signal, building a line and playing connect the dots by mathematically extrapolating the rest of the signal. You end up losing a good chunk of the information that provides that "warmth" of tubes. Tubes are analog to analog and vinyl is a lossless medium. Whatever the microphone picked up, the vinyl recorded and the tube gear will play back. That's why many consider it high fidelity. There is no missing information.


Since the digital recording on your CD is already sampled, it has a loss. However, it is considered lossless because the loss in the actual program information is negligent and inaudible to the human ear. Therefore, it is considered lossless. When you create an MP3, you are essentially sampling an already sampled track and then compressing it by cutting out a chunk of data that the computer's MP3 player can re-extrapolate later. You also cut out the extremes in the frequency range like PBD already said. All that amounts to a very lossy product, even if you are using the highest bit rate possible.

A 24 bit Burr Brown DAC is an expensive item and it is a precision instrument. However, no matter how good it is, if all you are shoving into it is craptastic MP3s then all you are going to get out of it is craptastic MP3s. The 24 bit performance increases the sample rate. There is no doubt about that. However, on a CD, the increased sample rate can get the most out of an already negligible loss and you get a better, more accurate sine wave reconstruction than you would with say a 16 bit DAC. However, if you've already sampled and then compressed that signal, you are working with half the data points of the original mastering and data points that are already extrapolated. Sampling those extrapolated data points is a waste of time. There is no way to ensure accuracy and the more the DAC has to rebuild in a signal, the worse the performance of the DAC gets and reproduction suffers. Essentially, piping an MP3 of any bitrate through a 24 bit DAC is a waste of time when you won't see any better performance than a standard 16 bit or even a quad 1 bit DAC. It's more of a limitation of the recording medium (MP3) than it is of the DAC.

Without a CD player, a 24 bit DAC is a waste of time. It will never be used to its full potential unless you can digitally transfer, without a loss, the information on your CD to your iPod. Yes, you don't need to use something to it's fullest potential to benefit from it...in most cases. In a DAC, if you can get teh same performance from a 16 bit DAC than you can from a 24 bit DAC, go with the 16 bit. Digital signals are or they aren't. There is no headroom needed, there is no in-between. It's true or false and if you aren't using it to its full potential, you are wasting time and money. Beside, given current iPod capacity levels to store lossless encoding, you won't be able to fit any more information than a good 6-10 CD changer can provide you anyway.

Jstas

MacLeod wrote: »

I dunno John. Ipods are exploding and MP3's in general seem to be all the rave.

They may be taking a downturn but I bet its only temporary.

I myself buy pretty much all my music off of Itunes now.

Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's a good medium. Remember cassette tapes? Total junk.

Personally, I have yet to buy any digitial music. I buy CD's and rip MP3s to use at work so I don't have to trapse around with hundreds of CD's in my pocket.

I've perused iTunes and even signed up for trial version with a number of free downloads. I have found nothing but crap recordings on iTunes. I'm not satisfied in the least with anything I got off of iTunes and the DRM stuff it installed along with the Quicktime iTunes BS was next to impossible to remove from my computer. It took weeks of tracking down registry entries to remove the pop up software that kept telling me my subscription expired and that I should renew today to continue using thier great service! Yeah...eff that.

I've played with alot of stuff. MP3s and other encoded music from a hard drive has to be the worst medium that could be used. CDs aren't that far behind. The best stuff I have seen for digital is DAT (Digital Audio Tape) which can handle a higher sampling rate than CDs. Most artists in the mid 80's to early 90's used DAT for master recordings. There is another type of digital magnetic tape, I can't remember the name but it was never available to consumers just professional/industrial use. Didn't matter, it was insane expensive anyway and was used for making the Dolby sound tracks in movies for the sound editors to edit. For analog, reel-to-reel tapes are probably the best I have heard. The only drawback is that they are not necessarily archive quality and tend to degrade. Vinyl doesn't degrade but it can be worn out.

iTunes and anything on iTunes or downloadable from some file-sharing network has yet to come close to a "high fidelity" medium.

MacLeod

I wouldnt say that. Ive burned MP4's from Itunes onto CD's and theyre just as good a quality as the real thing.

MECA currently uses 2 songs for SQ judging. I didnt want to buy the original $20 CD for just 1 song so I bought them off Itunes and burned them onto a CD and they sound just like the versions on my buddies original CD.

