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Music Media

Dell To Make MP3 Home Stereo Component 203

Posted by CmdrTaco from the rackable-tunes dept.
ytsejam-ppc writes "C|Net has this story on a new MP3 player that will be part of your home stereo system, but use a connection to your PC to get MP3 files." $199 if bought with a PC configured with home networking capabilities and $249 if bought separately. Not bad, although I'm not seeing how much disk space, or what sort of UI you get.
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Dell to Make MP3 Home Stereo Component More

Dell to Make MP3 Home Stereo Component

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  • They also don't tell what sort of connection it'll have to your LAN or PC. Does anyone know?

    Refrag
  • This will be alot easier then running my laptop through my stereo for all of my party music.
  • There is (almost) always a degrade in quality due to compression. I few parts of the mp3 compression algorithms cause sound degrade at just about any frequency (as I recall, I may need to go back over the code).
  • read my other post...after I bought it
  • If we have to have our computers on to feed the stuff to the 'player', then why would we not use the computer and sound card to play the stuff anyway? If you are worried that your sound card doesn't sound good enough for you, then you would probably also not be satisfied with the quality of MP3s and also of the equipment that Dell makes. After all, Dell aren't audio experts. For $200, the device doesn't seem to offer too great a deal on features.


    ---
  • Kind of hypocritical, but you like listening to DVD's loud (so do I) but won't listen to mp3's on a equally-configured system. They both use psyco-acustic methods of eliminating redundant info.
    My mp3's are at 192k for a stereo file, Dolby Digital uses 384k (usually, can be 640k on rare demo dvd's) for 5.1 channels, and that info is bit-pooled.
    DTS uses 1.44m for their encoding. Newer DVD's (Saving private ryan) use half that, around 700k or so, and not bit pooled.
    Give a good listen, or read my post above about quality.
  • >What, a $250 box from Dell is going to be better?

    I don't know yet. But it has a _chance_ to be better. Good DAC's and audio outputs aren't _expensive_, per se, they're just not cheap.

    >I somehow doubt the box this article talks about will be much better. It's going to have plenty of noise around it, too.

    Totally. But unlike your sound card, which exposes the components and traces directly to the noise field, this will at least have a shielded box around it, cutting the noise floor by tens of dB's. I'm not saying that it's going to be audiophile quality, just that it's starting from a better position than a standard soundcard; that there are benefits to this scheme.

    >That's not really a concern for me, I've got a whole other machine for that.

    What? You don't run dnetc 24/7 on every machine you have access to?!? Heresy!!! (*grin)
    --
  • It used to be at http://cajun.current.nu/ [current.nu] but that seems to be down. Anyone know who's maintaining it?

    Try http://cajun.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net].
  • You can get a SBLive for about 60 to 70 dollars and it is worth every cent.
  • First of all, sory for the re-post, but the previous one was html-formatted and didn't include any line breaks. I'm relatively new here. Please limit your hazings to 1 a person and mod the other post down.

    I have a unique setup, but my mp3's sound better than anybody else's, heh.

    1. Good mp3's. 128k isn't going to cut it. 160k minimum, 192k if you can get it. Napster's filter is a godsend. Hallelujah.

    2. For those of you that are (unknowingly) using Xing encoders, I'll say a little prayer. They sacrifice high-end for size, and suck, making cymbols sound like running water. Tip: use Fraunhofer's encoders. I've got the codec (the C source is avaliable somewhere) so even audiograbber uses them. See? It's right in my media control panel. :)

    3. Good soundcards now have digital audio output. Mine has optical digital output. Besides the cool factor (mp3's x-fered via light!) the quality doesn't diminish, you bypass the DAC on the soundcard (which is usually really crappy), plus it is very electrically noisy inside a PC. Digital bypasses that. For those of you using analog, another prayer.

    4. Outboard DAC/Pre/Pro. This is a beauty. I've got a pre/pro that decodes the following data:

    A. CD digital audio
    B. DTS CD audio
    C. PCM digital audio (mp3/wav/midi/any other file format)
    D. AC3 (Dolby Digital) 5.1 audio
    E. DTS 5.1 audio

    And guess what? The soundcard's digital output passes all of this info. D&E requires DVD decoding software. It's hard to distinguish mp3's from CD's if ripped right. And the added plus is that you now have a decent Home Theater (at least from the audio standpoint).

    5. A good Amp. I use a Carver. Very good for the starving college student, which I am.

    6. Good speakers. Paradigm Atoms do very well, thank-you-very-much. Also a bang-for-the-buck must-have (sorry for all the hyphens). And a 12" sub.

    Voila! These "digital" speakers sound great, I now have DTS in my dorm room, and mp3's are good. I may have lost 30lbs in the process, but I needed to cut back on my food budget anyways.

    This post is longer than I thought, but I just get a little aggravated when people comment on how crappy mp3 is. It's just a format, like wav. Just compressed. Dolby Digital is compressed too, 384k/s. So is DTS, with a higher bit-rate. I think they use ATRAC or ATPCM algorithms, I can't really remember.

    However, there's a reason I'm not converting all my cd's to mp3 and selling them back to the record store for $5/ea.
  • and it plays CDRs full of mp3s... very nice.. can lose at 180.00 bucks! yahoo!
  • I stream my MP3s on a Sony Vaio using a PCMCIA wireless LAN card. This wireless connection goes to a server in the NOC on the other side of the building, which relays over to a box sitting right next to me, from which at least 10 people are playing MP3s at any given time. It also runs a web server, an eggdrop bot, and lots of my ridiculous C code that sucks.

    I have had no problems.

  • Well, it's pretty much gotten to the point where the legitimate (non-pirate) uses for MP3 have become so large that there's enough of a market for that. Maybe they realized that people like my are going out and buying whole PeeCees with VFD displays and IR remote sensors, in order to handle these kinds of jobs. There's real money to be made here.

    I don't think of it as being like Corning selling bongs. It's more like someone selling spraypaint. Yes, you can use it for vandalism/graffiti, or you can use it to inhale the fumes. But apparently you can also use it to paint things.


    ---
  • Actualy, SMB (Server Message Block) is a protocol specification.

