Mark Verber - January 1995 [Some Updates Feb 2006]
Quicklinks: Gathering Information / Speakers / Headphones / Amplification / CD/DACs / MP3s / Cables and Interconnects / Recommended Systems / Fun with Sales People / Related Topics and other Links
I am an audiophile because I like listening to good music but I am not particularly interested in audio equipment for it's own sake. When it was time to update my system (1980, 1993, 2006) I was willing to spend hours doing blind A-B testing (with the assistance of my patient wife) to find equipment which made a significant improvement in our sound system at what we considered a reasonable price. In 2006 we focused on headphones, digital sources, and DACs, and briefly checked out some amplifiers and speakers. I am unwilling to spend countless hours comparing equipment to get that small, incremental improvement. I don't play the constant upgrade game. As a result this page is somewhat dated. It's pointless to ask me questions about home theater... I know absolutely nothing about it, but you can check out avsforum for information.
Our primary system is a Slim Devices SqueezeBox 3 as source (playing lossless FLAC/ALAC files), Classe' Four pre-amplifier, Classe' Seventy amplifier feeding Martin-Logan Aerius speakers or Stax headphones. My "mobile system" is an iPod Nano with Etymotic EP4P canalphones (on the go) or Stax SR-001 Mk2 earphones (stationary). I was introduced to hi-fi by my dad, Al Franz, and Chris Wolfe. I started to build my original stereo system in 1975 and it changed little between 1981-1993: Dual turntable, Dynavector Rudy cartridge, Music Fidelity? MC step up, NAD 3020 integrated amp, Marantz portable pro cassette deck, and Stax headspeakers. Later I added NAD 201 CD player and Boston Acoustics A60 bookshelf speakers. In mid 1993 the BA's started to wear out (holes appearing in the cones). The cost of reconing seemed like it was going to be more expensive than it was worth. So we decided to replace the speakers. We replaced the speakers with Martin-Logan Aerius, which prompted us to upgrade from the NAD 3020 integrated amplifier to a Classe' four preamp & Classe' seventy amps for more power and better resolution, just in time for our NAD CD player to bite the dust to be replaced with a Marantz CD player (63SE and later a 6000 OSE).
The best source of information is your EARS. Form your own opinions, don't just accept what other people say. Believe what your ears tell you when listen to music! Remember that most of the people who write about high end audio are biased in one way or another. There is often a lot of hype to justify very expensive equipment. You might want to use some of this information to help you narrow down what you would like to take a first look at, but you need to listen for yourself.
I would suggest doing blind A-B testing whenever possible. Blind A-B is were you do back-to-back comparisons of two (or more) pieces of equipment, but have no knowledge which is which. When doing blind testing it is important to vary only one thing. For example, when you switch amplifiers, you need to make sure the output levels are equivalent. This is possible if someone is willing to switch equipment around, not telling you what they are doing, while keeping a record of the sequence used. This said, 30 minutes of blind AB testing in a showroom is not a sufficient. You really need numerous hours in your listening space to fully evaluate a piece of equipment. I have found that knowing what equipment I was listening always tainted my evaluation of the equipment. In particular, I tended to favor well regarded equipment (e.g. more expensive) even when I couldn't tell a difference in blind testing. Purchase what sounds good to you. There is no reason to spend $10,000 on a high end system if you don't notice significant difference between it and a $1000 system, or a $100 boom box. There was a nice article about Realsizing, were people wrote about switching from very high end gear to something a bit more reasonable.
When evaluating new equipment you should listen to music you know well. Ideally music that you have heard live. I have found that female vocalist, percussion, and piano solos are particularly helpful in evaluating equipment for good timbre. A number of audiophile record companies like Chetsky have samplers which can be quite useful. Realize that what sounds good at first might not be a sound you want to live with. A powerful bass may seem rockin for a few minutes but but very well may sound boomy if you have to listen to it for hours. Better quality audio equipment is neutral, allowing each piece of music to sound as it was recorded without adding or subtracting anything.
While you need to form your own opinions, it can be helpful to learn from others, both to prioritize what equipment to listen to, and to discover equipment which you might not have known about. A technique that I have found to be useful is to read reviews about equipment I have listened to myself. My goal is to find reviewers whose opinions are well correlated against mine. When I find a reviewer that seems to have similar opinions, I prioritize the list of equipment I want to listen to based on their opinions. The reviewers have listened to a lot more equipment than me, so why not use their experience to prioritize my list. For example, if I have listened to a particular speaker and thought it was really good, I will look for reviewers who agree with me. Then I will see what other components they liked. The components they liked (which are in my price range :-) would go to the top of my "try it" list.
I have found reviews written by serious audiophiles to be extremely helpful because they have a good feel for what is possible. They don't rank the high end of mass market components 5 out of 5. The down side is that they tend to nit-pick some of the best sounding gear in the world because they need to find some way to justify spending an order of magnitude more money on some exotic $20k amplifier. Some of the better reviews can be found in periodicals like Stereophile and the Absolute Sound. Stereophile's April and October issues have a large "recommended components" section can be a useful starting point.
