hard drive/networked hifi vs CDs for classical music

[tgr]

I am considering options for investing in a system for listening to classical music. I had imagined some second-hand naim equipment e.g. cd player, pre-amp, power amp, headphone amp, suitable floor standers.

Set against this I wondered whether modern technological solutions are at the stage where they reach the same levels of sound quality. I am aware that naim is also getting into this area but am unsure of how their products compare to their cd players. (naim is just an example to illustrate the type of system, I am not particularly wedded to them).

Could anyone offer any advice? One relevant point is that my broadband connection is a bit flaky and I wouldn't like to rely on it for music. A multi-room solution is not necessarily required although I'm happy if it is an added bonus provided the main function is achieved i.e. super sound quality in the main living room for solo piano, chamber music, orchestral and opera.

Sorry for the rambling post, as you can see I don't really know what I'm talking about but I hope that's clear!

tg

[Jon1967x]

Used Naim gear is pretty expensive. I've just sold a 20 year old CD player gif £700 which makes my mind boggle. The Chinese love all that olive kit.

I've moved to digital and the advantage is you can download higher quality music than CD format. Linn in particular do this.

My current setup is pretty simple, naim speakers, mono block power amps and a decent DAC/preamp fed by my computer. The only difference for your setup is the source.

You only need to worry about your internet speed when buying new content. Once it's downloaded you should be fine. I prefer it fir the convenience. You can also convert CDs to a computer file (FLAC is possibly the most popular lossless format) do you have the best of both. I actually use an Audiolab CD/DAC/preamp so you can do either.

[DavidY]

tgr

Have a look at Meridian Sooloos options, it is probably the only streaming product that is really geared up for Classical Music, as it holds large amounts of metadata, enabling searches by Composer, Works, Orchestra, Conductor, Record Label, etc, etc. It is very powerful (but not cheap!)

davidy

[tgr]

Thanks both, food for thought.

I imagine the broadband speed/stability would be relevant for Spotify, which might be another option although I have no idea about its classical coverage or its sound quality

[Crackie]

Novafidelity may be of interest.

http://www.novafidelity.co.uk/ I've not heard X30 or X12 myself yet but plan to check them both out this month. Good reviews for X30 in Hi-Fi Choice and Hi-Fi World late last year, Richer Sounds sell them.

[telecat]

Lots of SACD Classical albums and PCM stuff as well so I would look at a SACD player or Universal player first. Then there are a lot of DSD classical downloadable files as well as 24/96 and 24/192 PCM files as well so if you do go Streamer make sure you get one that can handle those formats.

[davepoth]

tgr said:

Thanks both, food for thought.

I imagine the broadband speed/stability would be relevant for Spotify, which might be another option although I have no idea about its classical coverage or its sound quality

Any mainstream streaming service will be supplying audio at a much lower quality than you are looking for based on the amount you are looking to spend - you can hear artifacts in tinny laptop speakers so on the sort of system you'll end up with it'll be horrendous. There may well be specific classical streaming services but I'm not aware of them - I expect they'll be googlable though.

[theboss]

tgr said:

Set against this I wondered whether modern technological solutions are at the stage where they reach the same levels of sound quality.

In terms of sound quality, this stage was reached many years ago. Don't be under any illusion that high-end CD players are somehow special. A streamer playing an accurate, lossless CD rip has access to exactly the same data as held on a CD, but without the potential for errors. There are plenty of high-end streamers with good DACs which will rival or exceed the capabilities of any CD player and this is in pure audio terms before you even consider the other advantages e.g. support for higher resolution media, downloading/streaming internet files without having to own/rip albums, and the convenience of accessing huge libraries of albums with a fingertip.

I listen to a lot of classical and generally tag my own albums meaning I can search for any work by composer, performer/orchestra, conductor and so on. You don't need a proprietary system like Meridian's to achieve this - though they may make it easier.

In terms of internet streaming, of course the higher the bitrate the better and I always prefer to listen to lossless files, but 320kbps streams can also sound perfectly good when played through a good system. I use Spotify for convenience (at 320kbps) and its absolutely fine for background music, wife and kids etc. There are some internet streaming services offering FLAC streams on a subscription basis, and of course you can download lossless material easily enough.

My main streamer is a Linn Akurate DSM - I haven't listened to many equivalents but I'd have thought that once you start spending four figures on a glorified DAC its going to sound pretty damned good.

[legzr1]

The only thing I can add to the above post is that you should make sure that whatever 'system' you eventually choose make sure it supports gapless playback - most do but some don't and it's far more important for classical than most other genres of music.

[FlossyThePig]

Something new from Meridian.

https://www.meridian-audio.com/sounds-too-good-but...

http://www.musicischanging.com

[Mermaid]

FlossyThePig said:

Something new from Meridian.

https://www.meridian-audio.com/sounds-too-good-but...

http://www.musicischanging.com

How does the sound compare to 192/24 music, or even 384/24 ( I have never heard this quality music) or it mainly space?

[tgr]

theboss said:

There are plenty of high-end streamers with good DACs which will rival or exceed the capabilities of any CD player and this is in pure audio terms

Thank you all for your comments.

Boss

A naim dealer I visited had a naim hard drive hooked up to naim amplification and sonus faber speakers and it sounded great, but I am a novice at this and didn't really know what I was looking/listening for. He compared the same track to one on CD and I didn't notice any difference.

