Audio Geekery

[slycat]

As I'm getting a new hi-fi soon, I thought I'd give my current one a test so I know how good an improvement my new system is.  I used Requiem For A Dream soundtrack, track 1 (Summer Overture) as a benchmark as it's a great classical track (used in trailers for LOTR:TTT and others no less).  Anyway, I played the CD from my Sony CMT-M90DVD and plugged in my Sennheiser PX200 headphones.  Needless to say, I was quite disappointed by the result, the sound was quite muddy and almost muffled.  I thought my PC's got to be better than this (only got the onboard nForce 2 audio) so I stuck the CD in to my PC and played it using the same headphones.  While the sound quality was better than the hi-fi, it still wasn't great - it sounded like it needed to be more spatial.  I decided to rip the CD into 160k OGG so I could just compare it with my portable MP3 player (iRiver iHP-140).  I attached the same headphones and despite the fact I was using a lossy compressed file, the audio quality was better still!  Who would have thought that my portable player would be better than both my PC and my hi-fi?

Now I wait in eager anticipation to see if my new Denon system can top the lot.  I'm expecting it will considering the glowing reviews it's received from various sources :)

Comments

[a-skunk.livejournal.com]

YEah, my iRiver player sounds great too! I can't play OOG files on it though. Not yet anyhow. They may release an update for it eventually.

[gerald_duck]

A lot of factors determine sound quality, and the interactions are normally complex, so you can't just find the weakest link and say that's what determines the quality.

Despite their inherent nastiness, 96kbps MP3s sound better on this system than CDs on some others.

Incidentally, when you played the CD in your PC, was the PC reading the audio into memory then pushing it out the soundcard, or simply playing the CD out the ROM drive's audio output through the soundcard's mixer? It can make a big difference — in one direction or the other.

Another amusing issue is that your iRiver is battery-powered, where everything else you tried ran from the mains. If you happen to have a shitty electricity supply that could make a difference, though I suspect the iRiver is actually just inherently better. (-8

Any time you're in Cambridgeshire, you're welcome to pop in for a demo, by the way…

[slycat.livejournal.com]

When playing on the PC it would appear to go through the memory and then come out the soundcard. There isn't apparantly any way to play audio direct from the CD to the output. You know those headphone jacks on most CD players? Well I can't get any audi out of that as presumably the audio is decoded by the PC and not the drive itself? If that's the case, why do all modern PC CD/DVD drives still have headphone jacks and a volume control on them?

[gerald_duck]

I guess they still have the headphone jack and volume control because they'd need to pay for a new front moulding in order to remove them, and nobody wants to be the first manufacturer to delete a cheap feature some customers want.

But personally the only time I've ever used that socket is to check whether a fault lay in the soundcard or the drive.