Better PC Sound

Posted at: Friday 29th February 2008 by Chris Lee

Just how good can PC audio be? Chris Lee investigates how to get the best audio quality from your computer, then pits the humble PC against one of the best CD players on the market.

Our first thoughts were that the poor sound quality was a result of having most of the music stored on our PC in the form of highly compressed MP3 files, in contrast to the 840C, which was playing the uncompressed data direct from the CD.

A terabyte hard disk can now be had for around £190 and provides enough space to store almost 1,400 uncompressed CD albums. If affordable, plentiful PC storage space isn't a problem then why hasn't everyone abandoned aggressive compression in favour of better audio quality? The answer is the c-word: convenience, closely related to the b-word: bandwidth. Bit Torrent sites provide access to vast swathes of music, and many people are prepared to accept poor audio quality if it means they can download a free song in less than a minute. This is enough to set an audiophile's heart racing - sure, you can download REM's entire discography in less than an hour, but if the drums sound like a five-year-old playing the pans, what's the point?

This isn't only the fault of Internet downloads - websites such as the iTunes Music Store, Amazon and eMusic offer much better audio quality than your average 128Kb/sec MP3 file, but many still use some form of lossy compression to encode the music they sell.

The fact that Bit Torrent technology is largely seen by the music industry as being irrevocably linked to piracy, and music download sites want to control their wares, means that they must serve their downloads themselves, resulting in large bandwidth consumption. Compressing the audio is a way for them to compensate for the huge volume of data they serve. As a result, the only foolproof way of obtaining top-quality music on your computer is to buy the CD, and encode the music files yourself.

Cost of buying CDs: Typically £8.99 each from online retailers, although prices can range from pennies in an eBay auction, to £40 or £50 for limited edition box sets.


Ripping

The most common media-playing applications for Windows, Windows Media Player and iTunes, both default to poor-quality ripping settings. Click on 'Rip CD' in Media Player 11 and it will hand over MP3 files encoded at a bit rate of 128Kb/sec. For more details on audio compression, see our full How It Works article, but suffice to say that the lower the bit rate, the greater the compression and the larger the amount of original CD data that's disposed of in the ripping process. While you can increase the bit rate at which WMP and iTunes rip, if you want full control over the process, you'll need a dedicated ripping and encoding application. Two of the best are dBpoweramp (www.dbpoweramp.com) and Exact Audio Copy (www.exactaudiocopy.de).

Perhaps the best feature of both applications is AccurateRip. This is a small app that creates a checksum code for each of the music files you've ripped, and then compares it with a database to determine if your codes are identical to those created by other users ripping the same CD. If your CD is damaged, your code will be unique, and you'll have to clean your disk or rip again. It's perfectionist, but it beats hearing a loud blip during your favourite song because dust on your CD led to a poorly encoded MP3.