I’ve been asked by a few of my reader’s about why I talk so little about Macs, when I use a Mac myself. Well honestly, if you have noticed, I’ve been talking increasingly lesser these days about ‘technology’ related topics on my blog. I think, in a way, I have a little bit more focus on life and, as such, been centering more on topics that allows me to explore the art of life. In addition, most things in Mac are so easy and readily available that you barely need to discuss. The questions, however, did make me think about certain things that I could share.
Being a huge music freak and always trying to look out for some good way to experience have made me invest quite a bit of my earnings on audiophile grade equipment. But let’s face it, in this digital era most of us have a lot of collection conveniently stored in hard drives in digital format. It’s just not practical or economic to collect all our favorite records in CD or EP format. So I’ll share a nice way to make the best out of your music collection on a Mac.
Macs are beautifully built for the artistic souls; they take care of the finest details that our hearts care about. But I’ve always questioned the lack of quality and audiophile features in iTunes. iTunes for Mac is perhaps the best audio management application, but in times of playback performance, it really isn’t on par with the high standards of everything else that Apple offers.
First of all, iTunes won’t playback the most common lossless audio format known as FLAC (.flac files). If you are looking for truly lossless CD grade audio, this is the most reliable format. Some may disagree stating that Apple nevertheless supports ALAC files. I would not recommend building a library of collection on ALAC format. This is because, the format is still only popular among Apple circles and at a later time would make it painful for you to convert all that back to some other format. FLAC is supported throughout multiple operating systems and devices. I’m talking about many popular high-end music players as well as computers running Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. (Please refer towards the end of this article where I’ve put together a list of online sites for you to collect lossless digital files.)
Secondly, iTunes isn’t popular as the application to really squeeze the juice out of your hardware. I’ve always wondered why Apple didn’t offer much better sound integrating more advanced audio solutions (e.g. stuff from Creative Labs), but there’s still lot you could do with your existing Mac.
Luckily, there are applications to fill up this gap and take advantage of your hardware supporting a larger array of file formats. Among some decent choices, the one I would recommend is Decibel. The application addresses both the issues stated above quite well.
There’s no shortage of file support in Decibel, and your FLAC / ALAC or any other lossless audio library is perfectly safe with this player. Yes, the music management area is not quite as polished looking; you should expect minimum features for organizing your music library – it allows you to add tracks, search for music, and sort by different fields. But it’s not designed to replace iTunes – you still need iTunes for managing your audio. Remember: the focus here is playback performance, not music management!
The real advantage of Decibel comes in playback performance. The first thing to note is the player’s capability to take full advantage of 64-bit floating-point precision. It simply means that audio, regardless of its original resolution (bit rate), is calculated with 64-bit floating-point precision. This applies to all branches of the signal path. For high-end audio, 64-bit computing helps enable a deep sonic palette and more lifelike and interesting compositions — more headroom for processing, more simultaneous plug-ins and virtual instruments. Audiophiles know ‘something funny’ happens when digital signals are summed, and 64-bit floating-point precision greatly addresses the issue. Logic is, the lower the resolution, the greater the odds of round-off errors accumulating. This issue was very audible with 16-bit systems, and some argued that 32-bit floating-point and 48-bit fixed calculations also degraded the sound; however, it’s hard to imagine that argument being made for 64-bit floating-point systems. With such high floating-point precision the system allows huge amounts of resolution, so round-off errors are more on paper than a practical reality – especially considering we will be using mid-range audiophile hardware to listen to the output. To take some added quality, please use the free Start Mode Selector application to ensure an automatic 64-bit kernel boot mode. But before downloading this application, please do read the easy descriptions thoroughly to ensure you fully understand what kind of modifications you are making to a very sensitive area of your Mac OS.
In addition, playing your audio files from hard drives also increases the likelihood of glitches, for fragmentation issues and the lack of smooth flow of data during playback. Thus read/write heads having to dart about between every available nook and cranny in the disk causes issues known as audio glitch. Disk buffers may also cause as many click and pop problems if you’re running other applications, have thousands of audio tracks, or involved in any activity that keeps your disk heads busy. If you have such a setting where your hard drive is using the same bus with other drives (HDD or optical), slow bus speed might be observed that effect playback quality. Depending on how your write-to-disk code works, it may also be that disk access is stalling the callback for too long and dropping samples. The point is, glitches while audio playback can easily be caused when accessing data from hard disks. The more advanced audio gear (file, software, hardware) you use, the more you start hearing such issues. Decibel supports loading and playing tracks directly from RAM of your Mac. This is a huge benefit since it removes the audio glitch issues. As files are first loaded in the memory, the playback becomes much smoother, eliminating all disk access issues faced by regular music players.