Jack from Indo

I have to agree with MacLeod here. I'm not an experienced car audio guy, but I am a former pro musician and piano tuner, and have spent many long years learning how to hear the subtleties of sound.

Just because there is some measurable scientific (physical) difference between one format/tool/electronic device and the other, that does not mean the human ear can hear it.

Our ears are fantastic instruments, but there really are differences which are measurable on sensitive enough equipment, but that we cannot and never will be able to hear. And that includes taking into account the things our subconscious can hear that we are not conscious of (and yes, those subconscious perceptions do make a slight difference.)

We can imagine we hear a difference though, and to me, one of the arts of Audiophilia is being able to tell where difference leaves off and fantasy takes over. If you are able to do that, and not get your ego involved in the process, you can save a lot of money.........:)

Be careful, friends, of the "It's new, therefore it's rotten" mentality. SOMETIMES that's right.

But.........Maybe not all of you are old enough to remember the audiophile temper tantrums they were throwing when CD's first came out, and how, according to guys who "knew", they "totally sucked", SQ wise, and how there was an "astounding sacrifice" in sound quality, blah blah blah.

PoweredByDodge

fk itunes and the ueber-cool group that gives them skull

Jstas

You get your butt on a plane, fly here to New Jersey and I will demostrate an AUDIBLE difference for you.

CD's actually are quite crappy. The compression algorithms have gotten much better over the years but the CD was never meant to be a high quality medium. It doesn't have the bandwidth needed for a full 20-20K frequency specturm. The get 20-20K on the disc through advanced compression algorithms that let them compress the 20-20K data steam into a data stream closer to 30-16.5K. Most of the intended high quality mediums never reached market but a few like DAT did and shortly after DAT, MiniDISC. If you don't believe me, find an early CD pressing of anything from the early 80's and play it on a decent, modern CD player. That is what CD's originally sounded like. No better than a cassette tape.

Your argument that you are a pro-musician doesn't make you an expert on listening. Piano tuning, maybe but not really. Tuning a piano is nothing like critically listening to a recording. I should know, I played the trumpet and piano for about 16 years through grade school, high school and college. Being a musician gave me a greater appreciation for music but the skills I gained in tuning my trumpet did not contribute to my ability to listen for distortion and compression anomalies in recorded tracks.

The argument against MP3s and other compressed audio, including the original CD pressings argument is that it loses information. That is a FACT and it is not open for debate nor can it be dismissed as a "mentality". This isn't a chance for you to have a kumbaya moment here and give us all the talkin' to that we deserve. Yes, not everyone can hear it but then again, not everyone has the level of gear that can make those inadequacies glaringly obvious.

There is no subconscious bias here. I have several MP3s...entire albums worth that sound very good but not as good as the CD they were ripped off of. There are small differences in things like the peak volume the MP3 attains vs. the CD or where the bass response cuts out vs. the CD. All of that stuff is directly attributable to the losses experienced in the compression process for an MP3.

As far as age and "remembering" the CD Sucks argument well, sorry oh wise and sage elder, we were not old enough to remember such things. But you know what? I am old enough and I didn't understand what all those "audiophiles" and thier "temper tantrums" were talking about but now that I understand all that science that gives us those measurable differences, I agree that the CD is not the best medium. It lacks storage space and the adequate bandwith to store a stereo signal for a full range of music without having to compress the source signal to fit the bit stream capabilities of the technology. SACD, that's a different story. DVD Audio has a great deal of potential too. However, analog recordings still have more detail and subtle nuances that you will never find on a CD or DVD because they are filtered out from the master as background noises in the pressing process. If you really want to hear a high fidelity recording, find someone with a very good reel-to-reel tape deck and get a master pressing and duped pressing of the same track. Listen to both and you will be surprised at how accurate that analog master recording actually is comapred to a CD. I know I was.

Maybe you should get off you wise and sage horse and get a reality check. You can find pages and pages of information showing you the differences and even describing what those differences sound like so you can hear them yourself. Then again, if all you are using for critical listening is a craptastic iPod with a pair of ear bud headphones or a cheap-**** stereo jack plugged into the auxilliary port on your car stereo then, you probably won't be able to hear the differences because your listening gear is not up to the task.