Another useful source of information can be the various community forums. Examples of this include: Usenet news groups like rec.audio.high-end, and rec.audio.opinion; various web based communities such as: eCoustics, AudioWeb, and AudioReview. The danger in any public forum is that anyone can express an opinion, even if they are complete idiots.
I have found there are numerous information sources which are completely useless. I am consistently disappointed in reviews found in Consumer Guide and Consumer Review. Consumer electronics periodically like Stereo Review which depend on advertising $$$ from the manufacturers never give negative reviews, even when they should. I expect this is because they don't want to antagonize the people who pay the bills.
I believe that you should always chose your speakers first, and then select components which work well with the speakers you have selected. There are a number of reasons for this. First, speaker load is variable which means that different speakers will require different amplification characteristics. Secondly, there is much more variability between various speakers than there is between various sources and amplifiers. It is common to find individuals who will largely agree about the relative merits of a amplifiers or CD players, and completely disagree about speakers. Unless you are spending a great deal of money, you will have to make serious tradeoffs in selecting a speaker. Because all low and mid priced speakers have flaws which you must choose between, speaker preference will be extremely personal.
I have found that the speakers that I generally favor are panel type: electro-static and ribbon based such as those made by Martin-Logan, Magnepan, SoundLab, Quad, Acoustat, and Apogee (now out of business). Panel speakers are particularly well suited to the sort of music I like: "small" and intimate. Vocalists, especially female, chamber music, folk, blues, and small jazz combos. I am not looking for a bass that shakes my bones. I want something that gives me a lot of detail, and has exceptionally smooth vocals. Most panel speakers, once properly place (which can be hard to do right) give superior soundstage, and are particularly good in the mid-range and higher frequencies. Weakness of most panel speakers is that the absolute dynamic range is less than a conventional design, they tend to be large and difficult to set up correctly, and may have a weaker bass end. Sometimes panel speakers will be paired with a dynamic woofer, since the real-estate required for a good panel woofer is quite large.
When I first starting shopping for speakers, I was hoping to find something under $1000 which would be noticeably better than my old, failing BA-60s. I listed to a number of the highly regard "budget" speakers (less than $1000) of the day. The speakers I liked the best were the Magnepan SMG. Other reasonable speakers included NHT SuperZeros + subwoofer, Epos ES11, PSB Alpha, Paradigm Titan, and the Spica TC60. In 2000 the NHT SuperOne ($370) seemed like one of the better value. In more recent times I have been told that the Aperion 422-LR ($220), Axiom Audio Millennia M3Ti SE Loudspeakers ($400), and Omega Loudspeakers Super 3 ($650) are suppose to provide good quality sound for a moderate price.
Since we couldn't find any speaker that sounds significantly better than than the BA-60s, we looked at speakers up to $2K. We were surprised to find only a few speakers in the $1000-2000 range that sounded significantly better than my BA60s. My favorite speaker in the under $2000 price range was the Martin-Logan Aerius. [The Aerius is no longer made. Martin Logan now sells the Scenario, which is targeted just below the Aerius]. There are few speakers (and none under $2500) which have the combination of transparency, liquid midrange, good imagine, and an accurate bass. I found that the Aerius had a lot of detail which pulled me into the music while not being too analytical. The negatives about the Aerius are that they are very sensitive to placement and the sound can be a bit too bright in rooms with very lively acoustics. The Aerius are visually striking which could be good or bad depending on your taste. I think they are nice looking, but I would love them to be more in the background. Everyone who enters our living-room for the first time comments on "those interesting looking speakers". While they look large, the Aerius has the same footprint as a mini monitor on stands. The Aerius was update (called the Aerius i) which is a bit more pricey, has removed the sometimes excessive "brightness" and tightness up the bass. Runner up to the Aerius in the under $2000 price range was the Apogee Centaur (updated as the Slant 6).
There are a lot of well regarded speakers in the $1000-2000 range which did not particularly impress me. Yet, there are a lot of people who seem to like them. If you don't like panel speakers, I would suggest the slightly bright Thiel 1.5 or the more laid back and warm Vandersteen 2Ce. Other speakers that seemed reasonable included Epos ES14, JM Labs Micron, and B&W Matrix 804. I had heard great things about the Totem 1 but found myself completely unimpressed when I listened to them. Maybe the setup was wrong (though it was being driven by top of the line Sonic Frontiers equipment in what appeared to be a well prepared room) or my expectations were too high.
There were a number of speakers that I like better than the Martin-Logan Aerius, but were too expensive (they cost >$2k): Aerial Model 10T, Apogee Stages, Sonus Fabor Amature Electa and the Quad ESL-63.
The cheapest way to get truly excellent speakers is to purchase great headphones and an amp to drive the headphones. Often you could build headphone based systems which will be superior to speakers costing three times as much (or more). I found this to be exceptionally true with Stax headphone systems.
