Purchase question
 

In article ,
"Uzmi Novce I Bjezi!" wrote:

Thanks. I already ordered Denon DRA-455 receiver.

But I still can cancel it in 3 days, so if someone has something against
speak now ;-)


I think that will be fine - I have a Denon DRA-395, which I think is the
same unit except that the 395 has a bit more power.

I don't know much about sound cards though...

--
Bill

Purchase question
 

Uzmi Novce I Bjezi! wrote:

"Joseph Oberlander" wrote in message
.net...


Uzmi Novce I Bjezi! wrote:

What's your budget and what country do you live in?


Croatia, and list was made based on my budget and availability of audio
components.

Unfortunatelly, here is all audio equipment at least 50% more expensive then
prices on internet.

The truth is that most amplifiers will be fine. They all put
out 50-100wpc into 8ohm speakers, more or less the same, so
consider the least feature-laden model for the money.(though
one that still does a good job) Onkyo and Denon and Yamaha
are fine choices - most of the differences are small and
have more to do with extra channels and processing modes.

The area to spend the most money and time is the speakers.
I personally like Tannoy as they are easy to find in Europe
and tend to sound nice. Very good budget models. If you
can find a set of Mercury or MercuryX(MX) speakers used,
These will be as good as any of the others you listed for
quite a decent price.

Purchase question
 

Uzmi Novce I Bjezi! wrote:

"Rui Pedro Mendes Salgueiro" wrote in message
...

/cut

Wow, that was really much :-)

What is the difference between analogue receivers (Denon DRA455 and Harman
Kardon 3380) and digital receivers (all others in the same range of price,
for instance Yamaha RXV457) in quality of sound?

Very very little unless you have difficult or very large speakers.
Moest people find even 10watts per channel to be painffully loud(over
100db per speaker in some cases), so unless you have a difficult speaker
or a party, you will never run any of them loud enough to have the
differences become apparent.

OTOH, this is a good thing - just buy any amp of the three and enjoy.

Since I will mostly listen to my mp3 collection is it better to buy sound
card with digital output and wire it directly into digital input of some
home cinema receiver (which generally has 'worse' sound than analogue
receiver) or to wire it into analogue receiver ?

My suggestion would be to buy a dvd changer for the system(or
CD if that's too expensive) that can play MP3s. You can skip
a link in the chain that way. Most soundcards are made more
for games and sound effects than audio playback, while a
dedicated DVD player sounds good because it has to. :)

A proper DVD player, btw, will enable you to burn 4.6gig
worth of mp3s onto a DVD. A 5 dvd changer like this is
effectively an IPod.(but one that you can burn and change
at will for a couple of dollars per dvd)

Purchase question
 

Uzmi Novce I Bjezi! wrote:

Thanks. I already ordered Denon DRA-455 receiver.


But I still can cancel it in 3 days, so if someone has something against
speak now ;-)

It's a good receiver. Plenty of oomph for driving most speakers
(and can run a pair of 4 ohm speakers if it has to, IIRC)

Purchase question
 

"Bill Riel" wrote in message
t...
In article ws.com,
says...
In article , "Uzmi Novce I Bjezi!"
wrote:

I'm planning to buy receiver + floorstanding loudspeakers for hi-fi
(not
home cinema) purpose.


I would mostly listen to mp3's (all kinds) and radio.


I prefer quality of sound over technical possibilities.

If you're listening to MP3's and radio, you have no concept of quality
sound.

Disagree - at least *I* can't tell high bitrate, LAME encoded MP3's from
original source. I doubt many people (if any) could.

I'm with you on that but I don't think we'd manage to convince many people
round here!

Purchase question
 

Rich Wilson wrote:

I prefer quality of sound over technical possibilities.

If you're listening to MP3's and radio, you have no concept of quality
sound.

Disagree - at least *I* can't tell high bitrate, LAME encoded MP3's from
original source. I doubt many people (if any) could.

I'm with you on that but I don't think we'd manage to convince many people
round here!


Thirded... After some months of consideration and testing, I decided I
couldn't tell the difference between CD and 320kbps, LAME-encoded mp3s so
moved exclusively to the latter when I set up my media server about 18 months
ago

Purchase question
 

Stimpy wrote:

Rich Wilson wrote:

I prefer quality of sound over technical possibilities.

If you're listening to MP3's and radio, you have no concept of quality
sound.

Disagree - at least *I* can't tell high bitrate, LAME encoded MP3's from
original source. I doubt many people (if any) could.

I'm with you on that but I don't think we'd manage to convince many people
round here!



Thirded... After some months of consideration and testing, I decided I
couldn't tell the difference between CD and 320kbps, LAME-encoded mp3s so
moved exclusively to the latter when I set up my media server about 18 months
ago

Conbsidering that this is a 50% reduction in bit-rate over the
original and compression under the 40-60% range has basically
no meaningful lost data(see typical "lossless" compression
methods - they all clock in at about 320k MP3 size), plus
the fact that CD quality is much better than most peolpe can
hear, yes, 320K properly encoded will give you a recreation
of the original that a side-by-side test would be hard pressed
to reveal.

Lower than that, though, it gets plainly audable. Quickly.
128 is very "gritty" sounding, like FM radio, and 192 is
maybe like tape but without the wobble and hiss.

Purchase question
 

Thirded... After some months of consideration and testing, I decided I
couldn't tell the difference between CD and 320kbps, LAME-encoded mp3s

If you want to test, put some stuff with nice harsh harmonics thru the
compression. Sharp-edged waveforms with lots of high harmonics are a
good test of just how well the signal can be reconstructed.

A co-worker did this with a series of different encoders. Of that set,
LAME was one of the best for the pulse waveforms he was testing.
Unfortunately I don't remember where he posted the results of that
study; I'll try to dig that info out again.

Purchase question
 

Lower than that, though, it gets plainly audable. Quickly.
128 is very "gritty" sounding, like FM radio,

128 sounds pretty good to me much like CD quality and better than FM which
only has an audible range of 50-15Khz. But on rare occasions, under the
right conditions, and if my old tube tuner could lock in on a good FM
station with a clean music source it sounds as good as anything vinyl, tape
of CD I have.

and 192 is
maybe like tape but without the wobble and hiss.


On a good reel-to-reel deck you shouldn't hear wobble, wow or flutter - only
the damn hiss.

Purchase question
 

I like Turtle Beach soundcards - cheap and clean sound. Creative is pretty
good too but perhaps not as clean although hard to tell without A/B
comparison.

I have a Harman Kardon receiver only rated at 35wpc but much more powerful
and cleaner than my 120wpc receiver.