{"id":2808,"date":"2014-12-28T22:37:33","date_gmt":"2014-12-28T22:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=2808"},"modified":"2025-01-04T21:14:52","modified_gmt":"2025-01-04T21:14:52","slug":"into-the-digital-age-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=2808","title":{"rendered":"Into the Digital Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regular readers will know that I’ve got some prejudices about audio: for years I didn’t have an MP3 player, eventually relenting<\/a>, although I still don’t do actual MP3s<\/a>, and buy music almost exclusively on CD, though it has to be said, my views on downloadable music 10 years ago<\/a> are starting to be disproved: MP3 at a highish bitrate (which is more practical with increasing bandwidth and storage) is good enough for most people, on most systems, at most times, and lossless formats are becoming more common, especially since Fruitco<\/a> introduced their lossless format<\/a> (though of course, they should have introduced it as an open format…).<\/p>\n

One thing* has kept me away from using a computer to play music in the house: the analogue outputs of most consumer PCs (and I’m including Fruitco in this) hardware is a bit ropey- but then again, it was never intended for high-quality audio.<\/p>\n

Enter the DACMagic<\/a>. It’s a proper (though very small) hifi component with TOSLink, S\/P DIF and USB inputs, and it’ll do the high sample rates that may not be neccesary<\/a>, but more importantly, it’s a decent DAC chip<\/a> with the compromise pushed a bit towards quality, and some initial testing sounds as good as the CD with a FLAC file (and, pleasingly, the device was recognised and working within seconds on Ubuntu).<\/p>\n

The plan now is a Raspberry Pi and Volumino<\/a>: the Pi’s analogue audio output is particularly compromised (hardly surprising given it’s a \u00a335 computer) and the ‘proper’ stereo doesn’t have HDMI. There are cheaper ways to get better Pi audio<\/a> with a Wolfson DAC, but as a bonus, the DACMagic’s inputs can link to my existing CD player too; a respectable but budget Marantz, and also, it comes in a nice black case that looks decent next to the other gear: initial comparisons sound like the DACMagic has improved sound here too, but that could be the confirmation bias- I’ve just bought it, so it \/has\/ to give an improvement :-).<\/p>\n

*OK, two things. I’m an awful luddite<\/a>, it would seem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regular readers will know that I’ve got some prejudices about audio: for years I didn’t have an MP3 player, eventually relenting, although I still don’t do actual MP3s, and buy music almost exclusively on CD, though it has to be said, my views on downloadable music 10 years ago are starting to be disproved: MP3 … Continue reading Into the Digital Age<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,3,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-computers","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5080,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2808\/revisions\/5080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}