marty said:
Re: m-audio Fast Track Pro for recording and playback via USB and "use whatever built in sound device the motherboard has and probably not notice" Lots more to learn about how the sound travels out of a computer. Green headphone jack verses some USB gismo?
Mostly it depends on the source material as to whether improving the output device would matter.
Since the internet radio is a highly-lossy-compressed stream of data, some of the "sound" is already gone, changed, degraded, altered, etc.
Kinda like a JPG file vs BMP or TIF or the "raw" camera formats. The latter three contain exactly what was digitized in the first place. But a JPG file even at it's best is still compressed in a way that destroys some of the data, so when you loook at the image you see the blockiness of color and "texture" that results form the lost data, especially if you compare it to the original uncompressed image.
Depending on the source material, you might not even notice the compression--if it is just a human voice talking, especially in a noisy environment, like a reporter on a street, all the relevant informaiton is still there if you're just listening to their speech. But if it is a classical orchestral piece with wide dynamic range, it's highly unlikely that it will sound like the original, as most of the dynamics are the first thing to be lost in such compression. It's still good enough for most poeple, but if you are a picky audiophile....
There *are* lossless compression schemes, but they're not typically used for streaming or things like internet radio; they're usually used for storing recorded data in home studios, or audiophiles that want all their hardware albums/vinyl/tape/cd/etc collections digitally stored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression
FLAC is the one I'm familiar with
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
but since the internet radio stuff almost certainly isn't going to use this, then unless you intend to digitize your own hardware audio collection, there's no need to go learning about it.
I was gonna attach two versions of the same composition I made years ago, one of them is compressed with MP3 at about the same bitrate often used for players and some streaming, and the other is an uncompressed WAV file, but I can't find that WAV file. Must be only on my old offline backups somewhere.
Anyway, the idea would ahve been to show that it's easy to hear the difference from lost information, although in this particular case I actually prefer the compressed version because of the things it does to some of the percussion, making it more "interesting". :lol: I'd already uploaded the compressed one, so I left it there (you just have to rename it from .zip to .mp3).
FWIW, equalizers and other plugins don't really fix the problems with the audio quality--they just make it possible to fit the audio range of the stuff you're playing to your sound system's capabilities, your room's acoustics and your ears' capabilities and your own preferences. Somtimes the improvement is sufficient, and sometimes it's not--depends on what you expect from it.
If you are using a lossless format, especially at a high bit-depth (24 or 32 bit) then it starts to matter a lot what audio output hardware you have in the computer--but if you are recording it in yourself at those bit depths, then the hardware for that should also output the same.
But otherwise, it doesn't matter all that much.
Some cheap soundcards or other audio hardware, especially built-in audio on laptops, can be problematic for adding noises to the output or input, like actually being able to hear distortions in audio when moving the mouse or dragging stuff around onscreen, or clicks or burps at every wifi data packet--stuff like that. Most cheaper audio hardware has a lot more hissing on its output even when there is no audio being sent to it (even when muted, on some of them), but this doesn't really matter much if it's just for internet radio--the embedded noise from data loss in most of those streams is going to be louder than the built-in hiss.
Try it with the hardware you've already got, and if you don't like the soudn of it, even playing a cd thru it, then you can try something different.