    Samba is a series of daemons that allow Linux to use the SMB protocol to communicate with Win/NT servers and the like.


    -MunKy_v2 [dialug.org]

  • Well, that and a slightly faster CPU. You do benefit a little from the fact that your PC isn't doing the playing.

    Though not a whole heck of a lot. I've found I have trouble playing music and compiling at the same time on a K6-2. I get a few skips. My other, faster box does both happily.

    I've also found that you don't need a particularly top of the line sound-card either. My six-year old Soundblaster 16 does fine.

    Though I personally keep the patch cord short and use long speaker cables.
  • This is completely untrue.
    MP3's over a stereo sound fine, provided when you buy the mini-headphone to rca (y cable) you get the one from radio shack that costs $9 instead of the $4 one. And thats just if your computer is more than 6 feet from the stereo. Under six feet, get the cheap cord.
    I've got a cheap sound card in my p2, connected to a 100w kenwood reciever and bose speakers. At about 160kbps and higher, you can't hear a difference between mp3 and a cd. Next step is to buy a p100 with a nic, big hard drive and a sound card to run as an mp3 appliance. Anyone know how big a hard drive you can put in a p100?
    Mike
  • I have no idea what their target audience is, but Joe Sixpack is going to be just as happy (if not happier because of the cost savings) with a 20 foot patch cable. I'm sure that my technogeeks and audiophiles will care about the difference, but then it becomes a niche product.
  • The other day I saw a report on Discovery en Español [discoveryespanol.com] about a portable mp3 player called Rome [romemp3.com].

    It's in the shape of an audio cassete, it comes with 32 MB of storage space, you can stick it in your car stereo, living room stereo, walkman, etc., it costs $199.95 dollars and it has a USB interface to transfer files from your computer to Rome. It even has a button that doesn't do anything (Menu Button), jejeje.

    I haven't used it, but I think the idea is pretty cool!!!

    --

    --


  • This is all fine and dandy, but why does it have to be a connected device to transfer files?

    Apple has the AirPort, and there are plenty of other wireless devices running around. I'll be honest and state that my PC does not sit next to my stereo system. (See, there's this wonderful thing called magnetism.)

    On another side note, put a zip disk, superdisk, click disk, or some other type of storage medium into the stereo unit and let us tansfer files that way. We really haven't seen much of that. Have we?

  • Here's a cheaper version of this gadget. (Score:5)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @11:07AM (#985117)
    ...A 20-foot stereo patch cord.

    My computer is in my living room. My stereo is in my living room. For those who are still starving students, substitute "bedroom" for "livingroom" above.

    Most of us who are geeky enough to use MP3s are geeky enough to either a) have our computer in the room in which we spend the most time - which probably also has our stereo, or b) have a spare computer kicking around which may already be in the stereo room.

    I question whether a storage-less MP3-to-stereo device is aiming for a market that exists.
  • MP3 anywhere is in theory a great idea... wireless transmission is great and all, BUT... I can see a couple problems.

    1.) interference: there was a thread on /. about this about a week ago... the band MP3 anywhere operates on is much less regulated. read: bigger chance to interfere.

    2.) flexibility: with a real unit sitting next to your stereo, you have better control, etc (think remotes).

    3.) range. CAT-5 can go a hell of a lot further without signal loss than mp3 anywhere.


    Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
  • I suppose it's a good idea if you have a big house and want to use your PC in the office to play Barry White in the bedroom, but, living in a studio apartment, I just plug my stereo into my computer with a few $5 attachments, and voila.
  • You will get a better audio signal from a separate MP3 box than a soundcard in a computer. Then again, this is MP3 we're talking about so it isn't exactly hi-fi to begin with.

    Hopefully, it'll look good and have a choice of black or champagne case to fit most audio systems.

    Refrag


  • I'm imagining this as more of a stereo component than a computer. It will probably (as I rub my crystal ball):


    1. Offer remote control

    2. Provide a direct connection via RCA cables to the stereo receiver.


    Feature number one is a REALLY nice feature that mainstream consumers will relish. I'd like it, too, because I don't want to have to make my own remote control IR program and try to script it against my mp3 software playing on my computer. So, I guess I'm more of a 'mainstream consumer' than an adventurous hacker.

    Feature number 2 is nice because it avoids having to locate the home stereo and computer right next to one another. It may also avoid having to run cabling between the two devices if they have a wireless networking connection, but for this price point, I doubt they will.

    This product isn't going to fare well, though, as more consumers are getting CDROM recorders and more electronics manufactures are adding mp3 support to their standard CD / DVD players.



    Seth
  • Too bad no one will do it :(

    Being stuck with napster might not be the best thing ever though...what if all of a sudden people switched to a different program.
  • I play my mp3's using the UI of my choice on my linux box, send them straight out my ultra-cheap SB16 card from before the invention of the transistor, and using $10 worth of cables from Radio Shack, send them right into the back of my sound system. I don't see the need for a dedicated unit for this, unless your processor is too overtaxed to handle the mp3 decoding (in which case, you'd be better off spending the money on a new processor).

    That withstanding, I think it's a cool idea, and definitely a positive move for the mp3 format. It will help people realize that it's just another medium, rather than a weapon of anarchy and mass destruction.
  • You can do this easily already. All you need is a 486, a soundcard, and a CD drive. Put good 'ole Linux on it and use these [linux.com] scripts. Take a CDR with MP3s burned on it and put it in and listen. You can just run a standard audio cable from the speaker out on the soundcard to the AUX in on your stereo and you have a perfectly good MP3 player. I'm sure it wouldn't be a big deal to mount it in your car. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than $250 for this thing.
    -Antipop
  • My guess is it's the standard turtle beach that Dell puts in their desktops.

    Hell, my guess is that this is a dell desktop design - pentium chip, LCD screen, and some sort of embedded OS. Why would they design something from scratch when they've got lots of musty old computer schematics sitting on the shelf.
  • And it's made by a company called Lydstrom [lydstrom.com] It can be hooked up to your Computer, or you can record CD's through it. Completely searchable by artist, title, genra, etc. A bit more expensive, though.
  • On a side note, when I set this thing up I initially made the BIG mistake of plugging it into the "Phono" RCA input on the stereo... have no idea why it sounded so horrible. Then I moved it to the "CD" input and now it sounds great.