---

Mac, MP4 is less lossy than MP3. It is still compressed but it also allows a higher bit-rate for recording. That higher bit rate gets you more bandwidth and more sample points so you end up with a more accurate reproduction of the recorded source material. MP4 is also Apple proprietary because it was based on the Quicktime container format and is esstially the Quicktime .mov file without the attached video. Because of that, Apple can tailor the iTunes store and iPod to work the best when using MP4. MP4 can be lossless encoding but it usually has to use an SAOL data stream which is the same or similar to MIDI which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface which is a lossless encoding and what the digital instruments that came out in the late 80's and early 90's use to create sound. Many electronic keyboards use MIDI as the recording standard also.

However, if you take a CD and break down the files in thier lossless encoding, you get an average size of 10-12MB of data for every minute of recorded audio information. If you look at an average 3.5 minute song on a CD, it will take up 38-42MB but that same song on iTunes in the MP4, M4A or M4B formats will be 1/10th-1/5th of that size. You can't get a 10:1 compression ratio without losing track information. The alogrithms are not that efficient to provide such a level of compression on current digital storage mediums to have a 100% efficiency level. It is not only mathematically difficult but right now, physically impossible. The digital media and how the data storage alorithms are structured do not lend easily to the compression and playback of muti-channel music tracks. It is not impossible to have current digital storage media contain lossless information, it just takes up a ton of room because of those short comings in how data is stored. If you want fast data access for pretty much everything else computers are used for then, the current storage standards work very well.

bknauss

F MP3s... lossless compression is where its at.

CDs sound crappy cause there are no dynamics in any recent releases. They jack the levels up and it sounds like poo.

And everyone has way too much time on their hands if they can post a novel.

Jack from Indo

Well, ok Jstas, I can see you are certain of yourself here, but - what, then, are we to do? Cd's suck, any form of compressions sucks, that doesn't leave many alternatives. I am well aware of the CD problems of jacking up the levels, but they would have done that no matter what media they use.

Jstas wrote: »

Piano tuning, maybe but not really. Tuning a piano is nothing like critically listening to a recording. I should know.........the skills I gained in tuning my trumpet did not contribute to my ability to listen for distortion and compression anomalies in recorded tracks.

Piano tuning is far, far more difficult than tuning a trumpet. We have to set the temperment, dozens of intervals, stretch octaves, destretch the bass registers. It takes most people a year of training to be able to do it. It is for this reason the majority of tuners use an electronic tuner, which is insufficient to do a really good job on a good piano.

By the time you are done learning, you can hear 4-5 different notes (harmonics) in a persons voice, for example, as easily as you can see the colors of a rainbow. When I listen to a vocalist on a good recording, I might say to myself "gee, she really can bring out the 3rd (or 2nd, or 4th) harmonic in her voice quite well".

Don't misunderstand - I concede your arguments are still valid, that you can hear a difference in your Mp3 vs CD for the various reasons you elucidated. Yes, I would like someday to get on a plane an go there for a demo, lol. I presume you ripped at 320, and still hear a diff.

MacLeod

I do hear noise on CD's recorded back in the 80's but I always thought that was because they were recorded on analog and then transferred to digital.

I dont understand how information can be lost so long as the file size is big enough. I mean isnt digital music just a bunch of 1's and 0's? If I download 1001011100 from Itunes and then burn 1001011100 onto an audio CD, I dont understand how they can sound different.

I get how it could be if the file was too small and you couldnt fit all the 1's and 0's in there but if its big enough I dont see a problem.

Also, is there a point to where the difference becomes inaudible? Kinda like how .02% THD is better than .2% but it doesnt matter cause you cant hear either. Is it the same that 320 kps is better than 192 but you wont hear the difference?

All I know is that my Itunes burned copy of The Holly Cole Trio and Eagles sounded identical to my buddies original audio CD.

Jack from Indo

MacLeod wrote: »

Also, is there a point to where the difference becomes inaudible? Kinda like how .02% THD is better than .2% but it doesn't matter cause you cant hear either. Is it the same that 320 kps is better than 192 but you wont hear the difference?

Well, iya, that's the whole question, isn't it? You could theoretically take two flowers, 100% identical except one of them was short two protein molecules on the tip of one of it's petals. Some guys will then argue that they can "see" a difference, even if others cannot. No matter the human eye cannot even come close to seeing even a single cell in the petal, much less a molecule.

And if you tricked them as to which flower it was that had the missing molecule, they would point out the wrong "superior" flower.

Jstas

MacLeod wrote: »

I do hear noise on CD's recorded back in the 80's but I always thought that was because they were recorded on analog and then transferred to digital.