Use at Home:
The ultimate headphone systems I have listened to are the Stax Lambda Signatures with the matching SRM-T1W tube amp. The modern equivalent of the Stax I listened to is the Stax 4040 system, though it's not clear if it is quite an equal comparison. In the 1990s Stax went bankrupt, but a smaller, leaner Stax is back. In the US, the Stax products are being distributed by Yamas. The cheapest source of Stax in the USA is via the grey market exporters audiocubes (good prices but sometimes slow to ship) and EITL. Note: Both of these companies are gray market retailers, so the equipment you purchase may be designed to run on Japanese power (sometimes user switchable), you will have to return the equipment to Japan for service, and the warranty period might be shorter than a product purchased through a licensed dealer in the US. On the other hand, the grey market items seem to be 60% the cost of US licensed items.
Audiophiles today seem to like Stax (3030 and above.. comparison of 3030 to 4040), AKG (K1000), Sennheiser HD(580, 600, 650). Grado (xx1 like the RS1) and the Ultimate Ears UE10PRO. The ultimate seems to be the amazing Sennheiser Orpheus which will put you back something like $15k! In the past I found the Grado RS1 and Sennheiser HD580 to be good headphones, but I didn't think either was in the same league as the Stax Lambda. The Grado RS1 are a bit to lean, and didn't seem to have enough textual in the lower frequencies. The Sennheiser HD580 seemed almost overly rich and slightly muddled middle range.
I don't normally use headphones at home since I love my speakers, but I sometimes use a pair of Stax SR-05 when I don't want to bother my family with music. They are comfortable enough to wear for several hours and are open so I can hear what's going on around me. They aren't in the same league as the Lambda. On the other hand, the we free.
On the Road:
These days, there are a lot of people who are using portable devices like the iPod to enjoy their music while they are "on the go". There are a number of headphones which have been designed for listening in high noise environments. The originator of this sort of headphones was the Etymotic ER4 which places the speaker into the ear canal with a good seal that keeps a lot of the environmental noise sealed out. Etymotic has added the ER6i to it's product line specifically targeted at iPod (and other MP3 players). The advantage of the ER6i is that it takes less power to drive it than the ER4 and the cables are more flexible which keeps noise down when the cable is rubbing against things (which is very annoying with the ER4S). I think the best compromise for the iPod is the ER4P which has flexible cables and is a bit more sensitive than the original EP-4. The Ultimate Ears Super.fi 5pro and the Westone UM2 seem to be giving the ER4 a run for it's money. Shure is also making some sound isolating ear buds, but they don't seem to be up to the sound quality or comfort of Westone, Ultimate Ears or Etymotic. The Ultimate Ears UE10PRO seem to be the best regarded canalphones, and they should be, costing $1000 and requiring custom ear molds created with the assistances of an audiologist.
There are a number of companies like Bose which are making more traditional headphones which make use of active noise cancellation to eliminate environmental noise. My experience is that the Bose do an "ok" job of reducing noise, they have that "Bose" (e.g. over-processed) sound. I would stick with the more transportable, better acoustics, and better sounds isolation of the Etymotic, Westone, or Ultimate Ears. One final option to consider are the Stax SR-001 Mk2 system. These are small, in-the-ear electrostatic headphones plus a small driver which runs on two AA batteries. The SR-001 doesn't compare to other Stax, but they have a warm (if not dark sound), reasonably tight bass, rich middle range, with an upper range fall-off. I like them for jazz and folk music. I general I think the EP4P sound better then the SR-001, but there are times I want my earphones to be a bit more open and a bit more comfortable.
Cheap:
The best headphone deal after more than ten years still the Grado SR60 at $69! I found the Grado SR60 to be a bit dark for my taste, but you will have to spend something like $200 before you will find headphones (like the Etymotic ER4) which are significantly better than the A60s.
Headphone Amps
I had heard that the Headroom headphone amplifiers make a big difference. I found this to be true when the source was a low output portable CD player or if the headphone were extremely power hungry (like the AKG 1000). I didn't find the Headroom Supreme gave me a significant improvement over the Marantz CD63 SE headphone jack with Grado HP-1s.
If you want good reviews about headphones, check out head-fi.org (full reviews), headwize, and the ecoustics headphone reviews.
The first question with amplification is whether you are going to use an integrated amplifier or separate components. The advantage with integrated amplifiers are they they tend to be less expensive and offer more value than equivalent separates. If you are spending less that $3000 on a system and don't plan on playing the upgrade game, you should strongly consider using an integrated amplifier. The advantage of separates is that you have more flexibility and are able to update one piece at as time.
If you aren't familiar with electronic design, you might want to read the wikipedia article about electronic amplifiers. Most high quality pre-amps use a class A circuit design. Most power amplifiers are class A/B. Most companies don't make class A amplifiers because they are less efficient (run hotter, use more electricity) and will be more expensive to build than an A/B amplifier of similar output power. On the other hand, it's easier to design a clean class A amplifier. Most class A integrated or power amplifiers are expensive. It is possible to build low to moderate class A power amplifiers (say less than 30 watts) which are reasonably priced.