Decibel also supports the popular ‘hog-mode’ for Macs. This means it can take exclusive control of the audio device (sound card). This mode gives any program exclusive access to the ‘CoreAudio’ driver. When running the player in this mode, no other application is able to use the audio device, resulting in an exclusive and native use of the device to deliver clean audio playback.
Another issue with regular playback is software sample rate conversion. Obviously for software mixing all the signals need to be converted to a single rate. This rate, by default, may be 48kHz. Usually the algorithm used by default is a very rudimentary. It may be fast but very low quality and is likely to audibly degrade the sound quality of 44100 materials played through a mixed device. Some mentioned software sample rate conversion could add harmonic distortion of around -10dB in some cases and about -20dB on music! There are high quality mixers available, but I prefer to avoid all kinds of sample rate conversion whenever possible. Decibel can automatically adjust the output device’s sample rate to that of the playing track, preventing audio quality degradation associated with any kind of software sample rate conversion. Again, such features ensure your audio is least processed and pure. Some of you, who will prefer high quality resampled audio, could also have a look at iZotope 64 bit Sample Rate Converter and its implementation on some applications. Another player I would also recommend for you to test is Fidelia from Audifile Engineering. Fidelia (Advanced Edition) incorporates iZotope’s sample rate conversion and real-time audio dithering technology in a perfect manner. In my tests, this player sounded as good as (or, slightly better than) Decibel, but the level of quality improvement did not provide me enough contentment in reasoning the higher price. Also, Decibel incorporates a solid feature of supporting Apple Remote with Macbook Pro that really helps me relax and control playback from anywhere in my room.
If budget is a serious issue, you may consider free software. For a completely free application, you may also try Audirvana. It comes very close in playback quality compared to the paid ones mentioned above.
Apart from investing in a great audio player, to have a mid-range audiophile experience, I would at least recommend you to invest in a good pair of speakers or headphones. Please ensure you do listen to any of the options I mention to finally decide on your taste.
As for speakers, my first budget recommendation is the popular Audioengine 5. Great speakers for price that come with decent built-in amplifiers. A lesser priced but much more elegant looking speaker system would be the beautiful Harman Kardon Soundsticks III. Although they wont sound as good, considering the overall objective of your project is to create a value for money system, these will serve up-to your expectations. Another tie for second position is the M-Audio AV40. If sound quality is a concern, the AV40s can take out Soundsticks III. My last recommendation is the Creative GigaWorks T40 Series II, for people who are on a very tight budget.
Headphone / earphones can offer more sound quality than similarly priced speakers. There are two options in this category: first, the Grado SR60i – an incredibly awesome headphone that will change your perception of value range, and second, the Shure SE-115 – an entry-level earphone that doesn’t sound half as good as the Grado but provides a good balance between portability, practicality, and sound quality (this is the cheapest you can get). My recommendation is to go for the Grado SR60i and add a basic headphone amplifier, like the FiiO E5. This is because, I recommend switching off any kind of pre-amplification (volume control) in your music player application to avoid distortion and send the pure signal to the headphones / speakers.
I don’t ask you to get a Digital-to-Analog-Converter, as the purpose of this article is to provide you an option for budget audiophile experience (which quite honestly, is far different from the ‘perfect’ audiophile experience). That being said, if you have some additional budget for this setup, please do consider using an exceptional USB DAC / headphone amplifier known as Fubar III. The Fubar III can add the final touch of completeness to your system, replacing your factory audio device in the Mac. Just for note, I’m writing this post assuming that you don’t use an expensive DAC to playback music from your Mac. (DAC is beyond the purpose of this post. If you don’t know what a DAC is, then be sure that this post is perfectly fine for you.)
Due to the mid-range performance of the overall setup, there is no real advantage of wasting any money on interconnects (cables). Just use stock gear and you should be fine. You must, however, spend some cash in using either a good surge protector or an UPS when sending power to all of the components (computer, speakers, amps, etc.).
A basic overview of the overall setup:
- Player > Sound Card > Speakers (with built-in amps)
- Or, Player > Sound Card > Headphone Amp > Headphones
- Or, Player > DAC > Speakers (with built-in amps)
- Or, Player > DAC (with headphone amp) > Headphone
Once you setup this system, your taste for high quality digital files will continue to grow. I’ve found a good list of sites that can help you get access to an exceptional library of audiophile grade music in digital format:
Boomkat
Bleep
Bandcamp
Linn Records
Verve Master Edition
Acousence
Bowers & Wilkins Society of Sound
Cedille
Downloads NOW!
iTrax
HDtracks
Naimlable
Deutsche Grammophon
Sloan Music
Beatport
Trackitdown
And that puts together a very budget based setup for you to experience some classic audio performance using Mac. In reality, many of us spend a lot more time listening to music than watching movies or playing video games. This is why a $500 – $1000 is the least you can do to get some incredible quality out of digital music.
I hope you find my post helpful to start building a proper mid-range setup.
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