    The Phono inputs go into a phono preamp before they are passed into the reciever's line ins. I've accidentally done the same thing and it does sound like crap. Note that *real* audiophiles use an external tube preamp for their precious vinyl :)

  • I find that really hard to believe, at least for an average user. I did tests myself between a CD, an 192bit mp3 played through a SoundblasterLive and an 192bit mp3 played through a Soundblaster 16. I could not tell the difference.

    I found the cabling itself to be far more important.
  • Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver.

    Yes, that would be very cool. It's importent that the computer retain control of things like seeking with the MP3 and selecting songs. I do not want to be stuck to some fucking playlist or a massive random play. I wrote a little program [gtf.org] which attempts to learn your music lissening moods. It's not very reliable or stable, but it makes the point that ALL current mp3 players and sterios have uninspired crap for user interfaces. Anyway, if Joe Random Geek has the ability to write his/her own music user interface then we should see some cool shit in a few years, but if the corporations keep giving us the 3 button remote control because they are affraid to cornfuse their customers then we will be stuck with the crappy interfaces we have now.
  • >The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap.
    >Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?

    Heh. Yah. I've heard MP3's that sounded 'fine,' even 'good' when you get into the 256K range. But since Napster doesn't have any actual meta information (you can't filter out MP3's made with the insanely bad Xing encoder, for instance), you can never tell what you're getting until it's already assaulting your ears.

    I suspect that part of the reason Napster is so popular especially at college campuses is that the target market -- people who definitionally don't care to spend their liquid income on music -- have never owned, probably never HEARD, a proper music reproduction system. And so they believe the myth that "MP3's are CD-quality" because played back over 4" speakers out a $3.99 motherboard-mounted sound chipset, MP3's and CDROM-spun audio CD's _do_ sound about the same.

    Not that everyone who hears a proper reference system will become a raving audiophile junkie and disavow anything but first-play virgin vinyl in an anechoic chamber with $35000 in speakers alone; many many people are content to hear their music in 'good enough' fidelity, and I'm not here to bash them for that by any means....


    --
  • Will it need disk space if it connects to your PC?
  • I dont think it is meant to replace your CD player, but rather to compliment it. You keep the CD player (or get a SA-CD player or whatever) for your "serious" listening, and use the MP3 deck when you download a bunch of 80's crap for a party or whatever, so you don't have to go buy a bunch of music you're only going to play once.
    --
  • Not bad, although I'm not seeing how much disk space, or what sort of UI you get.

    I think the point is, the disk space is provided by the PC. Maybe it plays the files over the network? Seems like bandwith would be an issue though..


    Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
  • I'd rather have an MP3 playing stereo component that can access a central repository of MP3s via NFS or SMB, hell, even HTTP would be fine if there were a standard server component that could manage play lists. Hey, that's a damn good idea. I manage my MP3 collection on a server so all computers/devices on the network have access to them. I'll start an open source project to handle the server side if someone can build the boxes with enough Linux on them to play MP3s, handle TV out, and retrieve playlists and files via HTTP over 10mb networking. If they could do that, it would be entirely possible have playlist servers on the 'net... kind of like shoutcast on demand. (Really it's just any HTTP server with a standard page format for giving playlists)... heck... mix it with a built in Napster client and a 1 gig drive to cache downloaded songs...

    By George! Someone call the patent office! I think we're in business!

  • I just mention that model because they used to be really cheap at Circuit City (old slashdot story on this) and they have lots of really cool features (old /. story on this, too).

    The ones they're currently selling are locked to region 1 and don't let you kill Macrovision. They still play MP3s, though (it only groks ISO-9660, not Rock Ridge or Joliet, so names look weird unless you keep them to ISO-9660's 8.3 limits).

    I snagged one of the "good ones" back when the /. articles you mentioned were first put up. Can't say that I've gotten any urge to become a "DVD p1r4t3" (arrr) as a result, though. :-)

    _/_
    / v \
    (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
    \_^_/

  • Why would you spend $190 and up for an mp3 player when apex dvd players are under $180?

    You remember apex AD-600A DVD player? The one that let you play illegal DVDs. Well, they took that feature out but it still plays cd's full of mp3's -- plus it has a built in DVD player :) Goes great in your home stereo rack as well.

  • Why someone might want a Dell MP3 (Score:3)

    by orpheus ( 14534 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @12:01PM (#985137)
    I wish that they had a picture of the unit, but what I am envisioning from the description is a box with little more than a 'off' switch and a display in front (it doesn't need either, but they are cheap, and would aid marketing at this price point - $250 w/o system purchase)

    The real magic would be the 'back panel', standard output jacks to mate with a home stereo, which unfortunately will probably just be phono plugs and clamp-ons for bare speaker wire. It's really too bad, because believe me, if they added stereo 'balanced input' jacks, I might even suggest it some people I know. getting a decent balanced in to a computer, even one with a studio-style music card (not a Soundblaster) is pretty expensive.But that would make the device and I/O device, and I see no suggestion that it's anything but an output device.

    I also wouldn't immediately assume it's Ethernet or anything like that. It could be USB.

    It's primary advantages (if I envision it correctly) are:

    0) Fiddle free operation: i could (and have, in the course of helping people with home studios) create some of all of the advantages below without adding components, but I like hacking. And because it was important to get it 100%, I noticed how many apparent solutions weren't 100% for various reasons

    1) Skip protection -- face it, HDDs are *slow* to change tracks. I doubt there's an IDE HDD around that can't be pushed to 20-30ms *worst case* track seeks. Don't bother checking your specs, NO ONE publishes worst case numbers, and even their 'typical' and 'capability' (best case) figures are unstandardized between manufacturers and suspect, technically, as savvy HDD review sites like Storage Review [storagereview.com] will happily show you, via exhaustive testing and comparisons. So when you're doing a few things at once, skips aren't unheard of, even at modest CPU loads. I rarely notice them, and they don't bother me, but they are there. A meg of buffer at the output device is cheap and easy anti-skip pretection.

