[garyi]

I guess you mean the CDs?

If I want a proper audio experience I am afraid XBMC does not even start to come close so its back to a CD player for that.

[joebrady]

I guess you mean the CDs?

If I want a proper audio experience I am afraid XBMC does not even start to come close so its back to a CD player for that.

Disagree. I'm pretty sure XBMC can play a cd and many other formats of high quality audio.

[garyi]

The audio quality of XBMC is far inferior to both itunes coming from the mini and my CD player. Its obviously not a problem with 5.1 as you want noise and gun shots etc.

How is audio handled in XBMC? Had you guy considered making sure its the total best it can be? What about all the flavours of audio now available such as 24bit etc?

Even itunes cannot deal with this. OSX has output set and cannot be changed until its changed in audio midi setup. There is one piece of software that I know of which will change outputted bitrates on the fly Amara, and that costs 1500 bucks.

XBMC is not the last word for music audio, sorry.

And yes I used to have an LP12 with naim aro and my fav cart of all time the a DV caret 2, lovely set up and great when just you and the good wife. But now I have two kids....

[quotaholic]

I ran my own AV company I was a dealer for these folks:

http://www.olive.us/

[AnalogKid]

I guess you mean the CDs?

If I want a proper audio experience I am afraid XBMC does not even start to come close so its back to a CD player for that.

You do realise that a regular audio CD is about as accurate as trying to draw the Mona Lisa on sand right?

I mean... it can't even reproduce the same digital data twice in a row (i.e. EVERY time you play back an audio CD, the digital content is likely to be different).

Basically it's a crock... and so is Digital TV for that matter.... but it's good enough for plebs like us who are fooled by the hype.

I can readily accept the audio quality of PC's in general could be greater, but to claim XBMC is 'lesser' than iTunes et al is a tad far fetched. Perhaps there's something amiss with your configuration? Given the same lossless source material there should be no difference.

Oh and my Analog name's nothing to do with Analog audio... it's just that folks seem to blindly assume digital means HQ, and the HDTV content providers want us to think their compression schemes offer no noticeable degradation. They are liars, and thieves, and many of them vagabonds and bearded.

[dan1son]

I mean... it can't even reproduce the same digital data twice in a row (i.e. EVERY time you play back an audio CD, the digital content is likely to be different).

No... That's not true. Two completely separate digital pressings of the same CD should yield identical data. That's how the whole thing works. Especially true for data cds. Installing Microsoft Office requires the data to be complete and accurate. You rip the same disc twice, the checksum should match... audio or otherwise.

[designgears]

No... That's not true. Two completely separate digital pressings of the same CD should yield identical data. That's how the whole thing works. Especially true for data cds. Installing Microsoft Office requires the data to be complete and accurate. You rip the same disc twice, the checksum should match... audio or otherwise.

All wrong... try this...

Take one of your cd's, get a black permanent marker and blacken the center clear ring. Even better, go get some black CD-R's and copy a cd to it. You will notice a pretty substantial change in the sound quality when played back on a cd player.

Simple logic behind this, black absorbs light, so less laser reflection.

If you don't notice a difference, your speakers/cables/amplifier/reciever/cd player are probably crap.

Also, high end cd players will have you insert the cd data side up which also helps.

BUT, If you are looking for a real audio experience, vinyl all the way. Be prepared to drop some big bucks on a player tho

I would also recommend a full range electrostatic speaker, none of this sloppy high mass cone driver business. SoundLab brand, they are hand built, highest quality you will find.

[jmarshall]

Make sure your local power supply is coming from pure nuclear as well - power from crap like coal makes things sound all dirty, hydro makes things sound watery, and geothermal just smells bad.

[dan1son]

Take one of your cd's, get a black permanent marker and blacken the center clear ring. Even better, go get some black CD-R's and copy a cd to it. You will notice a pretty substantial change in the sound quality when played back on a cd player.

Simple logic behind this, black absorbs light, so less laser reflection.

I thought it was a green marker that made them sound better

My Grado HF-2s and Etymotic ER-4 headphones would disagree that they're crap.

The cool thing about CDs (or dvds, or blu-ray discs, or even mini-discs) is that even less reflection, as long as it's enough to be seen, is just as good as more reflection.

I still feel sorry for people who don't understand how digital works.

Vinyl is fun, no question there, but albums actually do get worse the more you play them.

[natethomas]

Dear audio nerds: While your deep conversations that literally mean nothing to me are interesting and probably even useful to some people, please post them in a different thread. Perhaps a thread called "Audio Nerd Fights."

Mind you, it isn't that I don't love nerding out. It's just that this thread is for nerding out to pretty pictures, not pretty sound.

[osli]

It's sad that some people really believe they have golden ears that can hear beyond what is reality. I'm sure he has plenty of good reasons why his "non crap" system can't reveal the difference between standard CD's and ones made magical with a market when his eyes have a simple blind fold over them.