The wikipedia article mentioned that there is something called a class D amplifiers. Class D amplifiers are more efficient than class A or A/B amplifiers. Until recently nearly all class D amplifiers were designed for efficiency and not for high fidelity. In recent years a number of decent class D amplifiers have hit the market. Many (most?) are built around chips from Tripath or the more recently the B&O ICEpower. I would describe most of these units as budget hifi rather than truly audiophile quality. Appropriate for someone who will shell out the money for an iPod and a few hundred dollars for a speaker. There are a number of feature filled products like the NuForce Icon (review). Most low end products typically use the TA2024. Higher end units often seem to use the TA2022 or the ICEpower chips which has much better specifications in terms of distortion and output power. If you have high efficiency speakers (>90dB/W/m) you might want to check out the Sonic Impact T-Amp which is decent sounding for just $30. This amp have gotten a fair bit of press from reviewers at 6moons, stereophile, tnt-audio, audioasylum, audiocircle and a host of other sites. There are a number of amps built around Tripath chips that are a bit less cheesy than the Sonic T-Amp such as the $99 Trends TA-10 (TA-10 review). There is an active community of DIY hackers who are customizing these amp such as Michael Mardis. Some folks did a comparison / shootout of commercial tripath based amplifiers. I tried the TA-10 between my Squeezebox3 and Martin-Logan Aerius and was unimpressed by a lifeless sound. When I put my Classe 4 pre-amp between the Squeezebox and the TA-10 I was impressed. Did it sound as good as my >$1K Classe 70 amp? Nope. The Trend TA-10 didn't even touch our more layback Bryston BP60, but the sound was pretty good when you consider it was more than an order of magnitude cheaper. An easier load would have narrowed the distance, but I think the other amplifiers would still have been significantly better. A few simple mods like replacing the power supply with something like pyramind ps4kx (or any good 13.2-13.8 regulated power supply) and upgrading the input capacitors improves the sound quality. I haven't found any moderately priced amplifiers which use the higher quality TA2021B & TA2022, but there are a variety of tripath kits or DIY class D projects that might worth investigating. The cheapest pre-built I have found using one of the better chips is the Hawk Audio D402. I predict that as more people figure out how to build high quality class D amplifiers, that we will see class A/B largely disappear from the mass market. Why? The class D amplifiers don't sound as good, but they are close enough while being cheaper, more compact and more power efficient. Welcome to the iPod generation where people don't seem to care as much as audio fidelity. I expect that class A and A/B will only be found audiophile orient products in ten years.
Now back (mostly) to conventional A and A/B designs. There used to be a large a number of very fine integrated amplifiers which were in the sub $1K price range (many $250-550) that provide excellent sound quality for the money, especially when compared to separate preamp / amp systems. It seems that many manufacturers have stopped selling reasonably priced integrated amplifiers. Today (2009) Bluecircle CS and the Peachtree Nova seems to be the best performing integrated amps for around $1000. For less performant / expensive options I would suggest looking at Rotel and NAD, such as the CS320BEE which is a decent sounding 50W integrated amp for around $400. The Onkyo A-9555 uses a good quality class D amplifier which costs in the same range as the NADs (street price around $500) and is reported to be slightly better for classical music. The Outlaw Audio R2150 receiver has gotten some good reviews and has a built in USB input for direct streaming from PCs, though I don't go for the retro styling and haven't listened to it personally. While no longer made, it would be worthwhile to look on the used market for the now discontinued Arcam Alpha line, and Creek 4xx0 line which sold for $400-800 in the 1990s. If you like tubes give a listen to the Jolida 302 ($850, my favorite integrate amp for under $1000). I would also recommend look at the used market for a Classe' CAP 80/100, Bryston BP60 (slightly updated Bryston B-60 is still made but overpriced at $2k), YBA Integre, Acurus DIA-100, or Krell KAV 300 (updated as the 400 and overpriced a $2.5k) which you should be able to find for less than $1k. Each of these integrated amps with extremely well built and provides extremely good sound quality.
If you are doing separates for under $1000, I think that Parasound and Rotel seem to make the best value. I think that Adcom is ok. I was disappointed with the Acurus RL-11 preamp and the Acurus A250 amp. Acurus makes a solid looking box, but I found that to my ears, the NAD 3020 sounds as good as Acurus separates. Acurus sounded dry and flat. It almost seemed like the amp didn't have enough power to drive the speakers, even though I know that is not the case. Against my bias are a lot of people who really like Acurus and the high build quality of their products.
