Sometimes streaming is a bummer. I can hear that frequencies are missing. I have listened to tunes on a streaming service and know that instrument parts that are on vinyl or CD are not there or at least can't be heard. I know that this question is a kick back to old-school days but has anyone found a CD player that's good for musicians with looping features?.
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
I bought my first ever CD on the weekend.
- Thread starter Katoosie
- Start date
Well, those are harsh words! But your starting point was that "Sonically, CD quality is the most faithfully representative of the original recording." There are a whole of lot of folks - including the engineering community developing sampling and playback protocols far exceeding the Redbook CD standard, who apparently feel otherwise. Peace Out...
CDs have a lot of advantages but as someone who never collected vinyl as a kid I appreciate the larger form factor LPs provide such as better art. CDs also get lost too easily.
Hi!
This might be weird to most of you, but I just got my first two CDs on the weekend, this past Friday (I often work night shifts etc so to me, Friday was the weekend).
I really do not enjoy the current streaming services and the requirement to be always online for most of them and the God awful implementation of most of the offline modes along with ads, so I decided to buy their stuff in the meatspace.
I grew up poor and I never had most of the things that a lot of people in the western world take for granted, so this felt a lot like rewarding my child-self a little bit and being my own cool momMy whole idea is to go to the CD store every month and pick one album that I am a fan of and one album that I know nothing about.
So... one old, one new. That way I collect my faves and add something new to my listening, whatever it ends up being.
During the holidays I received a few gift cards, so with these I was able to buy a CD drive to rip the CDs onto my Music app that's on my iMac. The next step?
Buying a modded iPod classic 5.5 with an upgraded battery and storage, Wolfson DAC and to get some IEMs to tie it all together for that ultimate old-new-on-the-go music solution.
View attachment 5309401
Anyway, the music I got so far is -
The Black Dahlia Murder - the Nocturnal album from 2007. My old favourite...
I really like that the cover for the case doubles as a booklet with lyrics for every single song on the album, such a great thing!
Benighted - Obscene Repressed from 2020. I had no idea what this was, turned out pretty good. I would get another album from them
So that's it for now. We will see what I get at the end of this month.
Thanks and until next time TB!
Here's my original reply:
This thread has gone off on a digital vs. analog tangent and didn't want you to miss what I said.
I like simple. That's why I don't like/use iTunes. The various devices I use for listening/learning/jamming with, all work very simply by allowing me to just copy music, whether mp3, flac, wav, etc. directly to the device or the SD/micro SD card without having to use any software like iTunes or whatever.
The HiFi Walker lets me put music into folders and/or create playlists using free utilities like foobar2000 (which I also use for ripping cd's). I think is is way more flexible that using an iPhone with a DAC as it is built for the sole purpose of listening to music.
I am not affiliated with them. It's just a great product at a very good price.
https://www.amazon.com/HIFI-WALKER-H2-Resolution-Bluetooth/dp/B072C4YPCG
As an Amazon Associate, TalkBass may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via links on this site.
I was gifted a subscription to iTunes. I’m not a fan. But I’ve discovered it has its uses.
I basically use iTunes to find new bands and research albums. I then go out and buy physical media (either CD or LP) whenever I find something on iTunes I really like. Same goes for books and movies. We have a ridiculous number of CDs, LPs, DVDs, and books in our house.
Only problem with movies is that some studios have stopped releasing hard copy media and now only make their titles available on streaming services for home viewing.
Last edited:
Those in this thread claiming that digital is somehow less accurate are objectively wrong, and this is verifiable. This old video of Monty from Xiph is perhaps my favorite primer on the subject.
Remember that digital as an analog of the source, just as analog is an analog of the source.
Remember that digital as an analog of the source, just as analog is an analog of the source.
Waiting for the mathematicians to respond to this one... going to be a brutal! Theorems require no evidential support.
There was never a case, let alone a jury.
Compact Disc is objectively superior by nearly all metrics. Brand new LPs can potentially have better high frequency response, but those delicate highs wear away after a few plays, and tend to get lost in the noise. That's not to say that some don't prefer the sound of LPs... just that there was never a competition in any objective sense.
