Home Audio in the 21st Century

The evolution of portable music has been pretty much straightforward. Sony introduced the Walkman cassette players in the 70's, and soon followed it up with portable CD players. Then came ipod, and the rest is history.

For home audio, it really has not been as clearcut.

As I am writing this, I am sitting at my desk, listening to some music. I mean amazing sounding music, with sound quality (SQ) that a decade ago you'd need to spend some serious money to get. And as I look at my desk top, there's not much here that resembles anything hi-fi, in the traditional sense of the word.

Over the past few months, I have ripped my entire music library of CD's. Not compressed MP3's, but all in a lossless format. That means, the files are pretty much identical to the CD's, with no loss of sound quality. There are different lossless formats available, with FLAC being one of the most popular. I just use Apple Lossless, for compatibility with my ipods. It is built into iTunes.

Under the advanced preferences tab of your iTunes, it allows you to select the compression for ripping music. I thing the default setting is 192kbps. Deselect that and choose the lossless option (no compression).

Of course the downside is that the files become much larger. If you are the type who needs to have 3000 songs on hand in your 30GB ipod, then this may not be for you. But for home audio use, your PC or laptop has much more memory available. Not to mention that the price for memory has now decreased significantly. I recently got a one-terrabyte external hard drive for less than $100 from Amazon. I use it to store my large digital pictures (mostly in RAW format), but it also houses my music library.

Now about iTunes. Well, I always thought it to be quirky, but I can live with it. Compared to listening to music in the traditional way - by CD, LP or tape, playing it through your computer gives you instant access to any part of your music library at the touch of a button. No flipping through to find the CD you want. No cleaning LP's. Don't want to listen to the entire album? Use playlists. No scratches. Did you know that the groove on an LP deteriorates everytime you play it? Well, digital media suffers from some data loss over time as well, but to a much, much less extent. Then again, you can burn a CD or create some other form of backup.

A lot of times, I find myself preferring computer playback over playing the CD (which you can also do through your computer's CD/DVD drive, btw) because the nifty (do people actually still say "nifty?") little iTunes equalizer lets me tweak the music to my liking.

Okay, that covers the storage and media player. Depending on how good the soundcard is on your computer, it may be perfectly acceptable to plug in a small pair of headphones and you are all set. But what I would consider the "hub" of any serious computer based audio set up is what is called the DAC. This stands for digital to analog converter. Huh?!?

DAC's are not new. At it's most basic form, it is a chip that converts the digital file which, in this instance, is your music, into an analog signal. The analog signal is, in the end, what goes to your headphones or speakers and come out as the music you hear. Your ipod has a DAC. Your PC soundcard does the same. Your CD player, your blu-ray player, etc. The difference is in sound quality between your ipod and, say, a cheap MP3 player from Wally World, in a large part, has to do with the quality of this conversion.

What a DAC does is act as an external soundcard for your laptop, in the simplest sense. The digital files bypass the built-in soundcard, and goes directly to the DAC, through a digital connection, either a USB cable, a coaxial S/PDIF cable, or an optical Toslink (after the Toshiba proprietary cable). The conversion is then accomplished by the DAC unit. In almost all cases, the DAC will do it better than your built in chip.

Aside from your laptop, you can also connect a "CD transport" to the DAC. This means, anything that will read your CD. It can be an expensive audiophile grade CD player, in which case the improvement in SQ may not be as noticeable, since most of these already employ pretty advanced built in conversion circuitry. After I upgraded to a blu-ray DVD player, my old DVD player has been gathering dust. Now I use it as a transport. As long as there is a connector in the back of the unit for "digital audio out" (mine has optical and coaxial), you are in business.

What leaves the DAC is now an analog signal. Most desktop DAC's have the usual RCA line out jacks in the back. You connect these to an amplifier to power your speakers, or if you choose, to a dedicated headphone amplifier to power your headphones. For my purposes, I listen with headphones on my desktop.

That's it. Of course, the equipment quality varies. You can spend quite a bit of money on the headphones, DAC, amp etc. The important thing to remember is to get good equipment, so you enjoy what you are hearing. Note I did not say "the best." There will always be something better, and more expensive (although they don't always go hand in hand). At some point, the principle of diminishing returns sets in. Some people will spend hundreds for a miniscule amount of improvement. Well, whatever floats their boat.

That being said, there is a lot of fun to be had for DIYers with some basic electronics skills. Modifying amps, rolling tubes and opamps, recabling headphones, making cable interconnects (with better material than the RCA interconnects that came with your CD player, for instance). I am a little handy with a soldering iron, so I have been having fun with this, but it is by no means a necessity.

So, what am I listening to right now? Well, I have Keith Jarrett's Vienna concert playing through my laptop's iTunes, out the USB, into an inexpensive (but very good) Chinese DAC/Headphone amp combo, powering a pair of Denon D2000 headphones which I modded. I can say I would be happy with this setup for all-around listening. As tends to happen, however, I right now also have a couple of other headphones and a dedicated headphone tube amplifier. They each have their own sound signature, which works well with different types of music, but I am not going to get into that right now.

What would be a good, inexpensive setup to try this out? This is what I recommend:

DAC/Headphone amp combo - read the UK review on Rock Grotto linked on the auction page. For the quality of materials and craftsmanship, this is a bargain at this price considering how much DACs and amps cost.

Headphone - this headphone is unbeatable in terms of "value for money" right now. The prices have already gone up significantly with the number of favorable reviews on the audiophile forums, but this store still has them at the old price. It also has low impedance and works well unamped, direct from your ipod or portable CD player. With a decent amp like the one listed above, it will give a lot of headphones priced 5x as much a run for their money. Here's a review on the same UK forum.

For <200 dollars, hook those two up to your laptop, play lossless files or a good quality CD, lean back and enjoy music in the 21st century!