I was surprised how much of a difference the preamp can make. I found a great deal of difference between comparably priced preamps when doing blind A-B testing. I did not find that similarly priced power amplifiers varied as much as the preamps did. I found that $1000 seems to be a significant turning point in preamps. Most of the preamps under $1000 (no matter how good the power amp they were connected to) did not sound significantly better than my old NAD 3020. There were a number of preamps over $1000 which impressed me. My favorite preamp today is the Audible Illusions Modulus-3a ($1995). When I purchased my preamp, I though the two best preamps for under $2k were the Melos SHA-1 ($1095), a top rated tube headphone amp which also can function as a line stage preamp and the Classe' 4 preamp ($1395). I think the Melos SHA-1 is the best values if you can live with it's minimalist controls. Other notable preamps I tried (in order of preference) Sonic Frontiers SFL-1, Bryston BP-20, Conrad Johnson PV10A, Classe' 20, and Aragon 18k.
Most of the power amps I tried sounded good. There were only minor differences. I ended up selecting the Classe' 70 because it sounded slightly better to me than the other amps with the Aerius, and because Classe' has a reputation for standing behind their product, it was one of the amps Martin Logan used in the lab with the Aerius, and I got a good deal on it. All Classe' components come with a life time warranty for the original owner. All Classe' amps use the same basic design. I found that the Classe' 70 ($1195) was enough for me, though the Classe' 15 ($2995) did sound a bit better. Other amplifiers that I listened to in the order of preference: McCormack DNA-1 ($1995), Forte 4 ($1595), Aragon 4004 ($1995), and Rotel RB-990BX which has been replace by the RB-1090 ($995). I was very impressed with the Rotel's sound and power for it price (e.g. nearly as good as the McCormack at half the cost). I expect that the McCormack DNA-.5 ($1295) would be an excellent amplifier, as would the Muse 100 ($1395) though my dealer didn't have them in stock when I was comparing equipment.
I would recommend considering purchasing amplification components used. In particular it's possible to purchase very high quality units from the 1990s at very reasonable prices such as Classe DR and first generation CA lines. They are easy to find, especially via newsletters like Audio Trading Times, Audiomart or on various web sites. Amplifiers are generally durable having minimal moving parts and most audiophiles treat their equipment well. Many audiophiles play the constant upgrade game so it is possible to find good equipment in great shape, with almost no wear.
At one time I thought that CD players were more or less the same and would not make a significant difference in the sound of a stereo system, it's all digital, right? Wrong. There is the D/A converter which makes all the difference. I found noticeable differences between the mass market CD players and those CD players which are aimed at high end of mass or any level of the audiophile market. Most of the CD players under $400 sounded poor. I have yet to find a portable CD which sounds good to me. In 1995 I found that there were a two of reasonably priced, decent sounding CD players: the Marantz CD63 Mk II ($399) and the NAD 502 ($299). Some people on the net have complained that the Philips lasers found in many lower end CD players, included the Marantz CD63 are prone to failing in a year or two. I find this a bit hard to believe, especially with Marantz giving a 3 year warranty. My player was purchases in 1995 and still going strong in 2007. In 1999 the Marantz 63SE was moved to second system and later given to a friend when it was replaced by a DVD/CD player. Our primary stereo used a Marantz 6000 OSE until it was replaced by a Squeezebox 3.
When we got the Marantz 63SE there are a number of options for slightly more money. When my old NAD CD player died (not really so old, I had it for three years - is this a build quality issue?) I didn't want to be without a CD player for long so I did all my comparisons in a weekend. From what I had read, the players that I should compared included the Marantz CD63 special edition ($499), the player I purchased, Rotel RCDS-955AX ($449), Pioneer Elite DP-65 ($850), and CAL Icon Mk II ($850). I started by listening to the CAL Icon Mk II, the CAL DX-1 ($595), and a cheap portable made by Magnvox (the best sounding portable we could find for under $100). I was quite disappointed with both CAL players. I had been expecting a player that was significantly better than my now dead NAD. In a blind test my wife preferred a cheap portable to the Icon. She said that the midrange on the Icon was garbled, and that she had trouble making out the words of many vocalists. I had to agree. The CAL Icon Mk II did seem to image better than any other player for under $1000 and had a very tight bass. I have no idea why the midrange seemed so awful, especially since the CAL Icon has historically been the CD player many audiophiles recommend for under $1000. We were unable to find the Rotel in our local stores, and the Pioneer Elite DP-65 was definitely not twice as good as the Marantz CD63se.
I thought both the Sony X707ES ($1995) and the Meridian 563 DAC ($1350) with a Meridian 500 transport ($1095) were significantly better sounding that my Marantz CD player... but I couldn't justify spending that kind of money on a product when I expected to see this level of sound quality at main stream pricing in a few short years. [It's digital circuits.. should improve on a Moore's law sort of curve.. right?] Alas, my expectations were a little off. Seems like Joe consumer doesn't demand great fidelity, so most companies aren't that motivated to provide it. In 2000 I had hoped to find an inexpensive priced DVD/cd player which compared reasonably to my 5 year old CD63SE. No luck. Finally, in 2002 I found that the Pioneer multi format DVD player DV-656A ($171) was better sounding than my CD63SE.