    2) Better sound reproduction -- Yeah, you could buy a better sound card, but as great as those can sound, a dedicated device can be better, especially when driving a stereo amp/speakers . I'm no sound snob personally, but I help a lot of home studio musicians, and the difference is easy to hear, even for me. Similarly, few PC speakers come close to a goo set of home stereo speakers. Even some $300 'big name' (you'd recognize it instantly) USB speakers I tested recently were very disappointing.

    3) Device segregation: There are actually good reasons why a normal user mught be better off keeping a 'game style' (FMsynth/MIDI/WAV) card like a soundblaster as his primary audio device, rather than a killer studio-style card -- I have a friend who has separate semi-pro MIDI and digital audio cards, and a cheap Ensoniq for apps/surfing, so he doesn't have to power up his whole studio for normal computing. Such a set-up tends to create confusion in apps that expect a SB compatible, too. Sure, you could do this with USB speaker drivers, but see above re: those

    4) Looks cool on shelf: don't knock it

    5) allows full utilization of existing Home Entertainment components (which, in many houses doesn't revolve around the PC, as strange as that sounds) Unfortunately, this is merely a theoretical advantage. This product seems clearly targeted at the market that will buy first (computer users) and will probably not even talk to other home stereo components, aside from passing on the audio analog signals.

    However, having said all that, I am utterly unmoved by this product, and I expect most users will be, too. What I'd like is a "digital entertainment station" - bidirectional, so it would be able to pipe me radio, TV, good balanced mike input etc. as well as piping my decompressing and D/A'ing mp3 (and WAV) stream to the speakers.

    There is a market out there for this. Lots of companies sell this stuff for Beaucoup bucks. But Dell is going for a mass market portal model for revenue and expansion
  • I was wondering about that while reading the article. The best way to make it simple, IMHO, would be to use the FTP protocol. At least one implementation of an FTP server is freely available on every OS I can think of. Moreover, it could be packaged with a simple, made on purpose FTP server for those Windows people who don't want the pain of installing a non dedicated FTP server on their W98 box.

    Now, the problem is that it isn't the original aim of the FTP protocol at all. It would certainly not be the most efficient protocol to serve this purpose, but we are talking about 128-192 Kbits / sec, i.e. virtually nothing. And it would make things so simple !

    Does anybody think about inherent limits of the FTP protocol which would make it really incompatible with such a system ? I sure can stream mp3's by FTP from my 10 Mbits-connected-P100 Linux box so it can be so hard to conceive (I mean, I could do it, but I use Samba for this).

    Stéphane
    Have you checked out Badtech [badtech.com] The daily online cartoon?
    Have you checked out Badtech [badtech.com] The daily online cartoon?
  • why not turn an old pc (486 and on) into an mp3 player. you can easily hook it up to a stero via the sound card. and all you need is mpg123 and lots of diskspace.
  • Check out www.mambox.com - It does all your asking, its portable, and its $199. Pretty sweet.
  • I have a p5-200 in a little case that has many gigs of mp3s on a couple of hard drives. it has a sb16, but could easily have some fancy schmancy newfangled sound board.

    if you're goin to have to have a computer on which to store mp3s, why not play mp3s off that computer too? I'm lost.
  • Most likely the computer would store the MP3s. UI would be like any CD player. Might have an external component on your computer to setup the play list.
    Interesting device. I'd wait until the technology grows before getting one.

  • Rack component (Score:3)

    by Dungeon Dweller ( 134014 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @11:08AM (#985143)
    It would be pretty sweet if it mounted like a stereo component, could be openned and modified similar to a computer rack component (or a stereo rack component if you really put some thought into it).

    Probably doesn't need disk space if all it is doing is playing it, could be done over the network, but network traffic would interfere with operation, of course.

    What would be cool is if it did more than MP3. MP3 loses some of the sound quality (still love it though). Perhaps there are other formats out there begging to be ported to this that could be added with some sort of bios flash or software/hardware modification?
  • Actually, you can buy car decks that play CD's of MP3's. Crutchfield (www.crutchfield.com) sells two such units: the Kenwood eXcelon Z919 for $750 (list price... they won't list what they actually sell it for) and the Aiwa CDC-MP3 for $300.
  • it's called an Apex 600A :) (too bad they've been neutered).

  • Well I'm glad to see that Dell is finally stepping up to the plate, and joining the 21st century. It will be interesting to see how the first wave of MP3 players interact with our home stereos. We should be glad that Dell is putting an MP3 player on the market instead of some company like Pioneer, even though I'm sure Pioneer's would have a lot more lights!
  • Latency can't be much of an issue compared to most CD changers. It's like torture waiting for the next CD to rotate/slide/spin into position before it'll start playing. Enough of a pain to never use 'SHUFFLE'
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The only way that the Dell solution would be better than a cable is if the hardware they're putting out has significantly advanced signal quality over your average soundcard - but then why not just get a better soundcard? This product makes no sense at all...
  • great idea... except trying to get a signal thru that kind of cable is hit or miss. with unbalanced line-level, anything over 6 feet is risking it. sure, it might work, but when you're used to professional concerts (think violent femmes, rusted root, etc) you get in a "don't risk it" attitude. I've seen a hundred feet of unbal line level make it... I've also seen mad interference in less than 4 feet. A well shielded cable can help, but the only real solution is to balance the signal. A pair of line balancers or passive direct boxes connected with XLR would be a much better solution... and could easily reach over a thousand feet.


    Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
  • The phono input is set to take the input from a phono cartridge. There used to be seperate inputs for moving coil and moving magnet cartridges. Sometimes I get a chuckle from the "vinyl's best" folks, records have equalization (riaa?) set when to mixed to compensate for various frequency rolloffs inherent with "wax." Digital really is the purest signal when properly recorded.
  • S/he's probably a starving student because her/his college forced her/him to buy the laptop. And apparently what little money was left went for "expensive stereo speakers and sub-woofers".

    The 8-track is a thrift shop/yard sale bargain with an amp as good as a lot of sound cards, but in the future it'll be a valuable nostalgia collector's item 'cause there won't be many left.

  • "-- The average sound card in a computer is crap. Complete and utter garbage when it comes to the fidelity of the audio outputs and the quality of the DACs."