He then recommended getting one over a high end CD player but I was dubious - you nevertheless agree I take it?

[clockworks]

I spent a whole afternoon at my local HiFi dealer comparing sources a few years ago - £700 CD players v laptop with DAC v media players with and without off-board DAC. I ripped a few CD tracks to flac files on the laptop, and copied them to the media player.

We came to the conclusion that there really wasn't much between the transports (CDP, laptop and media player) - makes sense, since digital is digital - but the DAC used did make a noticeable difference.

£700 CDP sounded slightly better than laptop with £200 DAC, £350 HDD media player with it's own DAC as good as CDP, media player with off-board DAC (connected using optical) was best.

Think the laptop sounded worst because of electrical noise, but there wasn't much in it.

For me, a hdd or network player and a decent DAC is the way to go.

[Jon1967x]

That's what I do. I use a squeezebox, connected to a quality dac, controlled via my iPad, and I can hear differences between different qualities of source material, especially MP3 and lossless. I've not tried CD for a long time as I rip them straight away and have all the convenience of sitting on the sofa selecting what I listen too.

The higher quality formats make a difference too, part of which I suspect is due to the extra care in mastering and the selection of good quality recordings in the first place.

[essayer]

I have actually been really impressed with the range of classical music available on Spotify. There are of course a million and one 'Most Relaxing Classics..Ever!' types of albums but if you persist with the searches you will usually find full collections of original pieces - labels like Naxos, or well known performers, composers, and so on.

If you are a premium member then 320kbps is available for both streaming and offline play - you can try it with a free trial but only 128kbps IIRC.

Much more flexibility than Squeezebox etc.

[RobM77]

It completely depends on the bitrate that the music's been encoded with; most music from iTunes or similar will sound pretty poor on a decent hi-fi, but many formats are now 'lossless' (I've never quite understod what this means - I presume they're comparing the bit rate to a CD?).

With music stored as files, usability is also a consideration, and I find classical music especially annoying as default filenames are often very long and without the data in the right order to see from the first 10 digits what you're actually listening to. In addition to this, most software to store, search and play your music is not designed with classical music in mind, both in terms of this track description issue and also in selecting single pieces/works to listen to (for example, as far as most music playing software is concerned, a CD with two symphonies on it is simply a CD with 8 tracks by a particular composer, so if the track names don't make it obvious which symphony they're from, which is normal, you're stuck. This s especially pertinent if you want, for example, the second piece of music on the CD and you don't know how many movements the first is and all the first ten digits are telling you is the composer or orchestra's name).

[theboss]

tgr said:

theboss said:

There are plenty of high-end streamers with good DACs which will rival or exceed the capabilities of any CD player and this is in pure audio terms

Thank you all for your comments.

Boss

A naim dealer I visited had a naim hard drive hooked up to naim amplification and sonus faber speakers and it sounded great, but I am a novice at this and didn't really know what I was looking/listening for. He compared the same track to one on CD and I didn't notice any difference.

He then recommended getting one over a high end CD player but I was dubious - you nevertheless agree I take it?

Yes I would agree with the dealer in principle - I'd rather have a good streamer than a high-end CD player, even if it were used solely to play a ripped CD collection i.e. disregarding other benefits such as the accessibility of internet media.

Any networked streaming device is essentially a 'perfect' CD transport playing a flawless disc each time - it does a bit-perfect job of retrieving the audio data and feeding it to its DAC. Therefore it stands to reason that even a modest streamer when coupled with a good DAC can rival a decent CD player.

To argue that a CD player must sound better than a streamer, you'd have to be comparing a high-end CD player (good DAC etc) with a poor streamer, and/or basing a comparison on the playback of compressed files. If you make things equal and compare a high-end CD player to a high-end streamer, and ensure you are playing lossless files, there's a good chance that the streamer will sound better. There is certainly nothing inherently superior about CD players, that's for sure.

I wouldn't get too hung up on bitrate either... its more the case that the higher the bitrate for a given recording on a given streaming device, the better, but that doesn't mean that higher is always better. I would rather listen to 256kbps AAC (e.g. iTunes quality) on a £10k streamer than the same track played losslessly on a £200 streamer.

[Crackie]

theboss said:

I wouldn't get too hung up on bitrate either...

+1

Higher bitrates are helpful for recording engineers and when controlling volume levels in the digital domain but 'Redbook' 16/44.1 has more than enough bandwidth and dynamic range for playback.

[Mermaid]

Crackie said:

+1

Higher bitrates are helpful for recording engineers and when controlling volume levels in the digital domain but 'Redbook' 16/44.1 has more than enough bandwidth and dynamic range for playback.

& yet when I have heard 96/24, 192/24 at hi-fi dealers, it sounds so much more open/revealing.

[maffski]

RobM77 said:

...but many formats are now 'lossless' (I've never quite understod what this means - I presume they're comparing the bit rate to a CD?).

Lossless refers to the compression that is applied, rather than the quality. It specifically means that the compression does not loose any information, the data out is the same as the data fed in before compression. Usually it's only bothered with for Redbook quality audio or better, but it doesn't have to be.

Things like FLAC and ZIP are lossless, MP3 and JPEG lossy, which means they throw away some of the original information in order to make it more compressable, the more you throw away the more it can be compressed, but the further away it is from the original, loosing the fine details.