I dont understand how information can be lost so long as the file size is big enough. I mean isnt digital music just a bunch of 1's and 0's? If I download 1001011100 from Itunes and then burn 1001011100 onto an audio CD, I dont understand how they can sound different.

I get how it could be if the file was too small and you couldnt fit all the 1's and 0's in there but if its big enough I dont see a problem.

Also, is there a point to where the difference becomes inaudible? Kinda like how .02% THD is better than .2% but it doesnt matter cause you cant hear either. Is it the same that 320 kps is better than 192 but you wont hear the difference?

All I know is that my Itunes burned copy of The Holly Cole Trio and Eagles sounded identical to my buddies original audio CD.

You're missing the point. The only way it would be a duplicate is if you used a lossless compression method or no compression to duplicate his CD. Then it would be a bit-to-bit copy.

Digital signals lose information because they sample the analog signal. I can not state it any more plainly than that. Sampling is essentially tracking an analog signal and recording data points along that analog signal and recording them as 1's and 0's like you said. However, when you are reconstructing that signal from digital to analog for playback, your DAC has to connect the dots between those data sample points to rebuild the sine waves that are the music you hear. You don't get the original analog signal because the digital signal only contains a fraction of that original analog signal.

Because of that extrapolation of data points and reconstruction of an analog signal, fundamentally, what you are hearing from a CD source is not what was recorded. It is a fairly accurate recreation but a reproduction or duplicate it is not. That is why CD's are a lossy medium.

The reason MP3s suck is because of thier bandwidth or rather lack thereof. The same goes for CDs. CDs are compressed so that a full audio signal can fit into bandwidth that is not large enough to track an entire signal without clipping the tops and bottoms of sine waves. So recording engineers compress that sine wave to fit by cutting back on the dynamics like amplitude and bias and then juice up the signal levels to try and boost the parts of the signal that drop off due to the compression of the dynamics.

MP3s suck because of the same reason that CDs suck. However, since MP3s are usually derived from already sampled media, you are only resampling already sampled media and you are making a copy of programming information that is already an inaccurate copy to begin with. Essentially, the sampling of an analog signal to convert to digital signals leaves out information because of the way it is done. When you create an MP3, you are sampling a sine wave that has already been reconstructed from sampled information and already missing information. Since you are sampling an extrapolated and reconstructed track, you are losing even more information. The lower the ripping and encoding bit-rate you use, the more information you will be losing on that resampling. MP3s, depending on bit-rates, can be missing as much as 40% of the original recordings information.

I don't understand what's so hard to understand about that.




Jack from Indo, your flower analogy is a fallacy. It's a straw man and red herring at the same time and is invalid when attempting to refute the basic fact that there is an audible difference that can be shown several different ways including listening.

I already spoke of why the levels of a CD recording are elevated. Otherwise, it sounds like the CD is being played through a sock. Without the compression, the sound engineer would not need to boost levels unless it was appropriate for a track or for the artist's request. Your argument that the levels would be boosted anyway has no base in reality nor can you actually prove it. It is outlandish at best and sarcastically pessimistic. It would border on common sense that if a sound engineer was provided a better medium than a CD that didn't limit abilities so much, one would think that they would have a reasonable desire to attain thier best work. Since boosting the signals tends to destroy the playability of a track and they need to consider a fairly wide range of playback equipment, it can be argued that overboosting a track would be bad for business. Who would want to buy an album if it was poorly recorded and tended to break expensive playback equipment?

As far as piano tuning, it was not my intention to imply that it does not take skill. I know it does, I've watched piano tuners work. It's not a job I envy. However, while you may be able to hear tonal differences, listing for tuning accuracy is not the same as critical listening to a recording. In tuning, you are listening for pitch, tone and harmonics. Critically listening to a recording, you are listing for the quality of the artists' work including in-tune instruments but there are also factors involved with the physical reproduction of the system including speaker distortion, signal and power clipping, power source interference and induced harmonics and even signal interferences. It requires a trained ear but there is no real school that I know of except the school of experience that will get you the education in critical listening. The problem with critical listening is that it can be different and yeild different results for different people. Those differences in perception of the anamolaies can be detected and explained through not only meters and sensors but also mathematics and physics because there is a factual, concrete basis behind those anamolies that numbers will explain.

Just because the wire arguments fail to hold any real water levels doesn't mean that everything the "audiophiles" harp on is based on perception. And yes, I can illustrate a difference even in an MP3 ripped at a bitrate of 320.

