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Music Media

Kenwood Tries To Improve MP3 Sound 134

Posted by timothy from the who-are-you-that-is-so-wise-in-the-ways-of-science- dept.
Wister285 writes: "Although MP3 quality is pretty damn good, the people over a Kenwood thought that it still doesn't have the edge that CDs do. MP3s don't support high frequency that regular CDs do because of the data compression. Kenwood's format, which is called 'Supreme Drive' (another dumb name for a good product ...), is boasting good results. Catch the story over at Excite." While it's cool that research is going on to improve the quality of compressed audio, it's hard to tell from this article just what is actually going on. Does it even make sense to say that this program "takes the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental' -- and mathematically re-processes the data through a sound generator" to achieve a more natural sound? Where does it 'take' that information from exactly?
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Kenwood Tries To Improve MP3 Sound More

Kenwood Tries To Improve MP3 Sound

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  • According to a previous slashdot article, mp3 isn't 'free' anymore.
  • You forgot mentioning creating an AI-program that analyses the music from the compressed output and starts "fixing" what is missing. Oh wait, that was not funny. Oh well, forget it then.

    If humans can do it, computers can too.

    - Steeltoe
  • It's difficult to tell from that story, but it sounds to me like they're using some kind of enhancer like the much-beloved Aphex [aphex.com] 'Aural Exciter'. That supposedly adds harmonics to a signal, and can be very efffective if used correctly. Nothing particularly new, though.
  • LAME is the best encoder, (see r3mix.net for examples) and cdparanoia is the best ripper.

    You can hang it all together nicely with grip, too.

    LAME Home Page [sulaco.org]

    Grip home page [nostatic.org]

    CDparanoia home page [xiph.org]
    --

  • MP3 is a portable media and 128 bitrate (oh, go on then, spoil me, use 196) is perfectly adequate for people who are then going to listen through tinny little earphones or in their not-completely-sound-proofed cars.

    MP3 (and MiniDisc for that matter) is not a refined listening format, CDs will always be better.

    That's not to say that there aren't still holy wars raging about CDs and Vinyls!

    Ok, who'll bid me SACD? :)

  • I wouldn't say the fundamental the only note you hear though.
    Many instruments have very pronounced harmonics. If you primarily heard the fundamental it would just be a sine wave.
    In fact, percussion instruments like marimba and xylophone have to have their harmonics tuned. This means the bars are cut and shaved not only to bring the fundamental into tune, but the pronounced 4th harmonic as well. If the fundamental is in tune and the 4th harmonic is out, it sounds like crap.
    Other instruments (like strings) are closer to an ideal physical system, so the harmonics will be in tune with the fundamental no matter what (assuming the string is uniform thickness and density, and not played too loudly).
    Then you have something like a harpsichord, in which the harmonics are actually louder than the fundamental.
  • Encode the first song "Shaky Ground" at 128kbps/44000Hz.

    One thing that should be remembered is that MP3 is a lossy method and therefore it does matter which program/algorithm you use to generate your mp3 stream. Sure if you use some poor encoder your results are similarly poor. I am pretty pleased with lame [lame.org] quality and you should try that also before bashing mp3. IMHO if you think music encoded with lame sounds terrible you are unfortunate enough to be born with golden ears.

    You should try a few decoders also but it shouldn't make that much difference.
    _________________________

  • I've never heard that particular recording, but is it possible that it really is the high frequencies that are lost, anyway? The clarity of voice is extremely dependent on the high frequency components.

    There are several other possibilities. Firstly, the particular encoder you use may be more even in its destruction, but most of the "better" encoders do the most damage at the high end. Secondly, the distortion may be due to a bad original recording (although it sounds like you've heard the original, and would know if that were the case), but since the voice is no doubt picked up through one of the mics intended for the piano, it would not be surprising if this was distorted through the clicks of the keys and the frequency response of that particular mic.

    That said, there are lots of things lost on an MP3, it is just most obvious if you listen for high frequency components (percussion instruments are great for this) to determine if it is an MP3 or an original recording. The brightness of a high-hat is the first thing to go, and the only thing that many can hear.

