hotgrease

CNET has a list of the decade's 30 biggest tech flops and the DVD Audio made the list. It's such a PIA to make one!

http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-33_7-10...tag=mncol;page

hotgrease

also satellite radio! it's growing on me, but i still prefer my ipod. and i hate driving into a parking garage and hearing silence

http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-33_7-10...tag=mncol;page

MzaTL

iTrader: (1)

i was hoping the DVD-A would make a come back they sound great.

Steven Kephart

I don't know what it is, but I sure want to buy it: http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-33_7-10001201-27.html?s=0&o=10001201&tag=mncol;page

Ken1997TL

Nothing floppy about those.. more like rubber cement :fake!:

princelybug

iTrader: (16)

+1.

Steven Bell

iTrader: (2)

Coming from a 32 year radio disc jockey, it is one of the greatest disappointments I've seen in my professional career. People don't know what they're missing. The problem is that people want everything too easy. They don't know how to hook up 5 wires into the back of their receivers.

I hate cars

I'm still a little hopeful that it will make a comeback. I love the soundquality, especially with an upgraded system.

One thing is for sure, CD quality isn't what it used to be especially with some of the rock-ish music. My Lincoln Park CD sounds like an MP3.

phee

iTrader: (5)

^ thats mostly because the art of mixing and mastering is going down the drain. everyone just wants a loud and in your face sound and they get that by compressin the shit out of the music. which in tern leads to degradation of sound quality and that feeling of the dynamics that old audiophiles used to love.

Ken1997TL

I've got some older CD's that sound incredible in my RL. A rich bass, crisp highs and clear vocals.

Leuth

They were clueless when they came up with DVD-A, weren't they? I mean.... remove the hyphen. Seriously. What were they thinking?

princelybug

iTrader: (16)

I TOTALLY wish that DVD-A's would become mainstream again.

princelybug

iTrader: (16)

WHO DO WE HAVE TO TALK TO FOR THIS!!!

Ken1997TL

I'm quite disappointed there arent any DVD-audio headunits available..

I guess people would rather listen to crap at a high volume rather than good music with sound staging and clarity.

arrogantbastard

Good discussion of that here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

It's amazing the difference in quality between some of my older CDs from the 80's and 90's and the newer ones. The older ones don't have that "in your face" loud sound, but you can actually crank them louder because they sound so good.

The whole loudness war has gotten so bad that the definitive audiophile version of Metallica's Death Magnetic is a remix some guy did with the masters from Guitar Hero

Steven Kephart

Wow, and here I thought I was the only one on this forum that cared about great sound. I wouldn't say that all modern music is horrible. There are some great sounding CD's out there. But yes, most of the popular stuff is designed for the radio where the distortion won't be noticed. Put in on a reference system and the flaws make it almost unbearable.

TheWeez

Why bother with disc technology that's becoming outdated when you can goto stuff like lossless and other formats that offer even better options.

Ken1997TL

And how are they transmitted to the sound system?

DVD-A is so far unmatched in terms of quality.

arrogantbastard

Thumb drives, portable USB drives, etc.

The problem with lossless formats is the large file size compared to a crappy 128k rip of the same song. The typical consumer is happier to put 10,000 songs on their ipod at 128k than maybe 1,000 at 320k or god forbid FLAC or other lossless format. Then they'll argue with you till they're blue in the face that you can't tell the difference anyway.

I hate cars

I've hear of the FLAC format from co-workers. Is there a website that you can download some of the higher quality stuff? I don't care if it costs money, I just want better SQ.

arrogantbastard

Sadly, there aren't many headunits or MP3 players out there that will play any lossless formats. iPods will play a proprietary "Apple Lossless" format, and I don't know of any MP3 players off the top of my head that will play FLAC (I think there's a couple out there but I don't recall which ones they are).

When I acquire music, I download FLAC whenever possible then convert to 320k MP3. If I can't find it in FLAC, I don't download it unless it's 320k. A 320k mp3 is not quite CD quality but is much more tolerable than 196k or 128k.

I use winamp http://www.winamp.com/ (free) to convert FLAC to WAV, then iTunes to convert WAV to mp3.

Free CD rippers:
Exact Audio Copy http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
dBpoweramp http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

I've also used the dBpoweramp music converter to convert between formats, but winamp and itunes works just fine.

I hate cars

Thank you! Looks like I have a lot more research to do.

I dislike crappy recordings so much that I have no radio station presets and let the XM expire. It almost seems like the cheap recordings sound even worse once you upgrade the system or maybe the good stuff just sounds better so you can really tell the difference.

arrogantbastard

Yes, when you upgrade amps/speakers, and especially headunits with premium DACs (Digital to Analog Converters), you will definitely be able to tell the differences between poor recordings and good ones. And I'm with you on the XM, the SQ is terrible!