    Crap it may be, but then MP3 is crap in the first place (at least at any reasonable bitrate). It turns the top end into nasty, tinny slush, and bass becomes incredibly flabby. Anyone with an ear for fidelity wouldn't be using MP3 to start with.

    Of course, it turns out that lots of people don't have an ear for fidelity (perhaps, ironically, as a result of going to too many rock concerts?), hence all the oft repeated claims that "it's as good as CD", and "I can't tell the difference". For the lucky people who can't tell the difference, just run a cable from your PC and have done with it. The rest of us will stick with CDs.

  • What...are you deaf? What equipment did play that back on? On my Kenwood Dolby Digital receiver with Wharfedale speakers it's a hell of a difference. 128kb mp3's have always sounded as a washermachine while 192kb sounds better, but still not good.
  • names look weird unless you keep them to ISO-9660's 8.3 limits).

    That's ISO 9660 level 1. Level 2 lets you have filenames that are up to 31 characters in length. The reason for this restriction is that the Mac OS cannot currently handle filenames that are longer than this, and an industry standard is useless if it is not implementable across a wide variety of platforms. Nevertheless, the ISO 9660 implementations found in most other operating systems (i.e., Linux, Windows, etc.) happily handle filenames that are longer than this, and that's a good thing .. a lot of MP3s obviously have pretty long filenames!

    Unfortunately, I had to manually add an extra option ("-e") to mkisofs to get it to pre-master images with the longer filenames. Sure, it breaks ISO 9660, but doesn't seem to cause any problems on any OS other than the Mac OS .. and this doesn't bother me since I don't own any Macs.
  • If they are en- and decoded the same (from a software perspective) the signal coming from a 16-bit sound card should be identical to any other. The sound card doesn't do the decoding

    That would depend on the quality of the componenets used in the Dell box. If they use the sort of cheap massmarket IC's used in most soundcards then, agreed, there ought to be no discernable increase in quality.

    But, on the other hand, if they're serious about selling into the HiFi marketplace they will have to use 'audio quality' components, preferably all discrete components rather than IC's, no electrolytic capacitors, milspec tolerances, ideally wiring looms rather than PCB's. In particular they ought to either use highest quality DACs and/or provide a SPDIF (and i can't recall where the '/' goes) output so i can use my own DAC.

    If they take this approach then they can get better output than a direct soundcard-amp connection - the PCM 'wav' output from the mp3 decoder should be identical, but the analog signal going to the amp could potentially be a whole lot better.

    That's if you believe that Dell are doing this from a hifi perspective (which would require outsourcing or a lot of new facilities for just one product) rather than looking at a way to bundle a whole lot of stuff they already make into a new format for a different market. In which case, yup, should be no different from soundcard output, which we already have.

    TomV

  • I've had this idea for a while, knew someone would eventually come along and do it. So here's my version of the dream component:

    (1) A CD player and software to allow you to rip & encode all your CDs just by popping them in and pressing one button. (CD player of course can also be used to play Plain Old CDS and MP3CDs)

    (2) Digital output for modern amps would provide noise free sound and 190 kb/s encoding gives you decent enough quality.

    (3) Embedded Linux on a SansDisk and space for two 2.5" laptop drives would give you a nice quiet player. - and making it user upgradeable means you can double your players capacity every couple years. (A 10 GB drive for starters should allow for over 100 CDs)

    (4) NTSC output for enhanced on screen menu based music selectoins and categorization. (No X server though as that would be overkill)

    (5) Builtin streaming server for whole house music. (Assuming you have Cat 5 going to every room :) - Your kids will no longer each need their own copy of the same CD. This may require the server to restrict streaming the same song to two different clients simoultaneously to avoid any legal hassles.

    (6) Enough RAM to cache the songs being played to HD access doesn't cause interrupts. (64 MB should be more than enough to allow local play + 5 streams at 190 kb/s)

    (7) Front mounted USB port to allow download of MP3s to handheld devices.

    (8) HTTP server for remote browsing of song selection with option to allow download/upload of files from remote source with module to sync file uploads to main CD database. (You may have to make this option a "hack" to allow yourself some protection from lawsuits that will probavly ensue anyway.)

    (9) CDDB access as well as on screen/IR remote title entry for those not savvy enough to network the thing.

    When someone builds one of these I'll be their first customer. - Anyone want to collaborate on making this the first open source and open design consumer product?
  • Here's what I never understood: CD's aren't that good! In some ways, LP phonographs have better sound (they are analog). I would like to see a new audio format (say, on DVD discs) with the following:

    -96khz sampling rate
    -24 (or 32?) bit audio
    -5.1 channel surround sound
    -and would it hurt to include the Artist, Album and Track names in the table of contents, so they can be shown on computers/stereos playing the disc?

    That, I think, would push any differences between the digitized sound and the original analog sound out of the range of human discrimination.

    And, as a bonus - if we devote more data to sound quality, there is less total available recording time for an artist making an album. I would like to see a limit of say, 45 minutes. I think that would cut down on the number of crap fluff songs that artists put in their album nowadays because they feel like they need to fill the 74 minutes or just like to hear their voice.

    --
    grappler
  • I believe that this [linux.com] may be what you're looking for. Get a 486, install mpg123 and those scripts and just insert your CDR of MP3s and it'll play. Works great and it's cheaper than something like these MPTrip Discmans [easybuy2000.com] which are $115, which isn't too bad but you can't beat free =).
    -Antipop
  • Why not just hook up the line-out of your soundcard to the line-in of your stereo? All you need is some cables.

    Besides, you can not only use it for listening to MP3s but for gaming or listening to MOD, XM, S3M etc...

  • With this box you get your mp3 collection accessible from the same place as your stereo, without having your computer and monitor in the same room (produces noise and heat, looks ugly and reminds you about work that you need to do...). If my PC is placed in another room it's easier to ignore it even if I know it's involved.

    Probably you get a remote control too...

  • Idea good, price bad. The electronic components for this beastie should come to about, oooh, $50-$100? And that's with more features!

    I'll still plug my laptop into the stereo for now, if it's all the same with you.

  • That's just a normal soundcard with S/PDIF and optical outputs, with a wavetable and other such stuff added, too.