To answer your question of what are you to do, there's not much. We are stuck with what we have currently until the industry sees fit to offer a better alternative. The point of my ranting is not to give you an answer of what to do. You do what you want, I am not responsible for you in any way. All I am saying is that your current choices are lacking and not what you are making them out to be so stop deluding yourself. An analog signal is still the best case for high fidelity but we do not have reliable media nor a reliable way to read that media efficiently and at a price that the consumer market is willing to pay. Digital reproductions of analog signals are flawed because the technology has not reached a point yet where we can take that analog signal and all it's nuances and reproduce it in a digital form that can be easily used by the mass-market. We have recording technology that can reach the levels of fidelity than an analog signal can achieve but we do not have a viable medium large enough store that signal and still remain efficient for not only consumption but distribution. On top of that, the playback technology is not there yet. Sure, again, we have it but that technology is prohibitivly expensive for your average consumer and therefore not viable in the market right now. We are making progress. DVD Audio and SACD are evidence of that but things like DMA and format wars are keeping those techologies firmly planted in the trenches where they can't be expanded and improved. Until those obstacles are overcome, we won't see any real improvement and we will be stuck with the scourge of iPods and MP3s.




Lastly, it's my choice to write a long post. I write a long post because I have a good deal of information to share and things to say. If you don't like it, don't read it. One thing it doesn't mean is that I have too much time on my hands. I have very little time to do everything I want so I have to pick and choose and then make the time. This is one of those things for which I have chosen to make time. It doesn't detract from me and this forum allows this level of free expression. Anyone here is entitled to use it. It is not against the rules nor is it degrading into a typical Club Polk pissy-pants fest. It is a discussion, it may get heated but it is a discussion with good dialog and good information. I would think that would be much more beneficial to the forum than the usual childish spats that are purported here.

exalted512

I had to look up the word proport...but i feel better knowing that firefox doesnt know its a word either...
-Cody

bknauss

For those who don't want to read the novel...

MP3s lose information cause it strips harmonics and other frequencies they have deemed that aren't extremely important. So by stripping the info, you've got less data, and you've compressed the music (even though you lost some data).

Analog to digital: Based on the number of bits, the circuitry is going to measure the height of the signal at a certain time. So let's say you've got a pretty sine wave, and based on the sample frequency, its going to measure the sine wave 3 times on way up and 3 times on the way down. So its going to read the lowest height, the middle, and then the peak. So now you've got basically a staircase representing the analog signal. Its then converted into digital to represent the staircase. When you convert back to analog, the circuitry is going to make a couple guesses at what the sine wave should have looked like before it was made into an ugly staircase. Its not perfect, but it can get close. That is the dummies guide to A/Ds and D/As.

Jstas

exalted512 wrote: »

I had to look up the word proport...but i feel better knowing that firefox doesnt know its a word either...
-Cody

oop! I speeled it wrong. It's supposed to be purported.

madmax

bknauss wrote: »

And everyone has way too much time on their hands if they can post a novel.