    -Alison

  • Approaching the problem from the other side, I'm becoming increasingly swayed by the benefits of Variable Bit Rate as a way to improve the quality at the recording side. It only goes so far, of course, but I am hearing an audible difference.

    I use (and heartily recommend) CDex [n3.net] as my CD-Ripper, and it is now supplied with the Lame encoder. The latest CDex supports VBR, where you can set a) the lowest bit rate you will accept, and b) a general quality tradeoff parameter, where "VBR0" is the least, and "VBR9" the most compromised in quality. I'm hearing better results with this setup than I did with Steinberg [steinberg.de] WaveLab 3's VBR system, and it's also allowing WinAMP to show the correct songlength, rather than fluctuating as the bitrate changes.

    In effect, the VBR system analyses each audio block and makes a guess as to how much information it can drop. If you convert the resulting file back to WAV and examine in CoolEdit [syntrillium.com] Spectral View, you can actually see the high-end cutoff stepping up and down as the bitrate varies. Noisy sounds such as cymbal splashes get the most bandwidth, while smoother sounds allow a lower rate to be used.

    The resulting files are larger, but you could tradeoff more quality to get the size down. With the parameters I use ("VBR0", no less than 96kb/s), the bit rates shoot up to 320kb/s at times, and the average compression ratio is only about 8:1. Still, I think the results are worth it...

  • It beats 28-bit
  • I heard the ms cans.net kicks ass
    ___
  • mp3 wants to be cheap
  • Ever noticed that if you reply to posts rated -1, you're less likely to get moderated? I guess the moderators usually read at >-1. There are actually -2 posts, in case anyone cares.
  • I remember about a year ago [before winamp == AOL], that there was a DSP plugin that came with the binary that allowed you to improve the audio quality by throwing garbage into the ultrahigh frequencies [30khz - 44khz]. The idea was that even though you did not "hear" in the conventional sense, the music sounded fuller on a system that suffeciently quality enough. I tried it out on my beloved stereo [two JBLs standing tall and true at 5 feet], and while I felt I could hear something I didn't know if it was the plugin or the crack. While this harmonic/fundamental stuff seems to be different, still made me think about this..
    Anyone else remember this, or should I go back to my crack pipe?
  • Just try:

    lame -V1 -b128 -h -mj

    These are the best Settings!

    have a look at http://www.r3mix.net

  • (+1 Scary)

    :) What is the world coming to, man?

    Beg pardon? I do not grok this.

    Rami
    --
  • All their competitors like Aiwa all cost $300, while Kenwoods cost $650. Think about it, who would buy a $650 deck when you can get one for $300? Because it has this 'new sound system' of course! Bah. Marketing junk. Just get the $300 Aiwa and be happy.
  • There is a already a digital equivilent of the BBE unit. It's called WowThing [wowthing.com]. I've noticed that it does exactly what you describe. I've used the WinAmp plug-in version. However, I noticed that when the plug-in is installed, yet turned off, it makes the sound quality worse than if it wasn't installed at all. When you turn it on, it doesn't sound too bad. I figure this is so there will be more of a noticable difference when you use it so you will buy it. It's shareware, BTW.
  • Most CDs use sampling. This is fine for most popular music formas but there can be a difference in the quality for classical music (and other music forms that can have intricate sounds). In that aspect the tapes we used to buy were better. CDs just last longer, easy to navigate from song to song, and were cheaper to make (thus increasing the profit margin for the greedy companies). I would hope they would aim for better than CD quality.
  • The BBE doesn't replace harmonics. What the bbe sonic maximizer does is to time-align the bass component of the audio. Bass waves take longer to generate because they're so huge (think about it, length = 1/f, so for that 20Hz bass wave to kick in, you need a half meter or so.)

    The BBE delays the upper half of the audio, so the Bass hits your ears at the same time the mid/high frequencies do. Not so much replacing of harmonics, but a correction for the reproduction of audio.