Back to the pictures discussion... I'd show off my pretty setup, but I had to sell it all when I entered medical school. Bi-amped Magnepan 7 channel, Velodyne subs, modded Rotel amps all around, digital room correction years before it became a fad, and a decade before the "high end" gear started including it and suddenly it became an acceptable thing to do to the audio signal.

But the video was always crap. Now my meager Toshiba HDTV is light-years better than what I had, and I'll one day reassemble a proper audio setup as well. Only this time, I'll build the speakers myself from my own Linkwitz inspired dipole designs.

[AnalogKid]

No... That's not true. Two completely separate digital pressings of the same CD should yield identical data. That's how the whole thing works. Especially true for data cds. Installing Microsoft Office requires the data to be complete and accurate. You rip the same disc twice, the checksum should match... audio or otherwise.

Sadly you're mistaken, gravely. The pressings will be matches, the reader will not. The medium is digital, the laser is analog. 20% of the disk is reserved for error correction precisely for this reason. The readback of ALL digital optical media is error strewn. Data CD and Audio CD formats are different, to allow 'error' in audio to happen, whilst data CD's can require multiple reads to determine the actual value.

You need to read up on CD standards young man! I'd like to write more, but it's not the right thread... http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0...i_9683351/

[osli]

The medium is digital, the laser is analog. 20% of the disk is reserved for error correction precisely for this reason. The readback of ALL digital optical media is error strewn.

The laser might be thought of as analog in a sense, I suppose, but the logic that it feeds is strictly digital. Either the laser reads a bit, or it doesn't. It might read "half a bit" but the logic will make a determination via a threshold comparison of either bit or no bit. I understand the point you are making... that the environment of the cd and laser, quality of disc and laser, etc. all have an impact on whether the laser correctly reads the bit or not. But you are grossly exaggerating the net effect. 20% might be reserved for error correction, and for precisely that reason redbook audio is very error resistant on final output given a clean disc and reasonable electronics. Readback of optical media at the laser level might be somewhat error strewn, but on the output level it is certainly not. The layers of error correction in summation are very robust and tolerant of single bit errors. Only large physical media defects are routinely transferred through the logic chain in all but the worst players.

I've captured digital streams from a few different players and compared large segments of the resulting raw data. Even with the possibility of transmission and/or capture errors (though unlikely), I found discrepancies almost nonexistant.

That's the whole point of digital audio and the redbook standard. If playback had something even remotely approaching a 1% output error rate, the design of the whole technology and error correction scheme would be an absolute and utter failure.

Audiophiles claim to hear differences in various uber expensive cables, where the actual transmission differences have to be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Put on a blindfold, and they can't even tell the difference between a wav from an ipod and a wav from and ultra expensive CD transport.

[AnalogKid]

The laser might be thought of as analog in a sense, I suppose, but the logic that it feeds is strictly digital. Either the laser reads a bit, or it doesn't. It might read "half a bit" but the logic will make a determination via a threshold comparison of either bit or no bit. I understand the point you are making... that the environment of the cd and laser, quality of disc and laser, etc. all have an impact on whether the laser correctly reads the bit or not. But you are grossly exaggerating the net effect. 20% might be reserved for error correction, and for precisely that reason redbook audio is very error resistant on final output given a clean disc and reasonable electronics. Readback of optical media at the laser level might be somewhat error strewn, but on the output level it is certainly not. The layers of error correction in summation are very robust and tolerant of single bit errors. Only large physical media defects are routinely transferred through the logic chain in all but the worst players.

I've captured digital streams from a few different players and compared large segments of the resulting raw data. Even with the possibility of transmission and/or capture errors (though unlikely), I found discrepancies almost nonexistant.

That's the whole point of digital audio and the redbook standard. If playback had something even remotely approaching a 1% output error rate, the design of the whole technology and error correction scheme would be an absolute and utter failure.

Audiophiles claim to hear differences in various uber expensive cables, where the actual transmission differences have to be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Put on a blindfold, and they can't even tell the difference between a wav from an ipod and a wav from and ultra expensive CD transport.

Sorry, but you're wrong... the red book standard allows CD players to interpolate data between good samples... because it's "acceptable" for audio... for Data CDs the error correction is much more stringent and can require multiple reads...
Basically a CD player will read back, discover an error, and interpolate.
Across an entire Audio CD, the chances of reading back every bit the same as the last read are less than 1 in a 1000 on a typical home CD and still less than 1 in 500 on a high end.
Please read the standard... I do this for a living....The comments weren't about how human can detect this (they typically can't), merely the assumption that somebody made that XBMC audio quality for CD is bad. To which I educated that even a high end player cannot read back a CD twice in succession with the same data. Massively true for CD-DA and true CD-DATA (needs multple reads, and extensive error correction to overcome the problem). 'Digital' is not bit perfect. That's the message.