    What I'm on about is actually an MP3 to WAV rendering engine onboard the card, and not all that other foo. Poke a raw MP3 stream at the card, get standard full-bandwidth digital audio out the digital outs the other side, without my primary CPU needing to think about the decoding. Save CPU time and frontside/PCI bus bandwidth.
    --
  • i have an apex dvd player that will play CDRs full of mp3s.. it is perfect! it was 179.00 bucks from circuit city... can't beat that.. g
  • this technology needs to be merged with something
    like dragon "naturally speaking" or some other
    voice recognition software so that we can lay in
    bed and say "stereo, play some cd|some mix|some song" and for control volume.

    hook it into something napster/gnutella-like (presuming it gets developed to where it treats the napster network as an extension of the local filesystem) and you never have to leave your bed.
  • I'm not so sure about that equation. Better speakers will only show you the shortcomings of MP3 compression. I believe the advantage to MP3 is the fact that they sound the same on computer speakers, which have decidedly poorer audio quality and response. Usually your PC speakers are the weak link in the Total Audio Quality flowchart (Audio Source == CD). MP3s give you smaller sizes without becoming a weaker link than your PC speakers. The sound is only as good as the weakest component.

    Better speakers will give you better output, but unless you're getting better input than a compressed MP3 file, you're wasting your money as the Audio Source (MP3 File) is now the weak link.

  • I don't know. The SB16 is an awful, awful, awful sound device, in my experience. I have one, and, while it was ok with the cheap computer speakers I used to have, when I plugged it into my stereo, I noticed how badly lacking it is. Perhaps three awfuls weren't necessary, but it's hardly a quality component of a home stereo.
  • I also disagree with people who say "that's too hard" and "people aren't smart enough to do that." We aren't talking about anything hard here, popping in a sound card and ethernet, and a small linux distro. If someone put together a little pamphlet on it, it would be easier than assembling a swing set.
  • FWIW, pro studios have been using a 96/24 format for the past few years, and some DVD audio specs on the drafting board want to use that same scheme.

    That pushes the amount of data/time up to something like 320% of standard CD audio (for stereo -- 5.1 would triple THAT), but the fidelity is, as you say, getting into the realm where we're pushing the limits of physics for humans to perceive the granularity.

    I once saw it demonstrated that in 32 bits, you have the resolution to capture everything from explosion-style-shock-wave-air-compression on down to the quantum jiggling of molecules due to heat, with a lot left over. 24 bit is just about right to capture the subset of that range that's audible to the human eardrum.


    --
  • I had the rommate problem, the gizmos problem et al.

    But the only thing that could slow our network down was another roommate's win95 machine. he originaly had it in a network set up by his father at home. The moron and his dad decided that they needed to set <sp>netbeui</sp> to ping everyone on the network every second.

    We couldn't figure out why our 100Mb/s network sucked so bad until we scanned and noticed that one machine in sleep mode made up 94% of all traffic. We fixed that problem quite easily, disconnect the cable.

    Just another reason why this plan may not work.

    Devil Ducky
  • or, horror of horrors, a stereo wire from where you'd normally plug in your 'puter speakers to the Aux-in of your hi-fi--a tenth of the cost of MP3 Anywhere( $6 at Radioshack for a 20' cord, give or take).

    The remote capability is nice, as it is I have to get to my keyboard (and/or mouse) to do anything, but that could be solved with an extra keyboard, or a terminal into my (not-yet-extant) house network....
  • MP3 Server Box [mp3sb.org] can be used with an old PC. I'm doing this with a hacked iopener.

    What's slick about MP3 Server Box is the number of ways you can control music playback, IR Remote, Command Line, multiple GUI clients, Windows clients, and my favorite the CGI [mp3sb.org] client. Lets me control from any system w/browser on my home network.

  • >At least one implementation of an FTP server is freely available on every OS I can think of.
    True, FTP is on (practically) every OS. But it's not designed for streaming traffic. I don't think SMB wasn't designed for streaming either, but it was adapted to it. SMB doesn't come built into every OS but it does come built into one that FTP is not included in -> Windows.

    When Dell started this idea and they had to ask the inevitable question "What network protocol do we use? FTP, a standard but it would require special software for windows users, or SMB, not a standard but would require no extra software for windows users?" What do you think they would choose? What would you choose in their shoes, honestly?

    The only good news in this rant is that thanks to an ingenious program (I'm not a developer, nor do I have anything to do with project) called Samba SMB is available to all of the Unices. I know Macs have some implementation of SMB (I don't know what it's called).

    So that pretty much takes care of Dell's problem. That is if they even bothered to care about non-windows users and I would be truly surprised if they did.

    Devil Ducky
  • >I don't think SMB wasn't designed
    FIX:
    I don't think SMB was designed...

    Devil Ducky
  • <WHINE MODE="audiophile">
    The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap
    </WHINE>

    What's your point? Are you stating for the record that MP3 does not provide the absolute best audio fidelity available?

    No shit.

    MP3 serves it's purpose. It provides a perfectly acceptable listening experience for the rest of us non-anal-retentive people who carry MP3mans or play music on our PC while we work or play. It has good sound quality that any layman is hard pressed to distinguish from CD. And the 128Kbps bitrate gives an excellent tradeoff between quality and file size.

    And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)

    Ah, well. I know there's no point arguing with one of these luddite zealots.

  • Amacdys [lousy.org] is a bootable mp3 player that fits into a single diskette.

    The idea is to make your MP3 CD's bootable with Linux and a built-in player. Then you only depend on a computer when you bring your MP3 CD's, it does not matter what is installed on that computer.
    --

  • Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....

    This is just a SoundBlaster Live with an extra chip that can decode MP3 in hardware and save less than 5% of the overall CPU load. Not much point, especially as it is then specific to a certain audio file format.

    Audio decompression is no longer demanding enough relative to modern CPUs to make this worthwhile. An SBlive and a reciever with a digital in is all you really need.

  • How this is better. (Score:4)

    by emerson ( 419 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @11:23AM (#985217)
    I'm seeing a lot of "Why not just run a cable from your computer?" posts.

    A few points:

    -- The average sound card in a computer is crap. Complete and utter garbage when it comes to the fidelity of the audio outputs and the quality of the DACs.