nov·el 1(nvl)
n.
1. A fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.
2. The literary genre represented by novels.
3. A long long long story. Ex: You're missing the point. The only way it would be a duplicate is if you used a lossless compression method or no compression to duplicate his CD. Then it would be a bit-to-bit copy.
Digital signals lose information because they sample the analog signal. I can not state it any more plainly than that. Sampling is essentially tracking an analog signal and recording data points along that analog signal and recording them as 1's and 0's like you said. However, when you are reconstructing that signal from digital to analog for playback, your DAC has to connect the dots between those data sample points to rebuild the sine waves that are the music you hear. You don't get the original analog signal because the digital signal only contains a fraction of that original analog signal.
Because of that extrapolation of data points and reconstruction of an analog signal, fundamentally, what you are hearing from a CD source is not what was recorded. It is a fairly accurate recreation but a reproduction or duplicate it is not. That is why CD's are a lossy medium.
The reason MP3s suck is because of thier bandwidth or rather lack thereof. The same goes for CDs. CDs are compressed so that a full audio signal can fit into bandwidth that is not large enough to track an entire signal without clipping the tops and bottoms of sine waves. So recording engineers compress that sine wave to fit by cutting back on the dynamics like amplitude and bias and then juice up the signal levels to try and boost the parts of the signal that drop off due to the compression of the dynamics.
MP3s suck because of the same reason that CDs suck. However, since MP3s are usually derived from already sampled media, you are only resampling already sampled media and you are making a copy of programming information that is already an inaccurate copy to begin with. Essentially, the sampling of an analog signal to convert to digital signals leaves out information because of the way it is done. When you create an MP3, you are sampling a sine wave that has already been reconstructed from sampled information and already missing information. Since you are sampling an extrapolated and reconstructed track, you are losing even more information. The lower the ripping and encoding bit-rate you use, the more information you will be losing on that resampling. MP3s, depending on bit-rates, can be missing as much as 40% of the original recordings information.
I don't understand what's so hard to understand about that.
Jack from Indo, your flower analogy is a fallacy. It's a straw man and red herring at the same time and is invalid when attempting to refute the basic fact that there is an audible difference that can be shown several different ways including listening.
I already spoke of why the levels of a CD recording are elevated. Otherwise, it sounds like the CD is being played through a sock. Without the compression, the sound engineer would not need to boost levels unless it was appropriate for a track or for the artist's request. Your argument that the levels would be boosted anyway has no base in reality nor can you actually prove it. It is outlandish at best and sarcastically pessimistic. It would border on common sense that if a sound engineer was provided a better medium than a CD that didn't limit abilities so much, one would think that they would have a reasonable desire to attain thier best work. Since boosting the signals tends to destroy the playability of a track and they need to consider a fairly wide range of playback equipment, it can be argued that overboosting a track would be bad for business. Who would want to buy an album if it was poorly recorded and tended to break expensive playback equipment?
As far as piano tuning, it was not my intention to imply that it does not take skill. I know it does, I've watched piano tuners work. It's not a job I envy. However, while you may be able to hear tonal differences, listing for tuning accuracy is not the same as critical listening to a recording. In tuning, you are listening for pitch, tone and harmonics. Critically listening to a recording, you are listing for the quality of the artists' work including in-tune instruments but there are also factors involved with the physical reproduction of the system including speaker distortion, signal and power clipping, power source interference and induced harmonics and even signal interferences. It requires a trained ear but there is no real school that I know of except the school of experience that will get you the education in critical listening. The problem with critical listening is that it can be different and yeild different results for different people. Those differences in perception of the anamolaies can be detected and explained through not only meters and sensors but also mathematics and physics because there is a factual, concrete basis behind those anamolies that numbers will explain.
Just because the wire arguments fail to hold any real water levels doesn't mean that everything the "audiophiles" harp on is based on perception. And yes, I can illustrate a difference even in an MP3 ripped at a bitrate of 320.
To answer your question of what are you to do, there's not much. We are stuck with what we have currently until the industry sees fit to offer a better alternative. The point of my ranting is not to give you an answer of what to do. You do what you want, I am not responsible for you in any way. All I am saying is that your current choices are lacking and not what you are making them out to be so stop deluding yourself. An analog signal is still the best case for high fidelity but we do not have reliable media nor a reliable way to read that media efficiently and at a price that the consumer market is willing to pay. Digital reproductions of analog signals are flawed because the technology has not reached a point yet where we can take that analog signal and all it's nuances and reproduce it in a digital form that can be easily used by the mass-market. We have recording technology that can reach the levels of fidelity than an analog signal can achieve but we do not have a viable medium large enough store that signal and still remain efficient for not only consumption but distribution. On top of that, the playback technology is not there yet. Sure, again, we have it but that technology is prohibitivly expensive for your average consumer and therefore not viable in the market right now. We are making progress. DVD Audio and SACD are evidence of that but things like DMA and format wars are keeping those techologies firmly planted in the trenches where they can't be expanded and improved. Until those obstacles are overcome, we won't see any real improvement and we will be stuck with the scourge of iPods and MP3s.
Lastly, it's my choice to write a long post. I write a long post because I have a good deal of information to share and things to say. If you don't like it, don't read it. One thing it doesn't mean is that I have too much time on my hands. I have very little time to do everything I want so I have to pick and choose and then make the time. This is one of those things for which I have chosen to make time. It doesn't detract from me and this forum allows this level of free expression. Anyone here is entitled to use it. It is not against the rules nor is it degrading into a typical Club Polk pissy-pants fest. It is a discussion, it may get heated but it is a discussion with good dialog and good information. I would think that would be much more beneficial to the forum than the usual childish spats that are purported here.