OK, the mathy/engineers have caught me out in conflating "theory" with "theorems," and I have some role in taking this thread to the digital vs. analog place. But my salient points were that each format has advantages/disadvantages, and that the Redbook standard for CD production is being eclipsed by more sensitive sampling protocols.
There also is the possibility that the "theorem" may check out based on known math principles, but may not account for sonic characteristics presently incapable of measure, or subjective factors that affect individual responses...but this will doubtless enrage the "bits are bits" crowd. And as for case/jury? The mere existence of the digital vs. analog divide speaks for itself.
Back to my cave...
Last edited:
Yea, most things do have their uses. I am an old school, well skilled IT pro and I really like doing things as manually as possible. I find most Apple products way too restrictive, forcing one to do things their way. Kinda like "The Apple way or the highway!"
I do a similar research thing on places like Qobuz, Amazon music, Youtube etc to search for new music and then either buy the hard copy or the downloadable file from Qobuz (my current download store favorite). When you buy the download, they provide it in mp3 or flac and possibly some of the newer more esoteric formats like DSD which I don't really use. My ears are blasted out from years of drummer hihats shredding my eardrums to pieces anyway.
I too have a vast # of cd's and when I bought my DAP a few months back, I spent many hours ripping some 250+ cd's into flac files. Fun. Really, I do enjoy that kind of stuff.
Anyway thanks for the reply! Maybe more time playing bass and less time fiddling with Chi-Fi would be a good idea!
Last edited:
44.1khz can reliably sample up to 22.05khz, which exceeds the limits of human hearing in all but the most extreme cases, and virtually all cases by the time the subject is 10-15 years or older. You can use a higher sample rate to increase the Nyquist frequency but you won’t hear any additional high frequency content in a printed medium that’s incapable of aliasing through attempted harmonic generation above Nyquist.
Well, the devil is in the details. From all the reading and listening I've done, I think that the A/D-D/A converters and analog stages contribute a lot to the sound, beyond any sampling rate and/or bit depth discussion. By the theorem, a perfectly bandwidth-limited signal can be perfectly quantized and reconstructed by a perfect convertor. Filters are imperfect, as are convertors. As of yet, no such device has been made, though some are so near to perfect that potential improvements will be minute. Speakers/headphones are probably the biggest variable in terms of sound quality. However, analog has a whole other set of challenges, particularly noise, degradation over time, wow, flutter, rumble, and various other distortions.
Amazing choices for your first cds! when i bought the nocturnal cd it was the “unknown” for me, and it really shaped my musical journey. it’s still my favorite black dahlia album… i feel like that was their golden age! that entire album (specifically what a horrible night to have a curse and warborn) was such a huge influence in the metal scene where i grew up… as soon as it came out so many local bands tried to rip off that sound lol
Watch the video I posted earlier that uses very old converters. Sample reconstruction in modern converters is so accurate it far exceeds the threshold of human perception.
Trying to stay away from more derailing.... glad that the OP has embraced physical media.
However, I have listened to a variety of converters, with different analog stages, different sample rates, bit depths, etc... and have heard reliably noticeable differences. For example, 16/44 should sound no different than 24/44, provided the dynamic range does not exceed 96dB. Yet, I've listened to 16 and 24-bit flacs and noticed subtle differences, differences that shouldn't be there, if the mixes are the same, level-matched, properly dithered, etc.... And often 24/96 flacs sound better than their 16/44 counterparts, even though 16/44 should be more than sufficient to capture and reproduce the entire audio spectrum (for humans). Could be differences in the way the oversampling filters work at different frequencies, aliasing, or ???
But that said, unless you're streaming uncompressed 24/96 digital, a Compact Disc will probably provide better sound quality than most lossy streaming services. What streaming offers, primarily, is convenience, though it comes at a price some are not willing to pay. Personally, I'm not interested in paying hundreds of dollars for a host of monthly streaming services and owning nothing.
My son actually started listening to cassettes, he liked our mixtapes and bootlegs. We still have some blanks as well - as well as DVDs. Glad we did not throw out our CDs and I have LPs too. I do not fully trust the streaming services, so I download from I artists I like to support or buy their CDs or LPs. I also have old iPODs that have music in them plus a rip of the CDs.