In early 2006 I started looking around to see how CD players / DACs had advanced in the last six years. There are several DAC which are reported to be significantly better sounding than most other DAC costing 2x more and should blow our six year old CD player away. We listened to a number of DAC. We compared a number of external DAC to the build-in DAC in the SqueezeBox 3 and our Marantz 6000 OSE. None of the DAC we tried "blew away" our existing gear. In careful A/B listening, we thought the external DAC we tried sounded better, but it was a close thing, and not clearly worth the extra cost. We thought the LavryBlack DA 10 was the best sounding DAC, though the Apogee Mini-dac and benchmark dac1 were pretty close. Other regard / value priced DACs costing between $400-$1200 (which we didn't listen to) include the aqvox dac, Bel Canto DAC2, storm digital D2, redwineaudio DAC, stello da100, and the Ack! Industries DAC2, and Grace Designs m902. For other ideas check out DAC reviews. Some other good reviews which match my experience include DAC Showdown: AQVOX USB 2 D/A vs. Benchmark DAC1 vs. Lavry Black DA10, comments from the Head-Fi SoCal meet. You might also want to check out the DACs for the SqueezeBox thread. I had heard decent things for the more moderately priced Cambridge Audio DacMagic.
These days, small, portable audio players which use flash or micro disk drives have become quite popular. Often called MP3 players, most will play a number of audio formats, not just MP3s. It seems to me that the Apple iPod is the most popular and player on the market today. The ilounge does a good job tracking the ipod marketplace. There are a number of reasons for the ipod's dominance: the best user interface (easy to use), style (are cute), well made, and they have reasonably high quality audio playback. The downside of the ipod is iTunes which is slow and buggy. Some people like the iTunes store... but I don't. More on this later. An ipod will typically cost between 15-30% more than competitive offerings, and around 50% more than basic models of equivalent storage capacity.
When looking at a portable music player there are several factors you should consider:
Besides the ipod, there are a number of good portable players. My favorite after the ipod are players made by Cowon due to their high quality audio playback, support of a wide number of codex, and decent user interface. I would also look into iRiver (especially with the rockbox firmware). You might want to check out dapreview.net for other ideas. Another source of ideas would be head-fi's portable audio forum because these folks really care about sound quality which many reviews don't pay enough attention to. While none of the portable players can rival the quality of high end audio equipment, they can provide surprisingly good quality sounds in an extremely usable package.
Some people have taken to using portable gaming platforms like the PSP or PDAs as music player. The Treo comes with a built in RealAudio player or you can pick up PocketTunes. I would characterize the sound quality of the Treo as barely adequate for basic listening. Windows CE devices come standard with Windows Media Players and there are a number of third party players such as 40th floor iplay, pocketmusic, pocket player. Windows CE devices often seem to be built with reasonable quality audio out. The downside of using a PDA as an audio player is that they burn through there batteries much quicker than purpose driven audio players. You should expect no more than a couple of hours on a PDA rather than the 10-20 hours of many dedicated music players. A number of cell phones come with the ability to play MP3s. In my experience, most of these had poor audio quality. Finally, some people use portable game systems like the Sony PSP as a portable music system.
I would not recommend purchasing music through itunes or most of the other online music stores. Most of the music is lossy 256kb/sec which is no where close to CD quality. The other problem is some of the online stores use digital rights enforcement which will restrict how you can play the music you purchased. You would be much better off purchasing a CD (which is approx the same price as the songs from itunes), spend the time it takes to RIP the CD yourself, and have the freedom to use the resulting music in any number of players. Note: it is possible to strip out off the DRM from itunes so you can play it on non-Apple systems thanks to the hymn project.
I have found that a number of these players will seriously out perform the provided headphones when music is encoded at better than 160kbit/sec. I would strong suggest picking up some better quality headphones.
Some people drive their audio system directly from their computer. Is can be as simple and cheap a plugging a $2 cable from the "headphone" jack on a computer to the "input" jacks on a stereo. One potential downside is audio quality. Most computers have audio cards which I would characterize as being "OK" to "poor". There is a wide selection of products designed to bridge between digital and analog audio worlds. The first option are good quality sound cards like those made by emu or the interesting devices from sondigo which make traditional sound cards as well as a wireless sound adaptor which is pretty cool. There are also off-board sound systems which make use of USB (might include a DAC or be used to convert to Coax or optical toslink for devices with built in DACs). Example of these sorts of devices are Trend Audio UD-10.1 $150, Apogee MiniDAC, AqVox USB 2 D/A (which also has a high quality DAC for CD transports), or the stella da100. The $130 Fubar 2 or the $170, devices from Bardaudio, BlueCirclue USB Thingee might also be a good options... I haven't tried them, but there are several people who have reported good things about these units. A bit ago there was a nice list of lower cost USB DACs.
