Dad_of_Davina on 29/11/2008 at 15:46
not a question.
A while ago I bought a creative fatality professional sound card that until recently I had hooked up to an Acoustic Solutions surround sound home-theater set (stereo only.. never could get the card to output proper DTS or owt over either spdif or optical) and was happy with the quality of my downloaded tunes.
Then I bought a set of creative i-trigue 3220's, and all thats changed.
These are an awsome set of 2.1 speakers... ignore any reviews u might read, these speakers kick s**t out of any cheapo 1's by miles, and even me old creative 4.1's & AS surround set to!
Problem I find though is that with MP3's and the like a decent set of speakers combined with a decent sound card really shows up the distortion in the recordings, even at low volume.
This kinda sucks coz I used to love annoying the neighbours by crankin up the bass & the volume to the max & playing some MOS... now though the quality of sound annoys me before the vibrating walls annoy the neighbours!
(this is purely to do wit the MP3's themselves, not the speakers, cos better recordings sound crisp & clear)
This is forcing me to learn about bps settings & s**t on my rips, which I can't be arsed to do.
For any default setting non-audiophile who just wants to enjoy their default setting ripped tunes as loud as possible I would recommend this...: Stick with the onboard chip and some speakers that u would expect distortion from... then u wont be disappointed with your purchase.
Now I'm gona get a load of replies from audio perfectionist telling me I'm wrong to say that... And all I can say in my defence is that although I am happy with the upgrade in the sense that I know its better than what I had before, as a default setting non-audiophile who just wants to play his rips at max volume, I can tell u that I was happier with the so called inferiour sound I had before I upgraded and would of benn happier still if I still had the £180 in my pocket.
Bjossi on 29/11/2008 at 19:41
I recommend ogg vorbis over mp3, for playing at home at least, mp3 would be better for portability.
I use (
http://www.rarewares.org/ogg-oggenc.php#oggenc-aotuv) this command-line encoder, it is very easy to use; you just rip CDs into wave files with a program of choice (I use EAC) and then use the encoder to compress them.
Here is an example of how it works (lets say oggenc2.exe is in C:\):
cd C:\
oggenc2 -q10 "x:\path\to\file.wav" -a "artist name" -t "song title" -l "album name" -G "genre" -d "date" -N "track number" -o "x:\path\to\outputfile.ogg"
q10 is maximum quality, 500k, but you will get bigger and lower numbers since ogg vorbis is VBR by default.
Though if you want to stick with mp3, (
http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php) here is LAME 3.98.2 mp3 encoder, it gives a very good sound quality at relatively low bitrates. Though I have never used it so I'm not familiar with the command-line arguments and such, better read an article about that.