Ken1997TL

I know what FLAC is, all of my music is stored that way as originals and when put on an iPOD, kept at 320 kbps. I'm OCD about sound quality. Eventually I want to find a digital player with a high quality DAC or maybe bypass the built-in one and use the headunit's (?)

My point is that DVD-A is even higher fidelity per channel and has 5.1 instead of 2.

Ken1997TL

BTW, my Palm Pre with homebrew software will play FLAC.

arrogantbastard

I think there are a couple of aftermarket headunits out there that bypass the iPod DAC and use the onboard DAC. I don't have an ipod so I never really cared to research that far into it. I personally use an 8 gig thumb drive loaded with mp3's that I play through my HU. And I'm OCD as hell about the quality of those files because my system will mercilessly expose subpar recordings.

I'm a little late to the DVD-A game (just bought my TL in October), and I can't find any with the kind of music I listen to anyway.

Sweet!

OLD_HATCH

Music (remix) ?


It is certainly very sad the way sound quality had declined even among big studios.

If I pull out my old cd's and play them in my car that has all my oldschool SOny Mobile es stuff (cdx-c90 xdp210eq etc etc) vocals and intruments sound sooooooo nice. I pull out one of the cds made in the last couple of years and its simply not there.


Ive never heard a DVD-A but from what Ive read its an audiophile's dream.

Steven Kephart

I used to have a C90/4000X combo.

My first SACD was Nickel Creek. It definitely sounded good and I use a normal CD of theirs as a demo disk. But I'm not a big fan of multi-channel music, especially in cars. It seems that the producers think they have to put sources behind you just because they have the channels available. A good recording on a good stereo system will be able to reproduce all that without the extra center and surround channels. When I worked at Adire Audio, my boss used to use Dark Side of the Moon played in stereo to show sound coming from the sides and behind the listener all off of 2 speakers up front. And most people don't believe me when I say the center channel isn't playing when they hear Norah Jones directly in front of them in my home theater.

As for cars, you don't have the proper seating position for multi-channel audio. You don't have a left, center, right channel. You have one left and two right channels which screws with the soundstage.

princelybug

iTrader: (16)

I would really like DVD-A's to come back, or to play lossless format music in the car. I wish.

darowa

One technique to play lossless digital in the car is with an Ipod/Itouch/Iphone. Rip the music to Apple lossless. It requires an interface of the Ipod/Itouch/Iphone into the audio system but there are several available. This is of course 44.1kHz/16-bit music but it's lossless.

DVD-A discs have several music formats. There are a variety of higher-rate or higher-bit on DVD-A discs. I know of no way to "rip" music from DVD-A discs (lossy or lossless). The only way to play these discs is to use a DVD-A player.

rubenders

No is very easy I use it to make my dvd a disck for my 04 tl Is call dvd a solo standar
With this you can create song in 6 channel insted of 2 and it can be 5.2 suround sound.

arrogantbastard

An improvement for sure but you're still stuck with the crappy iPod DAC...

JerZDevil

iTrader: (1)

Wasn't it the same thing with Mini discs? I liked the idea of having a small CD cartridge that holds a shit load of songs. Then again.. we do have iPods. I think it would have made more sense to have a MiDi player instead of a friggin tape player in the 3G TL.

I also hope DVD-A makes a comeback. Maybe if they had more music selections. Have an album with regular CD and DVD-A like DVD's and Blue Rays.

TheWeez

MiniDisc (like BetaMax and other Sony technologies) died in large part because Sony tries to screw everyone else by charging crazy prices to license their technologies.

Arcticcl9

MiniDisc died because it was just a better cassette tape recorder/player, and it fizzled when the iPod/mp3 player craze started. I had the NetMD recorder, but transferring songs from PC to the MD recorder was slow and a chore and the proprietary software to do so was not that streamlined.

as for DVD-A...not enough selection and overpriced discs killed it

Ken1997TL

USB stick?

iPod DACs do suck. Are the Zunes any better in this regard?

arrogantbastard

USB stick: Just holds files, so it depends on the DAC in your HU. Like I said earlier, there just aren't that many HUs out there that will decode lossless formats like FLAC (I think there are one or two, but they are high-end SQ decks).

I have a Zune, but I've never done an A/B comparison with an iPod, so I don't know if it's any better. My previous HU had a 24-bit DAC, and sometimes I would use the aux-in to play files from my Zune (meaning the decoding is done by the Zune DAC). I could definitely tell the difference if I played that same file off a USB stick (meaning the decoding was done by the HU DAC). So clearly, the Zune has a lower-class DAC, probably not much different than the iPod.

I'm sure the information is out there on exactly which chips are used in Zunes and iPods and which ones are better, but I'm too lazy right now to go look for it...