There are also dedicated network devices such as those made by the slimdevices, Sonos, Olive, Bardaudio, Apple (Airport Express) and Roku designed to make connecting you computer and your stereo equipment as painless as possible. Apple also makes the WiFi express which has an audio out. I have not tried The Apple device, but all the reviews says the audio quality is so/so. If you have the extra cash (and don't want to hack the software) I think the Sonos is the easiest system to set-up and use. If you only want to drive one device, I think the Squeezebox 3 is the best value. I have found the slimdevices SqueezeBox3 to be surprisingly good given it's price. In a series of blind A/B tests, we found the sound quality to be in the same league as the Marantz 6000 OSE, and an Apogee MiniDAC. We found that a CD player or Squeezebox driving a LavryBlack DA 10 consistently sounded better, but it was only a moderate improvement. We decided that the improvement wasn't worth $1000. At the high end I have heard very good things about the high end Logictec Transport. For more ideas, I would suggest looking at the list of hardware that natively supports FLAC.
Some audio devices also include data storage (e.g. built in disks). Most of these servers don't adequately address backing up your data, are more expensive than a separate player and storage unit, and don't give a good expansion path. You would be typically much better off separating your file storage from your audio processing. Use your computer's disk or a dedicate file server like the Infrant NV for storage, and something like the Sonus or Slimdevices network players.
Typically one of the first issues you need to face is what codex (or audio encoding system) you want to use. At the most coarse, your choices are lossless which preserves all the data but uses a lot of space (best lossless compression for audio is around 50%), and lossy popularized by MP3 which can easily give you something like 80% compression or better. To get a good idea how much space different formats take, take a look at getting louder's format comparision. The wikipedia audio data compression is a good starting place to see what encoding others exist. Hydrogenaudio has a good lossless codex comparison. The losslessaudio blog follows developments in high quality audio encoding. From what I can tell, FLAC is the lossless codex used by most audiophiles because it is open and free, and can be easily converted into MP3s for lower fidelity players. I wish Apple supported FLAC in the iPod!
There is compelling research indicates that prolonged exposure to compressed audio will erode your ability to distinguish small differences.. so consider how much you want to listed to lossy MP3s. The one up side of listening to a lot of lossy MP3s is that you won't need as expensive an playback system after a while :-). Unfortunately, significant portions of the recording industry have been making the situation worse by mastering CDs to sound good as MP3s.
The second question is how are you going to get your music into whatever codex you plan to use. Often people use whatever software came with the music hardware they use. For example, iPod users often use iTunes, but there are many other choices. BTW: iPods will sync with only one iTunes computer. If you lose your computer, you can rescue your iTunes song. Under Windows Exact Audio Copy (EAC) seems to be one of the most popular freeware programs because it puts an emphasis on 100% accuracy (eliminating jitter, etc). Official documentation is a bit sparse for EAC, but there is a pretty good EAC tutorial. Easy CD-DA Extractor seems to be a popular with people who want a fast and easy to use FLAC/LAME ripper and are willing to spend $35. Some, such as flacattack and wack will RIP cd's in both a lossless and a lossy form at the same time. This can be useful for people who have a large repository used at home for maximum fidelity, and smaller files used on portable systems which don't require maximum fidelity and have a limited storage capacity. Another popular free ripper is foobar2000. I would also recommend dbPowerAmp's RIPPing tool. If you use Ubuntu, Sound Juicer commons as part of the standard bundle and seems to work reasonably well provided you don't want to do fancy things with tags.
There are also dedicated RIP / serving devices such as the ripNAS which looks quite nice, and very pricy.
My recommendation? If you use an iPod and want full fidelity then RIP using Apple Lossless. In most cases I would generally suggest RIP your CDs into FLAC to maintain the quality since you will be able to convert that to just about anything else. If you are using a portable player which either doesn't support FLAC or doesn't have sufficient storage to carry a desired amount of music in a loseless form, then also keep MP3 copies of your music. Why MP3? Because nearly every player on the planet supports them. Since you are targeting the files to portable players I would suggest recording at ~192kbps using variable bit rate encoding. No, it won't be as good as listening to a loseless, but it's way smaller, and if you are using a portable player you will most likely not be in ideal listening conditions or have great speaker / headphones. If your RIPPING tool doesn't support doing FLAC and MP3 encoding at the same time, I would suggest get everything into FLAC first, and then do a bulk conversion. The easiest way to do this is to use dbPowerAmp's bulk converter in the licensed Reference edition for Windows. The free way to do this is to install a copy of FLAC and LAME and pick up a copy of the perl script flace2mp3 by Robin Bowes. Robin by default uses "lame --preset standard" which is 190kbps vbr (180-220kbps). Note: this is going to take many hours to run. At some point the mp3fs might be a way to provide MP3s on demand, but it's not fully bakes, and disk space is cheap, so just make mp3 copies of your FLAC files.
There is no tagging program that I really like for any platform.
