[geeks] home mp3 system suggestions

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 11:53:23AM -0400, s at avoidant.org wrote:
> > Also, personally, I like flac. 
> 
> I'll have to look at this. What advantages does flac have over mp3? I've
> been saving as wavs for later burning custom cds. The sound so-o-o-o
> nice compared to the mp3s. Maybe higher bitrate mp3s would sound ok. I
> haven't tried Really high.

flac is lossless.  The bitstream that comes out is the same as the one 
that went in.  But, it is compression, so it takes less disk space than 
.wav files. 

I would imagine that the difference would be even more noticable if one was
using a system that was actually of decent quality.  I was only able to 
afford a SBLive and an Altec Lansing surround set.  I wish I could get 
a direct SPDIF output on linux (the SBLive's isn't supported under linux,
and it isn't the greatest anyway since it up samples everything, then down
samples it again) and connect it to a nice set of external DACs, amps, and
speakers.

A lot of people bash infinities, but the pair I was listening to at a friends
house were really great.  Much better than anything else I've heard (which
is mostly the usuall mis-mash of common consumer gear, including things 
like Bose, Klipsh, etc).  It would be fun to try such a setup against a
properly installed set of Quad ESLs or similar.

> > There are various algorithms one could apply to finding the breaks between
> > songs, but they are likely to be fouled up by long pauses in songs, or by
> 
> This has been done too. look for Tapekit on freshmeat. It's for tapes,
> and no, it doesn't auto-name the tracks, it can't. But you can set the
> sensitivity to pauses and noise levels. Most songs with pauses have a
> low-level sounds that don't go away like they do with the pauses between
> tracks. It'd probably work fine for vinyl as well.

What about live recordings?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd