Digital Audio Hi-Fi
These devices let you play digital audio through your stereo system, and the only finger you have to lift is the one on your remote control.
The high end (top to bottom): Yamaha MusicCast wireless client, Yamaha MusicCast MCX-1000 server, Onkyo TX-NR801 receiver, and Xhifi Xducer 2.1 speakers (background).
For most of us, listening to digital music is something we do when we're sitting in front of our computers, or when we're out cruising around with our portable audio players. In the living room, we're still more likely to be playing compact discs. But a new crop of digital audio devices allows you to listen to digital audio through your stereo system.
Compressed digital audio still has a long way to go before some people will relinquish their CDs. But it's truly convenient. You can spend as little as $100 to bring thousands of MP3, WMA, or AAC audio files from your PC into your living room. Spend a little more, and you can play the files over a wired or wireless network. Or you can spend thousands of dollars on a full-blown digital audio server (the fact that it has a hard disk is a sign that digital audio may be edging toward respectability among audiophiles).
Several of the devices that I looked at can do more than simply play audio files. Want to listen to Internet radio on your home theater system? No problem. How about watching your vacation photos on your TV, in perfect sync with your favorite music? Can do.
You might be thinking, "Great, all I need is another big box in my living room." Relax: These devices come large and small, wired and wireless. Besides, think of the space you'll save once you stick your old CDs in the attic.
Low-Cost Hi-Fi
Inexpensive and wired: Xitel Pro HiFi-Link.
Does your PC rest within arm's length of your stereo receiver? You can run a $5 minijack-to-RCA audio patch cable from the line-out port on your PC's sound card to the analog ports on your receiver. However, you may hear interference caused by your PC's circuitry, and you'll have to use an audio application on your computer to pick songs. You also won't hear multichannel sound, unless you have a sound card with digital audio out, such as something from Creative's Audigy 2 line. MP3 audio can be encoded only in stereo, so you won't miss out when you play those files, but any surround-sound-encoded audio on your PC, including DVD sound and some Windows Media files, will have to be played in stereo.
If your PC is within 30 feet of your home theater, your best bet is the Xitel Pro HiFi-Link. A small silver box the size of a deck of playing cards, this $100 device sends digital audio stored on your PC over to your stereo, connecting to your PC via a USB port (thus bypassing the sound card). You can use one of three included 30-foot cables: optical, coaxial, or standard RCA.
You'll get surround-sound audio with the Pro HiFi-Link only if your receiver has either a digital optical or a coaxial port; if it doesn't, consider the $5 patch cable, or Xitel's standard HiFi-Link ($50). The Pro HiFi-Link works with Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and it doesn't require any additional software. But like the $5 cable, it has no screen or remote, so you must select your songs via a computer.
Music Without Wires
Network streamers: Slim Devices Squeezebox (left) and Creative Sound Blaster Wireless Music and its remote.
Creative's Sound Blaster Wireless Music--a $230 device about the size of a cable modem--connects to your receiver and pulls digital audio from your computer over an 802.11b wireless network. The included remote control has a small, integrated LCD panel--an inspired design decision that means the receiver itself doesn't need one. The Creative's remote is the only one to use Radio Frequency control; the other products in this review use infrared, which depends on a direct line of sight to the device for reliable operation. The setup wizard, while straightforward, did not offer helpful hints to ease configuration problems. Though it was my own fault for forgetting that I had Windows XP's built-in firewall activated, the software should have been able to detect that fact and offer something a little more useful than simply telling me that the setup had failed.
Nevertheless, the software that converted my PC into a wireless music server worked flawlessly, except that the music skipped occasionally owing to interruptions in the wireless signal. I appreciated the ability to program the software to scan the PC regularly for recently added music. Unfortunately, the device does not support Internet radio; Creative says it may add that as a downloadable upgrade in the future.
With minimal instructions and software that's not the most intuitive, the Slim Devices Squeezebox is definitely for the enthusiast crowd--it's based on open-source code and is supported on the Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and Solaris operating systems. Getting the connection up and running is pretty easy, though using the remote control to enter a WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) password and, on some networks, an IP number is a bit clunky.
The hardware is a simple black box that looks rather like a radar detector. And though its vacuum fluorescent display is a touch brighter than a standard LED screen, it's still not viewable from a distance--say, if you're sitting on your couch. As with the Creative device, I heard some hiccups when using the device wirelessly, but they cleared up when I used the ethernet port.
Turtle Beach's AudioTron was one of the first network audio players. I tried out a preproduction version of its successor, the MediaTron, which will access photos as well as music files from your host computer: Just plug the device into a TV, and you can view photo slide shows and browse cover art from your albums. The unit will come with three networking options: ethernet, 802.11b, and HomePlug. Turtle Beach says the MediaTron will be available in March.
High-Rent Hi-Fi
The $999 Onkyo TX-NR801 is a sophisticated 7.1-channel home theater receiver that can manage high-definition video and digital audio (both optical and coaxial). Like most receivers in its class, this one decodes Dolby Pro Logic II and Dolby Digital EX audio. It outputs 100 watts per channel.
But when you're scanning the myriad inputs provided on the back, it's easy to spot what sets the TX-NR801 apart from the rest of its class: an ethernet port. Just plug the receiver into your home network, and you can listen to MP3 and Windows Media (WMA) files stored on your Windows PC, as well as to a canned selection of Internet radio stations (if your favorite station isn't included, you're out of luck). The track and artist info is easy to read on the receiver's display, and you can specify up to 30 Internet radio presets (in addition to 40 AM/FM presets). The Onkyo is a very good receiver. But it will have to wait for "outstanding" status until the company lets us listen to any Internet radio station we like. A hard disk to let the device store its own audio would be nice, too.
Yamaha's $2200 MusicCast MCX-1000 does have a hard drive, an 80GB model. It's the one device I evaluated that operates independently of your PC. To download track and data information from the Internet, the MusicCast connects to your home network via ethernet. Unfortunately, the device's copy-protection scheme won't permit you to copy any music files you may already have on your computer; instead, you must re-rip all of your CDs to the MCX-1000.
The MusicCast server, about the size of a home theater receiver, will rip from other analog and digital sources, so this could be your chance to finally copy all of those old LPs and cassettes. The unit also includes a 4X CD-RW drive, so you can burn CDs (albeit slowly). You can stream music from the server to space-age-looking MusicCast clients (at $599 a pop, plus another $150 for small matching speakers) in other rooms in your home via ethernet or the integrated 802.11b connections. However, you can't listen with any other type of device--say, a computer. In the end, while the MusicCast offers the wireless networking and storage of a computer, it lacks the flexibility of one.
Freelance writer Josh Taylor lives in Brooklyn.Does MP3 Mean High Fidelity?
Illustration by Diego Aguirre
Compressing Issues
I've always found that trying to discern a decent sound recording from an outstanding one is like tasting wine. I can tell the difference between a nice Cabernet and a bottle of Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck, but I'm not as sure when I'm trying to differentiate between a Sonoma Valley Pinot Noir and an Oregon Pinot Noir. But much like when I taste wine, if I have someone pointing out the differences in audio recordings and I know what I'm listening for, I'll put my ears up there with anyone's.
If digital music sounds good to you, isn't that enough? Using portable digital audio players and earbuds, most people can't tell the difference among music files encoded at moderately different bit rates. But what happens when you start piping music through an expensive stereo system?
"If you listen to CDs over crappy speakers, then listen to MP3s over crappy speakers, you're not going to be able to tell the difference," says R. Luke DuBois, an instructor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. "But once you move up to a prosumer-quality amp and speakers, you'll start to hear a difference at low bit rates."
If sound quality is critical to you, you can encode music using a "lossless" codec, which means it should sound identical to the original source. There are myriad lossless encoders around, including FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and Monkey's Audio. Windows Media Player 9 also offers a lossless WMA codec. However, using a lossless codec will result in huge files, which defeats one of the purposes of digitally encoding in the first place--saving drive space. But even though drive space is far less critical an issue when hard drives cost less than $1 a gigabyte, you can run out of space faster than you can say Itunes if you get too carried away. Coldplay's "The Scientist" takes up a mere 4.8MB when encoded using WMA at a data rate of 128 kilobits per second; with WMA Lossless, you'll need a staggering 31.5MB of space for the same song.
As for which compression format best preserves fidelity, audio experts tend to be split. Despite its prevalence--especially in file-sharing environments--MP3 is not considered the best format from a fidelity perspective. In our last lab test of audio formats, we found that, at the lowest data rate (64 kbps), listeners could easily tell the difference between a compressed MP3 file and uncompressed audio, but they were much less able to distinguish a 64-kbps WMA file from the original. However, at bit rates above 128 kbps, almost no one could differentiate compressed audio from the original, and they certainly couldn't distinguish differences among various compression formats.
However, those tests were conducted using headphones--high-quality headphones, to be sure. But many audiophiles feel that differences in fidelity are best discerned by using loudspeakers. In that type of setting, many listeners say they prefer WMA and AAC over MP3, saying that those two formats provide richer sound, particularly at the extremes of the listening range. Like WMA, the AAC format is popular with the recording industry because it contains copy protection, and experts say it provides quality that's comparable if not superior to WMA, especially at higher bit rates. Craig Eggers, Director of CE Technology Marketing at Dolby Labs, creator of the AAC format, agrees that compressed music can "lose some warmth, and can drop some subtle things at the high and low ends," but says that "the technologies are getting better and better, and a lot of average listeners can't tell the difference above certain bit rates."
Since popular music is already compressed, you're less likely to lose a lot of quality by using a lower bit rate, says DuBois. But if you plan on ripping a lot of classical and jazz recordings, you'll likely want to pick a higher bit rate to ensure that you don't drop any of the original recording--especially at the lower end--and you should use sound-leveling settings (if your ripping and/or playback software offers them) to minimize the boosts in volume most compression techniques typically produce.
As a general rule, for pop music either 64-kbps WMA or 128-kbps AAC or MP3 should satisfy the vast majority of listeners; for classical and jazz, you may want to step up to 192 kbps. Some codecs, including WMA 9 and MP3, allow you to select another option--Variable Bit Rate (VBR)--which adjusts the bit rate based on the needs of the music you're encoding. Though the AAC codec does allow for VBR encoding, Apple's popular ITunes software supports it only for ripping MP3s, not AACs.
Since this all comes down to personal preference, here's mine: I use WMA 9 with a variable bit rate of 85 kbps to 145 kbps, although I should admit that I rarely rip classical recordings. And in case you're curious, I'm also a fan of 2000 Bordeaux and 2001 German Rieslings.
Josh Taylor