I don't know why, but none of the CD databases nor the tagging/ripping programs seem to have gotten classical music right. With popular music organizing by Artist, Album, Song works well, but with classic you typically want something more like Composer, Piece, Performance, Movement. No one seems to have done anything about this. There is a iTunes classical hack which is a step in the right direction. Some people had develop tagging schemes for classic music which map classic music into the pop music 3 tag mode. You can see a discussion by a number of people struggling with effective tagging for classical music.
There is a lot of tools to share play lists and music over the network. At some point I will write something about things like:
Edwin's ipod pages going into a bit more detail than I do here, and his experiences are very close to mine. I would also suggest checking out hydrogenaudio.
For Christmas, my loving wife gave me an iPod Nano for my train ride. It has a really nice user interface, it's small, it's light, and it give me music for around 10 hours before I need to recharge it. I tried ripping some of my CDs using a variety of codex and bitrates. When playing any of the lossy (or is that lousy codex) through iPod and into my main stereo system (or good headphones), we were able to immediately pick out the iPod compared to the source CD playing through a Marantz 6000 OSE CD player. 128kb/s and 160kb/s were awful. 192kb/s was ok. 320kb/s still didn't get the highs right and the soundstage wasn't what it should have been. When I tried the Apple lossless codex, I was pleasantly surprised. With average recordings I could spot differences between the Nano and CD player when listening carefully, but the differences weren't glaring when the music was playing in the background. When I pulled out recordings which were particularly well engineered the difference were more apparent. After such a positive experience with the iPod we decided it was time to move away from CDs. We added an SqueezeBox3 to our stereo for home playback. Now the question was what codex we should use to RIP our CD collection. We decided on loseless quality for the home stereo, so we RIPPED using FLAC because it is an open standard. When using the Nano, I really don't need loseless quality, carrying loseless would limit the amount of music I could carry on my Nano, and the Nano doesn't support the FLAC codex. I decided that for me, 192kb/s with a variable bitrate, was about right for several reasons. First, I am often listening to my Nano in moderately noisy environments, so no matter how good replay is, the overall sonic qualities will be compromised. Second, there are real limits to the quality of playback that the iPod is capable of, which means that loseless is reaching beyond what the iPod can really deliver. Third, while the lossless format sounds better, it doesn't sound 5X better (most likely due to the iPods limitations), which is how much extra storage it seems to take up. It is pretty easy to automatically generated LAME MP3 for use on the iPod from my FLAC repository. I also have a few cherished albums that were RIPPED using Apple Loseless so I would have the best possible playback on my Nano.
I have been using cables which were given to me or came with my equipment. My interconnects are made by WorldWire, and my speaker cables are the typical 12 gauge speaker cable which can be purchased at better quality hardware store :-).
How much difference do cables make? Is there any significant sonic difference between a $1.50/meter 12 gauge speaker cable from Radio Shack or a decent Hardware Store and a $2000/meter high end audiophile cable? My guess is there will not be significant differences. I did one blind A-B test and didn't notice a difference... it's a low priority to do any more. I believe I could hear slight differences between some 24 gauge wire and my 12 gauge cable, but it wasn't a blind test. John Dunlavy sent a nice mail note about what he regards as Cable Nonsense when looking at cables from an engineer's perspective. Likewise, Roger Russell, who was the Director of Acoustic Research at McIntosh Laboratory also notes in his History of Speaker Wire that the main issue in cable is the resistances, which basically means that heavier gauge is better, which means that the $1000 12 gauge audiophile interconnects has no advantage over 12 gauge wire from a hardware store.
I was planning on listing recommended systems at various price points... but I just don't have the time to do this right now. I have a daughter Helen who is taking up most of my free time. I believe you should put 35-40% of your funds into the speakers (>=50% if you are spending more than $4k), and the rest of the money divided (more or less evenly) between amplification and a single source (CD player or turntable). Unless you are spending mega-bucks on a system, stay away from expensive interconnects/speaker cables, just try to keep your cable runs short, and make sure your speaker cable is 12gauge or better.
My experience with audio sales people has been mixed. I found all the folks at Bay Area Audio, in Cupertino, CA and at Progressive Audio in Columbus, OH extremely helpful and knowledgeable. They seemed to know the equipment and understand that most of their clients are looking to put together a reasonably priced systems. Both of these stores carry reasonable, low cost gear like NAD as well as high end audiophile equipment. I was not pleased with the service at most other audio stores. The Audible Difference in Palo Alto was a mixed bag. Some of the sales people were very helpful. A number seemed to decided that I wasn't going to spend mega bucks and were almost rude. One guy tried to convince me that $600 was a reasonable price for a used SRM-1 Mk 2 amplifier for Stax headphones. This amp was $600 new, and often sells on the used market with Lambda Pro III headphones for $400-500. I found the sales folks a little too much into audiophile hype. Audio Difference does has a wonderful selection of products and a good home trial policy. [AD has new management, I don't know what they are like now].
SF Bay Area audio dealers, many of which were mentioned in sfbay audio store list on audioasylum.com.
Wherever you go, I would look for a audio store and sales person who would let you: