**Need audiofile help**

[[H]ealer]

I have tinkered with Home Theater and HTPC over the years but have never been truly happy with it on either front. Well, now I have come into some very nice equipment for next to nothing and would like to do this right. This is a list of the equipment that I got, all is used:

*Onkyo TX-SR674 receiver
*Audio Source SW 15" sub
*Polk Audio Monitor 50x4 floor speakers
*Polk Center Channel speaker
*All wires and clips included
*Some kind of pre-amp bass management component (not sure what the hell it is tbh)
*I already have a nice lcd tv to use with it that supports 1080p and HDMI

I have always appreciated the difference in "cleaner high quality sound." I would love to get this all setup the correct way and really be able to enjoy these new goodies. Here are my questions:

1. Is there a guide that anyone can suggest to help me with home theater setup and or a forum that anyone here has used that you might suggest?

2. I understand that the "source" of the music you play is very important. Currently all music is on my pc and has been ripped at 256. I do have most of the cd's still but no one still plays cd's do they? My pc will be in an adjacent room to the home theater. Is there a way to use the pc to pipe in the music to the receiver? Is there a better way to do this?

Any advice is welcome and appreciated...thanks

 

[trancemitr]

If you want the highest quality sound available (and you still have the discs) you might want to rip to a lossless format. I use wma lossless, but there are others. Try this with a piece of music you know really well, and then compare it to the mp3 you've already got. If you can't tell the difference, don't worry about it.

The best HT forum around is avsforum. They'll cover pretty much any question you could have about set up (the room, the equipment, etc), sources, all of that. Be careful, though; they'll have you wanting a projector in no time.

 

[kevinnem]

well I assume you know how to plug it all in, .. all your HDMI souses feed the reciver, and it feeds the TV and th espeakers. (it is where you will select your source.)

As for the mp3 thing, they can get very close (shockingly close, material depended), if you want teh best, ou want to go with oirinignal losess , disk, or flacc, or some other loseless format. I did some tests, and mixed my own music to 512 all teh way to like 16 mp3 .... the highter level like 256 are really good.

ogg vorbis is slightly better then mp3 in my opinion.

 

[[H]ealer]

Ok, silly question. Can I connect an mp3 player/ipod to the receiver? Ideally, I'd like to control all the playback from the pc. Maybe a ps3 and load all the music up. Still trying to work all this out.

 

[rasatouche]

Lossless is the way to go for music if space isn't a concern (I rip all my stuff to flac now, with my current HT speakers it's hard to pick between it and 320 mp3 CBR depending on the music, but when i put my headphones on it gets much easier to spot the difference, it's a bit smaller than wav aswell, plus you get the benefit of if you lose / scratch / can't find your CD's, you can make a perfect 1:1 copy of it again.

I use flac personally, but depending on your home setup/what software you want to use to play it, WMA lossless and Apple lossless are also options, all will sound the same.

And if you want to connect an mp3 player/ipod to the reciever, you could get a 3.5mm to red/white RCA lead, and that will output the stereo from the device to the reviever using the devices DAC (The ones in the apple products are reasonably good). Or if your amp supports it you can get a special dock for the apple stuff usually.

Other really, really cool thing you can do if you have a smartphone or ipad is use VNC like i do and essentially have a giant remote control for your music when you're not in the same room as your PC. Touchpad is cool if you have an iphone/ipad, has special controls for all the media players, works as a keyboard / mouse replacement that's easy to use from the couch, otherwise there are lots of other VNC alternatives.

 

[[H]ealer]

I have an iphone 4 and like the idea of control the sound from the phone but that's not critical. The important thing is to integrate the receiver and floor speakers with the pc so that I can play music and games on the pc through the nicer audio equipment. I'm struggling to make this happen. I have an older xfi card that may be on it's way out. There is optical out directly off the mobo.

Will I loose EAX/surround in the games that I play? I don't watch movies from the pc so the video part in not in this equation. I still want at least 3.1 and prefer 5.1. Can someone please simplify this for me please?

 

[Deadjasper]

If you want the highest quality sound available (and you still have the discs) you might want to rip to a lossless format. I use wma lossless, but there are others. Try this with a piece of music you know really well, and then compare it to the mp3 you've already got. If you can't tell the difference, don't worry about it.

The best HT forum around is avsforum. They'll cover pretty much any question you could have about set up (the room, the equipment, etc), sources, all of that. Be careful, though; they'll have you wanting a projector in no time.

You're absolutely correct. I just bought my second projector. Put one in the bedroom a couple of years ago and just couldn't stand watching that iddy ibby 42" plasma in the living room. Out it came replaced by a Optima HD 20 1080p projector. The wow factor is awesome. And I owe it all to the SVS forum.