    -- You can buy high-end sound cards with much better DACs and outputs, but they're going to cost much more than $199, because of all the extra foo that usually goes into such a card, wavetable synths, PCI chipsets, etc etc.

    -- The inside of your computer is one of the electrically noisiest places you have access to (apart from about a foot from your car's distributor...). Your sound card picks up modifications to the signal from this, sometimes as overt as audible noise, sometimes just as subtle changes to the frequency response.

    -- Moving the decoder and DACs offboard allows them to be shielded from the above noise, as well as keeps your analog run to the shortest possible. Unless your stereo amp is 12" from your computer, you're running cables that are too long for the best possible sound. You're also probably running some $1.99 Radio Shack 1/8"<->RCA cable, instead of a short run of something good like Monster Cable. Keeping the signal digital as long as possible minimizes analog loss. (Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....)

    -- You can offload the cycles from your CPU with an outboard box. Nobody's running into CPU crunches with current decoders, it's true, but, hey, that's more distributed.net keys for Team Slashdot, right?

    Of course, in case you can't tell, I'm all into extreme fidelity, so I don't understand AT ALL why anyone would want to listen to MP3's as their primary source of music. (*shudder) But I'm just elitist that way, don't mind me....


    --
  • This [request.com] thing looks pretty spiff. A self-contained component MP3 jukebox with ethernet. Supposedly has Linux & MacOS software coming.

    I like the idea behind the Dell thing if it doesn't require its own storage. The last thing I need it a dozen 30GB drives all over the house.
  • The main reason MP3 was developed was for portability. Their quality is low, even on their highest sampling level. They are great when you are on the road, but over a good stereo you hear exactly what they are: a low quality CD substitute. On a PC or in your car you don't hear the difference because of all the ambient environmental noise, but in your home that's not the case. Let MP3's stick to what they are good at: letting you listen to your favorite tunes on a laptop with crappy speakers. I would hope that we could have a better quality format for those that want it and have the space. I mean no disrespect to the developers of MP3! I think it is a great format and I use it a lot, but it isn't a substitute for a CD yet.
  • When is somebody going to make a stereo component that reads ISO9660 filesystems, goes into the directory structure, assembles a list of the MP3 files in the filesystem, and then plays them? I like to burn CD-Rs full of MP3s (which amounts to about eleven hours worth of music), bring them to work, and listen to music all day with xmms (never once hearing the same song twice.) It would be nice if I could take that same CD and throw it into a MP3 stereo component and have it be able to recognize the format.

    Hard drives are nice, but IMHO removable media is nicer. That way you don't have to maintain a network connection between your stereo and your computer. Or better yet, do it both ways (of course, that type of design decision tends to affect the price tag ..)
  • -- The average sound card in a computer is crap. Complete and utter garbage when it comes to the fidelity of the audio outputs and the quality of the DACs.

    What, a $250 box from Dell is going to be better?

    -- You can buy high-end sound cards with much better DACs and outputs, but they're going to cost much more than $199, because of all the extra foo that usually goes into such a card, wavetable synths, PCI chipsets, etc etc.

    Sure you can. But if you're the type to do that, you wouldn't a) run cables from your computer sound card to your receiver OR b) buy a $250 MP3 gizmo from Dell. This device is targeted towords the drooling masses that haven't yet realized a) is an option, not towords audiophiles.

    -- The inside of your computer is one of the electrically noisiest places you have access to (apart from about a foot from your car's distributor...). Your sound card picks up modifications to the signal from this, sometimes as overt as audible noise, sometimes just as subtle changes to the frequency response.

    I somehow doubt the box this article talks about will be much better. It's going to have plenty of noise around it, too.

    Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....)

    Now THAT I would pay for. This Dell toy is only good for one thing: /. flame fests.

    -- You can offload the cycles from your CPU with an outboard box. Nobody's running into CPU crunches with current decoders, it's true, but, hey, that's more distributed.net keys for Team Slashdot, right?

    That's not really a concern for me, I've got a whole other machine for that.

    --

  • or SMB, not a standard but would require no extra software for windows users?

    Is the average user computer savvy enough to understand how to share a directory from his PC HD ? From that point of view, a dedicated and simplified FTP server included on a CD found in the box would be easier.

    I know Macs have some implementation of SMB (I don't know what it's called).

    I think that "Dave" is an SMB server for the Macintosh.

    Another question that comes to mind is : is it easy for Dell to implement an SMB client ? An FTP client would sure be easiest to implement, wouldn't it ?

    Stéphane
    Have you checked out Badtech [badtech.com] The daily online cartoon?

  • I actually wonder if it has any storage whatsoever... the blurb phrases it kind of strangely:

    Consumers will download music from the Internet with their PC, and the PC will feed the files to the MP3 player, which will then transmit the files to speakers or a standard stereo receiver for playback.

    To me, that sounds like a very expensive winamp-in-a-can... more like a translator than a solid-state MP3 jukebox, which is what I'd much rather have in my stereo. :)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Ok, this is slashdot, we're mostly linux computer-types here... I can beleive no one's mentioned CAJUN.
    It used to be at http://cajun.current.nu, but that seems to be down. Anyone know who's maintaining it?
    Anyway, it basically turns a linux box into a jukebox... Mine is kindof neat, I mounted a pentium motherboard into a tape deck. It runs LIRC [linux infrared remote control] and so I control it with my reciever's remote. It also has a nifty LCD screen.
    Also, because I wanted it to sound good, I bought a fancy SBlive and use SP/DIF, and also took out all the fans and spun down the hard drive. So now it just plays mp3s over ethernet from the samba server in my basement.
    Definetly not mass market or anything, and a real pain to build... but it's so 1337...
    Ive got my ram image of it here [metaphase.org] along with some really bad blurry pictures.
    I hope cajun is progressing 'cause it is really cool.

  • I hope they have upgradable firmware (Score:3)

    by jsm ( 5728 ) <james@jmarshall.com> on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @12:49PM (#985239) Homepage
    MP3 is the current popular format, but it will surely be extended with more features. I hope all these dedicated MP3 players have an easy way to upgrade them to support new formats. Otherwise, we'll all be stuck with the old formats, because lots of people will have players that only play MP3's, so content providers won't use newer formats because they don't want to lose part of their audience.

