CD Player? PC Music? Naaa Flash Memory Music.
Do you have a CD Player? Throw it away!
I wouldn’t rest until I’ll share this with the rest of you, audiophiles in the world!
First of all forgive my English. My native language it’s Portuguese.
Second, If your source of music is the analog LP (you know, turntables and needles, etc.) this article it´s not for you.
Do you enjoy hear music? You consider yourself an Audiophile?
Are you an Audio CD based system? Ok. Nothing wrong whit it.
Do you have a decent Amplifier and Speakers? Ok.
Do you have already a separate DAC (Digital to Analogic Converter)? Great.
If not, I’m sorry but you must buy one. No big thing, two or three hundred dollars and you will buy a decent one (Cambridge DacMagic ?).
If you comply with the requirements above then…
Throw away your CD Player!
Or you CD Transport!
PC Music, USB cables, firewire, etc? forget it
I’ll guarantee you that, whatever is your CD based system is, this will sound better! (Much better)
And I’ll promise you that you wouldn’t miss him anymore (the CD player or CD transport, not any one you love, although after this I cannot guarantee that you will not find some troubles with your other half, if you have one)
Hoops, I forgot one thing. You must have at least one or two hundred dollars more. But it will be the most well employed money you ever spend (in music, of course).
So, what you need to replace is your devil machine (the CD player or transport) with 3 things:
• A Media Player (yes, it works with the PS3) that reads wav files. The ones I know are the O!Play from Asus and the WD TV Live from Western Digital;
• A flash drive. Could be a USB flash drive or a SD card or similar (depends on the media player interface). With a 32 Gb pen (or card) you can store aprox. 50 albums.
• A digital interconnect cable (SPDIF). Here, it depends on the media player. Most of all work with the optical Toslink. But I’ll guess that with the coaxial it also works fine (even better?)
Note: It must be a flash card, not a HDD.
So, you are ready for your most rewarding audiophile change you ever made.
Connect this all (if you are an audiophile guy I don’t need to explain how, right? ) and…ENJOY.
Beautiful, quasi-analogic music, coherent, smooth, detailed, you name it, the best sound you ever had hear with your own system (digital). Of course, if you have a friend that have better amplifier, speakers (and DAC) and also did the something you did, probably his system will sound better than your own.
But in the same system, this solution will play better than any other solution Transport+DAC ,CD Player or PC Music. Promise.
Now you ask: Hey! Are you crazy? Where do I put my dears CD’s in, to play?
Nowhere!
Hey. Wait, don’t go away. I mean, you don’t need, no more, to introduce the CD’s in any machine at all. Except one time, in your PC, in is CD drive.
Here I must introduce you to that beautiful program named EAC – Exact Audio Copy by http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
Maybe there are others CD grabbers out there that work fine. But this one I know and I love him. It also let you access a free data base with track names and covers.
Install it and rip your entire CD collection in an UNCOMPRESSED way. This will create a wav file (*.wav) for each track. Put them in a folder with the album name.
Copy your collection for the Flash Drive( or several, if you have a lot of CD’s) , insert it in the media player and you’re on!
And another thing: You never always need to get up to change CD’s (or even change the volume, because most of the media players have their one volume, although I don’t recommend it for sonic reasons)
You don’t need to thanks me. Just spread the word. Maybe this way we can change the format they sell us the music.
CD (16 bit 44.1KHz) it’s not bad. But it could be sold in flash drives, not in cd disks.
HR Music (24 bit) it’s better than CD. Yes but, it could be sold in flash drives, not in sacd disks.
Why flash drives, not CD’s?
Because the big problem with the Digital Music is one thing called jitter. And with this solution you throw away the major source of problems in this matter. Optical drives and their Digital MASTER internal clock’s. (read this site http://www.lessloss.com )
With Flash Drives and Media Players you don´t have those problems. And you can let your DAC do what it was meant to do. Convert Music not garbage.
Enjoy and ear the most music you can.
Fernando Pereira