 

[dandragonrage]

Don't go lossless. No need. Go for AAC or Ogg Vorbis at around 256Kbps (VBR, of course, but look for the settings that will get the average bitrate around 256).

Nobody - and I mean NOBODY - will be able to tell the difference. Not a single person. In the world. (Unless you find a CODEC bug.)

 

[rhouck]

Don't go lossless. No need. Go for AAC or Ogg Vorbis at around 256Kbps (VBR, of course, but look for the settings that will get the average bitrate around 256).

Nobody - and I mean NOBODY - will be able to tell the difference. Not a single person. In the world. (Unless you find a CODEC bug.)

Without even getting into the debate about what bitrate people can tell the difference at...

...this is still terrible advice. A great advantage of ripping lossless is the ability to convert to/from any format you want/need in the future without needing to re-rip your CDs. That means lossless for your home system if you want, but then a lower bitrate for your mp3 player, maybe even lower for your phone, etc. Converting is incredibly fast, re-ripping and tagging CDs is not.

Not saying OP needs to go back and re-rip his music, but advising to rip at a lower bitrate in the future (considering how cheap hard drive space is) is borderline asinine (especially into OGG).

 

[matteos]

Don't go lossless. No need. Go for AAC or Ogg Vorbis at around 256Kbps (VBR, of course, but look for the settings that will get the average bitrate around 256).

Nobody - and I mean NOBODY - will be able to tell the difference. Not a single person. In the world. (Unless you find a CODEC bug.)

I can tell a difference, not always apparent and sometimes very subtle, but there is a difference between lossless and 256 kbps.

When you can get 1tb hard drive for under $100 there's no reason to me to not have everything in FLAC.

 

[dandragonrage]

I can tell a difference, not always apparent and sometimes very subtle, but there is a difference between lossless and 256 kbps.

Bull. Placebo. Note that we're not talking MP3, and even if we were, I'd still be rather skeptical. But with AAC/Vorbis, you're most definitely not telling the truth, whether you know it or not.

 

[matteos]

FLAC FTW!

I ripped my cd collection to WMA about 5 years ago. Never do something like that, better to use a free format that isn't owned by someone. I had to re-rip the entire collection when I realized that 128kbps was very shitty.

If you use something like media monkey you can convert your FLAC files on the fly to lower bitrates to use on an ipod or mp3 player.

But whatever you do I wouldn't suggest using a proprietry format.

 

[matteos]

Bull. Placebo. Note that we're not talking MP3, and even if we were, I'd still be rather skeptical. But with AAC/Vorbis, you're most definitely not telling the truth, whether you know it or not.

No, I can tell, there is a difference in the quality. I have listened to at least a dozen records at 256kbps and then the same record as FLAC. I had most of my cd collection at 128kbps and I got annoyed at the obvious quality difference between listening to a cd and listening to an mp3... So I experimented with what format to listen to. 256kbps didn't make the cut, it wasn't as good. 320Kbps was OK, but at that rate, why not have lossless.

 

[dandragonrage]

Foobar2000 has an ABX plugin. Not that I expect you to be truthful when you claim you used it and noticed a difference, but feel free to check it out. Until then, we have plenty of people that actually did use it and claimed Vorbis to be transparent around q2-q3 (96-112Kbps ABR, IIRC) on Hydrogenaudio, and this test is a few years old. Vorbis has improved a little bit since. And Nero AAC is a little bit better still.

 

[Neb]

IMO, always rip to lossless.

1) You have a proper copy of your CD in case it gets scratched/destroyed/stolen.
2) You can always re-encode to a lossy format for whatever needs you may have.

Honestly, if you have the space for it, there's no reason you shouldn't rip to lossless.

 

[dandragonrage]

Have fun buying more space than you need and having to encode everything to a lossy format whenever you feel like refreshing your PMP playlist. *shrug*

 

[matteos]

Foobar2000 has an ABX plugin. Not that I expect you to be truthful when you claim you used it and noticed a difference, but feel free to check it out. Until then, we have plenty of people that actually did use it and claimed Vorbis to be transparent around q2-q3 (96-112Kbps ABR, IIRC) on Hydrogenaudio, and this test is a few years old. Vorbis has improved a little bit since. And Nero AAC is a little bit better still.

Its amazing that you can tell what I can hear, to the point you start accusing me of lying. Can you read my mind too?

I have listened to records that I know very well, that I have listened to for a decade or more at different quality levels. I can tell the difference. The difference between cd quality and 128kbps annoyed me enough that I spent the best part of 4 days re ripping my entire cd collection.

