MP3 players

If you are looking for a card to output a digital signal for your computer I would recommend looking at the ZA2 by Zefiro Acoustics or the Sonicport or Datport models by Opcode. The ZA2 has coaxial, Toslink and AES/EBU balanced inputs AND ouputs. It has a sampling rate convertor built in and can be used as a patch bay all on the fly. In other-words you can input on one format and output on all three at the same time. It also enables you to defeat the SCMS copy code. It runs about $400. The Opcode products are cheaper, between $150 and $250 but do not have as many features, but they are plug and play USB verus the PCI slot that the Zefiro board uses. My computer is a Sony VAIO and it has a sound card from the factory that has a TOSLINK fiber-optic output. I feed this into either my DAT deck or my mini-disc recorders to perform the D-A conversion. I am a big user of Napster and have been using this set-up without any problems for quite a while. Be sure to shut down as much as you can in your start-up menu to keep the proceesor noise in the computer to a minimum. This makes a big improvement in sound quality and background noise. I also recommend downloading the Winamp player and using it for your playback of the MP3 files. It is also better than the internal player built into the Napster software. I have quite a bit of music that I have downloaded that sounds VERY, VERY good. Much better than any tuner could possibly sound. In some cases it is un-distinguishable from the cd. My system is not awesome but is very respectable. I have a NAD 1600 pre-amp/tuner, Parasound HCA-1200 II amp, Toshiba SD-3109 dvd, Sony DTC-670 DAT recorder, Sony MDS JE-500 and MDS JE-510 mini-disc recorders, PSB 500 speakers which are being used for the present because I do not have any room to set up my Carver Amazings. Not ultra high-end, but not crap by any means. When downloading be sure to pick the highest bit rate possible! The difference between 128k and 192 or higher is night and day. This is the key to getting good sounding MP3's. You should not be disappointed if you do this. Please post back or write me if you have any more thoughts or questions.

Here is the deal with MP3. It is lossy compression getting its original data from CD. Most every MP3 out there was ripped from a CD and then had a lot of data thrown out. You lose info. You might argue that the data lost is not important, but I think most audiophiles agree that data loss is never really OK. MP3 primarily loses data about the high frequencies and low freqencies. As for the bitrate thing, that has nothing to do with Napster. The idea is that when someone creates an MP3 off of a CD, they can choose the fidelity level. 128 bit is normal but it can be higher. I think that you might be able to do MP3's that are nearly lossless, but so few people make such high quality copies that you will really only encounter those if you make them yourselves. Here are my two suggestions. One is that there is a new piece of hardware coming out that is detailed on Stereophiles website that takes the data off of a CD and stores it on a hard drive with variable compression. You can use that system set to lossless or near-lossless compression and achieve an effect close to that of an MP3 player. Otherwise you can buy the home audio MP3 player that Dell is going to release and just deal with the problems.

I agree with Nhorton that mp3 is a lossy scheme, but so is AC-3(dolby 5.1),DTS, and all other forms of mpeg including the dvd format. What I meant by downloading the highest bitrate, was that it should sound better because it uses less compression(higher bitrate) to make the file. As far as my ears can tell, I have heard some pretty damn good audio coming from dvd. Sure mp3 is not on par with SACD or a 96/24 audio dvd, but it isn't supposed to be. A cd has a bitrate of somewhere around 705 kbits per second(44100hz * 16 bits). A mp3 encoded at 320 kbits is just under half that , and 128 kbits would be about one-fifth. If I am not mistaken, DTS and AC-3 can compress audio up to around one- eighth and are usually in the one-fourth to one fifth compression most of the time. So just to say that because it compresses the file is not a valid enough reason to say that it sounds bad. It has to do with the quality of the encoding and decoding process. If someone has a inferior codec in their computer, yes the reult will not be good, but if it is a good encoder(most people use the Fraunhofer(the main member of the mpeg consortium)codec. If that is the case most mp3's should be of fairly high quality as I'm sure Fraunhofer wouldn't the mpeg format to have a bad reputation for quality. Anyways, there is a new player on the market that claims to be better than mp3 so it might not matter for to much longer. The new format is called Vorbis and it creates .ogg files. It can use either variable or fixed bitrates. It is also a lossy scheme, but they say that uses better acoustic models to reduce the damage to the sound. It is also able to support multiple channels and can use bitrates from 8 kbits to 512 kbits. For more info go to www.vorbis.com The only way you will find out if the mp3's you download will sound good or not is to just play around with it and see what your ears tell you. I think that if you download the higher bitrate files you will find that they sound pretty good.

WOW. It sounds like you have allot of expierience here GRUMPY. Thanks for all the great info it definately has got me more interested and hopefull. I'll look into it some more. Also I've seen some MP3's on napster as high as 300kbps so I think things are really starting to move. Hey one day they may be able to go straight off the masters or be able to download from a high quality digital master and beat out everyother format with some super high bitrate and sampeling frequency. Who knows. Then we can say we were on the boat before any audiophiles would give it a chance.

You must not be aware of all the lawsuits against Napster and MP3.com. There is simply no way you'll have a higher than (or equal to) CD quality recording you can download off the internet for FREE. "From the original master tapes"...Just isn't going to happen. It may be that people stop buying aluminum CD's, and instead pay for downloading their own (in the next 10 years), but I wouldn't bet on that either. CD as it exists now will be around for quite a while longer, and if you shop hard enough, you can find many for cheap. If you like classical, many of the Naxos titles sound excellent, and they are only $5 a piece.