Computer Music is it as good as CD? 

There is a widespread belief that Computers, iPods and MP3 players are not Hi Fi. This is nonsense and the easiest way to show it’s nonsense is to rate the sound quality of all these devices on a nought to ten scale. What you’ll find is that computers and related products score lower overall, but that the best will be better than large numbers of allegedly High End CD players and, if all are using the highest quality DACs, there will be no audible difference. Noughts and ones are the same however they are stored. Therefore we wonder how many people have made proper comparisons in controlled conditions. 

Computers play lossless music files and it’s in this form that recordings are made and stored, whereas CDs, if anything, may not sound quite as good. This is because it’s a very old storage medium that reads in real time and uses forward error correction and interpolation. 

The big worry for Hi Fi enthusiasts is compression and what it might do to the music. The answer for those that have experimented is remarkably little, a surprising amount of different music sounds either indistinguishable from the original or is affected so little as to be of no consequence. In other words, if you choose to store your music in a computer, you can experiment until you have the results that you want and that probably means different levels of compression depending on music type and how much you like it. The important thing to understand is that quite heavy levels of compression has to be used before things sound unpleasant, MP3s are surprisingly good. And if the only way to hear a piece of music is as one, then it makes sense to try it, you can always buy the CD later. 

The Itunes music store sells 128 bit AAC+ files of individual tracks or complete albums and some experts argue that these are indistinguishable from the original, but if you prefer to you can buy Lossless files from sites like www.mindawn.com. Either way it is your choice and you’ve never had greater. 

Many of you will have had bad experiences with compressed digital music, DAB radio being a case in point, every hi fi magazine has slated it since it arrived. We didn’t, we bought a tuner with a digital output and connected it to a DAC supplied by Wolfson Microelectronics as a means of demonstrating their products, and the result was a significant improvement in sound quality and proof that DAB isn’t CD quality but it is better than FM. It would have been the same had we used demonstration boards from any of the DAC manufacturers. The differences you hear between digital devices are not caused the choice of DACs but how competently they’ve been used. Implementation is much more critical with compressed music.