Maybe you can't. Great for you. If you are happy with the quality of your music collection then great. But you don't know what I can hear.

There are advantages of FLAC over everything else beyond the difference in quality. You can use it to re record a cd at its original level of quality and it is not a proprietary format. You can convert it into any format you like or downgrade the bitrate to play on other devices.

The disadvantage is that the files are large, but storage is so cheap now that isn't much of one.

 

[matteos]

Have fun buying more space than you need and having to encode everything to a lossy format whenever you feel like refreshing your PMP playlist. *shrug*

Ok, well $100 is not very much money to me, so if I need to add another terabyte to my PC I will go ahead and do so.

 

[dandragonrage]

Its amazing that you can tell what I can hear, to the point you start accusing me of lying.

I have never met a golden ear that was able to prove themselves. I am not accusing you of lying, but I think what you say you've heard is placebo. All true evidence I have seen (ABX) points to the opposite of what you say. It's not the storage that bothers me as much as the hassle of reencoding everything for a PMP.

 

[matteos]

I have never met a golden ear that was able to prove themselves. I am not accusing you of lying, but I think what you say you've heard is placebo. All true evidence I have seen (ABX) points to the opposite of what you say. It's not the storage that bothers me as much as the hassle of reencoding everything for a PMP.

Well I know you don't see the color red properly, so how about you go and describe that color to me?

Try using media monkey gold, it's $20 and it converts the FLAC files to whatever format you like for a PMP.

 

[Activate: AMD]

Well I know you don't see the color red properly, so how about you go and describe that color to me?

Try using media monkey gold, it's $20 and it converts the FLAC files to whatever format you like for a PMP.

Doesn't change the fact that you need to do it every time you want to switch media players. I tend to agree with dandragonrage that most people are biased. Have you done a double blind study comparing the two? until then, I don't really believe that you are truly able to pick out the difference between FLAC and something like 256kbps AAC/vorbis. That said, AAC/OGG aren't supported by some PMP's so then you have no advantage vs FLAC anyway.

I use both, so I obviously don't care all that much

 

[matteos]

Doesn't change the fact that you need to do it every time you want to switch media players. I tend to agree with dandragonrage that most people are biased. Have you done a double blind study comparing the two? until then, I don't really believe that you are truly able to pick out the difference between FLAC and something like 256kbps AAC/vorbis. That said, AAC/OGG aren't supported by some PMP's so then you have no advantage vs FLAC anyway.

I use both, so I obviously don't care all that much

Have either of you done a double blind study?

Perhaps I will when I have time. Honestly this debate to me is moot.

The real debate for me is whether I buy everything from this point at 24 bit 192khs DVD audio or not

 

[matteos]

I have tinkered with Home Theater and HTPC over the years but have never been truly happy with it on either front. Well, now I have come into some very nice equipment for next to nothing and would like to do this right. This is a list of the equipment that I got, all is used:

*Onkyo TX-SR674 receiver
*Audio Source SW 15" sub
*Polk Audio Monitor 50x4 floor speakers
*Polk Center Channel speaker
*All wires and clips included
*Some kind of pre-amp bass management component (not sure what the hell it is tbh)
*I already have a nice lcd tv to use with it that supports 1080p and HDMI

I have always appreciated the difference in "cleaner high quality sound." I would love to get this all setup the correct way and really be able to enjoy these new goodies. Here are my questions:

1. Is there a guide that anyone can suggest to help me with home theater setup and or a forum that anyone here has used that you might suggest?

2. I understand that the "source" of the music you play is very important. Currently all music is on my pc and has been ripped at 256. I do have most of the cd's still but no one still plays cd's do they? My pc will be in an adjacent room to the home theater. Is there a way to use the pc to pipe in the music to the receiver? Is there a better way to do this?

Any advice is welcome and appreciated...thanks

Feel like the thread went well off track so here is my input. That equipment is nice. The easiest way would be to use either coaxial or optical digital input from your pc to your receiver. It is just one wire, optical is better since the signal wont degrade over distance (coaxial wont really degrade either unless it is a fair distance). Another option if you have something like an xbox is to stream music wirelessly from your pc to your xbox (as a media extender) and have that plugged into your receiver and play it that way (I can't attest to how good a solution that would be as I've never tried it. If you have a smart phone like an android or iphone you can control music from another room using one of many apps available.

Despite the debate over 256kbps or FLAC if you already have everything ripped at that rate it is probably not worth redoing, maybe do a test and see what sounds good.