  • quality? It's called fraunhofer/digital output (Score:3)

    by ferrocene ( 203243 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @12:50PM (#985242) Journal
    I have a unique setup, but my mp3's sound better than anybody else's, heh. 1. Good mp3's. 128k isn't going to cut it. 160k minimum, 192k if you can get it. Napster's filter is a godsend. Hallelujah. 2. For those of you that are (unknowingly) using Xing encoders, I'll say a little prayer. They sacrifice high-end for size, and suck, making cymbols sound like running water. Tip: use Fraunhofer's encoders. I've got the codec (the C source is avaliable somewhere) so even audiograbber uses them. See? It's right in my media control panel. :) 2. Good soundcards now have digital audio output. Mine has optical digital output. Besides the cool factor (mp3's x-fered via light!) the quality doesn't diminish, you bypass the DAC on the soundcard (which is usually really crappy), plus it is very electrically noisy inside a PC. Digital bypasses that. For those of you using analog, another prayer. 3. Outboard DAC/Pre/Pro. This is a beauty. I've got a pre/pro that decodes the following data: A. CD digital audio B. DTS CD audio C. PCM digital audio (mp3/wav/midi/any other file format) D. AC3 (Dolby Digital) 5.1 audio E. DTS 5.1 audio And guess what? The soundcard's digital output passes all of this info. D&E require WinDVD or PowerDVD. It's hard to distinguish mp3's from CD's if ripped right. And the added plus is that you now have a decent Home Theater (at least from the audio standpoint). 4. A good Amp. I use a Carver. Very good for the starving college student, which I am. 5. Good speakers. Paradigm Atoms do very well, thank-you-very-much. Also a bang-for-the-buck must-have (sorry for all the hyphens). And a 12" sub. Voila! These "digital" speakers sound great, I now have DTS in my dorm room, and mp3's are good. I may have lost 30lbs in the process, but I needed to cut back on my food budget anyways. This post is longer than I thought, but I just get a little aggravated when people comment on how crappy mp3 is. It's just a format, like wav. Just compressed. Dolby Digital is compressed too, 384k/s.
  • I know this'll get lost in this old thread, but I had an idea earlier about how to make a decent standalone MP3 player...

    Provide an ethernet plug to interface to a PC, if desired. But also a CD drive to rip from. That way you could store a huge collection of CDs on the drive without having to download them all. A device that could justify a claim of not promoting piracy.

    A nice way to edit playlists is needed though, maybe via a video out that you could hook up to the television. And as a plus, it could display the artist/track/disk while playing...

    The CDDB thing would be handy, but a modem is way too clunky for this, dialing out every time you entered a disk and taking 45 seconds, minimum, plus the fact you'd need a dedicated service or the ability to enter your dialup info into the device. That is somethat that should be done via the ethernet... Or, buy a CDDB-type list from MP3.com, they recently ripped a few hundred thousand disks or something, they might have it available for sale (they'd probably love to make *some* money.) The list would be big, but it might justify another $150 for a bigger HD, if the device would recognize any CD inserted. Then you could download monthly updates, or perhaps bi-yearly CD updates, or something.

  • ...a real standard for MP3 audio encoded on a CD. It could even be based upon an existing standard (ie. ISO 9660), with some required heirarchial structure.

    That way, we could have a real MP3 home audio player, rather than something that just seems to simplify what can already be done with a PC and some technical knowledge.

    I would buy one, especially if they were available for car stereos. And you could even integrate it with a standard CD player!

  • But you need to switch focus, the benefit of the 'internet keys' is that they do this, enter the command, then return focus to the last application.

    You could probably hack something up that used those keys modified (alt-shift or something), but it wouldn't be as easy... And almost all new keyboards have those, why not use them?
  • Will this only recognize mp3 files on fat partitions? It'd be nice if it could be used to recognize mp3's on an ext2/BeOS/MacOS formatted drive.
  • Likely though, this could be compressed to 1.76Mbit (CD datarate) and sound a *lot* better than CDs do, without extra storage.

    320kbit MP3s done with a good compressor sound very close to CDs except for some artifacts introduced by the MP3 format, such as poor reproduction in certain frequencies, no matter the compression level. So, that's .32Mbit, going to five times that would likely result in a very high quality signal, especially if MP3s were updated (Is there a successor yet, in an official sense?) to avoid the problems we've noticed in the current version.

    96/24/5.1 is 2.18_*1.5*3 (using your numbers) larger than 44/16/2, which is 9.81_ ... 17.319Mbit. So we're looking at about the same 10:1 compression that we get from MP3s at 128, except that we've got a *lot* more quality to start with, 75% of CD is so-so, because CDs aren't all that, to an audio-phile. But, 75% of 96/24/5.1 would likely be *much* better than any consumer-level format available. (No, vinyl isn't better, it has an annoying hiss and degrades. Playing a new record, once, on a new needle, in perfect conditions, is not a fair comparrison to a medium and player that doesn't degrade.)

    I'd like the ability to use a DVD for *more* audio, not just 'better' audio, most of which will be lost on the ears of audiophiles, let alone everyone else.

  • Amen brother (Score:3)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @11:43AM (#985269) Homepage
    And can I get a hallelujah? The MP3's you get off of the net sound like crap. They get played back on crap equipment.

    The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap. Sure you can make perfect copies of this 128k crap, but what good is a perfect copy of a piece of shit?

    And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)

    --Shoeboy
    (former microserf)
  • The average windows user is smart/lucky enough to share a folder on their hard drive if given just the right instructions, I see it happen all of the time.

    It's not the FTP client that would be hard to implement it's the FTP server.

    Devil Ducky
  • One article says the Dell product is mostly S3 hardware. The press release (thanks) describes moving music to any room in the house. Therefore it appears to be this product [209.10.46.178] - which uses phoneline-based networking (Eww!).

    Shame, I've been looking for a USB-based hardware MP3 player to chain off my overstressed old 266MMX portable...

  • Re:so how is this better... (Score:3)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @11:03AM (#985295)
    Right, but that's what MP3 Anywhere [x10.com] is for, and at a fifth the cost. So the question remains, what makes this worthwhile?

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