The onkyo should be fairly easy to setup. If you really care about audio quality you might want to invest in a nice soundcard if your motherboards onboard sound is not very good. If you get a soundcard you might want to spring for a 5.1 24bit 192khz one, that way in the future should you decide you can play DTS and dvd audio in 5.1

 

[Neb]

Have fun buying more space than you need and having to encode everything to a lossy format whenever you feel like refreshing your PMP playlist. *shrug*

In this time of 3TB hard drives, I don't really see any reason why I couldn't spare some hard drive space for some backups of cd's. Why would I need to encode everything to a lossy format when I refresh my playlist? I rip to flac and mp3 in a single batch, it takes no effort on my part to do so.

If I ever buy a player that can't play mp3, then I might worry....but I haven't done that yet so it works for me

 

[SirMaster]

Have fun buying more space than you need and having to encode everything to a lossy format whenever you feel like refreshing your PMP playlist. *shrug*

Lets see, I have about ~10,000 songs and it takes ~240GB. A 2TB drive is $80 so it costs me under $10 to store 10,000 songs in lossless. Hardly a problem buying the space.

Encoding to lossy is simple.

Select folder.
Drag into foobar2000.
Right click, convert to AAC, MP3 whatever.
Done.

It takes only 3 hours to churn through 10,000 going from FLAC to 200k VBR AAC.

Plus I keep the encoded version so I only have to do it once. But at least i have the ability to do it again and when at home I get to listen to the full quality tracks on my headphone or speaker system.

The 200K AAC copy for 10,000 songs is 45GB, so thats another $2 in storage costs...

 

[Deadjasper]

Is there any advantage to storing them in .flac rather than .wav ?

 

[yomike007]

There is a HUGE difference in quality between 256 and FLAC.
I rip everything in V0 VBR or 320, simply beacuse the filesize is much less and I can fill up my iphone with them. The difference between 320 and FLAC is subtle, but definitely noticeable. I keep FLAC rips of all my favorite CDs. Id re-rip everything you listen to on a regular basis in FLAC.
If you dont believe me, get your home theater and test out the difference yourself.
Its kinda like watching DVDs instead of Blue-Rays on an HDTV. Some idiots swear it looks the same.

 

[SirMaster]

Is there any advantage to storing them in .flac rather than .wav ?

FLAC is quite a bit smaller than WAV but still completely lossless. It's similar to putting files inside a .zip. You retain all of the original data but it's still compressed.

 

[Neb]

Is there any advantage to storing them in .flac rather than .wav ?

Space. FLAC will reduce the filesize of a .wav by 50%-60% with no loss in quality, so why not? You also gain the ability to tag the files with metadata.

 

[Deadjasper]

Thanks.

 

[rhouck]

Doesn't change the fact that you need to do it every time you want to switch media players.

What is there to do? You tell MediaMonkey what formats your PMP supports. Then when you click sync to the files you want, it automatically transcodes those that need it. Zero end user effort required. And it does it on a per file basis. It's not like you have to transcode your entire collection at once... It really is a very slick program.

 

[Pawz2142]

FLAC is the way to go but if you want to go old school hook up a vinyl player, you get some of the best sound from the older technology, better than any cd

 

[SirMaster]

FLAC is the way to go but if you want to go old school hook up a vinyl player, you get some of the best sound from the older technology, better than any cd

Vinyl technology and sound quality isn't better than redbook CD. The reasons many people love vinyl is because vinyl typically has better masterings than the CD version.

The vinyl masterings are much less compressed than the CD versions so they sound much more dynamic.

CDs can hold more dynamic and better sounding masterings and some artists do release their stuff that way.

See:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)

 

[kevinnem]

Don't go lossless. No need. Go for AAC or Ogg Vorbis at around 256Kbps (VBR, of course, but look for the settings that will get the average bitrate around 256).

Nobody - and I mean NOBODY - will be able to tell the difference. Not a single person. In the world. (Unless you find a CODEC bug.)

this is simply not true ... they are VERY VERY VERY close. and if your "just listening" the quality is really acceptable. but to claim you can't hear a difference, ever by anyone in the world is a poor assertion.

The question is at what point is the quality so low that you stop caring. - that is a moving target for each person.

I would say that 99% of the time, I don't NOTICE a differences in listening, .. but if I try, I am I could tell if difference if I cared to test myself.

I HAVE done a number of tests with variable bit rates (for web applications), and it si shocking how much quility you can get for so little "data" , the compression rates ar eamazeing, but to say its the same as lossless -- no.

PS- my testing is on event sudtio monitos (ps6's) useing nuendo. - audio recorded at 24 bit 192KHZ, and then mixed down - with no prosessing or anything (though it does use a 32 bit buss).