  • can someone tell me why one of the big manufacturers doesn't make an mp3 player that uses MD's for the storage? it's obviously going to be much cheaper than any memory that's going around now?
  • Just what we need another "standard" that is incompatible with everything else. When will they learn?

  • Supreme Drive takes the missing harmonics -- known as "fundamental" -- and mathematically re-processes the data through a sound generator. When finished, music then has a more natural sound, according to Kenwood.
    -- This definitely smells like "marketing smoke" (catchy prose concocted by some articulate marketing person who probably does not understand anything about the technonlogy) Therefore, it's probably best to not even get excited over such a statement, and just wait and hear for yourself how it sounds.
  • Does this new Supreme Drive work on other sound formats? If not, Ogg/Vorbis is on its way - maybe Kenwood should focus on that instead.

    Actually, they might not need to focus so much on Vorbis. Some more technical issues can be found at r3mix [r3mix.net]. Basically, they made a small test that in their opinion showed that Vorbis still had 'a year or two to go'. They didn't bash it, but pointed out that there was some stuff needed.

    Personally, I hope Vorbis will live up to the hype, and I believe it will - most likely sooner than one or two years. This Supreme Drive stuff sounds like something for the trash can. Either it's crap that doesn't really work or it's crap that makes your music sound worse. Come on, re-creating the lost bits by sending the stream through some kind of algorithm?

    Don't think so. Go Vorbis.

  • Man this is good, we need a new slashdot threshold, -1 only!

    Moderate parent up. I mean down.

  • ... dont even buy CDs! Records are the way to go and with that new laser technology out they wont get scrached. We must remember that CDs are not perfect. As for a better format, lets try 18 or 24 bit sound, something more like 88200Hz sampling, and 4 or 5 channels of encoding. But then you need a DVD to store the songs. This will NEVER end.
  • Actually, the fundamental is what it is called: the fundamental frequency. Harmonics will occur in multiples and fractions of the said fundamental. But I have to agree that "missing harmonics -- known as "fundamental"" really hurts the article's credibility.
  • Do you *own* a Kenwood Excelon head unit? I do. The x811. And I wouldn't trade it for an Aiwa. Not on your life. Is it worth the extra $300? Well, that depends on what you're looking for. But it definitely justifies it's higher price, I'll tell you that. (And yes, I realize the Z919 isn't branded with their Excelon logo - it's a Japanese import for those who didn't know, which is why it doesn't include the branding, MASK, or high voltage preouts that one generally see on the Excelon line - but it's internally comparable to the Excelon line and that's what counts). Aiwa sound. Hey, it's *cheap*!
  • The folks at Power Technology [fxsound.com] have already done this in software. DFX is a plug-in for WinAmp (and also Real Player and Media Player) that reconstructs the high-frequency harmonics from existing harmonics.

    Really, the technology is sound (no pun intended), if not perfect. For streaming audio, DFX really sounds great. For 128-K MP3 files, the improvement is only noticeable on good sound systems or headphones. It sounds really good!

    They threw in some other DSP's, such as 3-D sound, Dynamic Range enhancement, and Ambience. These extras tend to make low bitrate streams sound muddy and worsen the "underwater" effect, however. I tend to turn these off, and just use the "Fidelity" enhancement (which is worth the low price all by itself.)

    The extra overhead on your CPU is not very much -- about half of what it takes to play an MP3 file.

  • I don't have a link for this but in the new Crutchfield [crutchfield.com] catalog Kenwood also has produced an in-dash CD player that also plays CD's with MP3s on them.



    The Tick - "Spoon!"
  • Around 140 megs, actually. Compressed about 4:1 by ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding). See minidisc.org
  • Since MP3 is suited to the average ear, you can hear a difference more easily, if you don't hear the whole spectrum, since you won't be distracted from the compressed part e.g. by some hihat you don't hear.

    (Some people call this a "flanger effect on the low end of the spectrum")

  • Sounds like these guys are doing the same sort of thing as the folks at SRS labs. I bought a WOW box, a little dealie that goes between the sound card and speakers. It "rebuilds" high-end frequencies, just like the Kenwood guys claim. The sound is much fuller.

    The best features of the thing, however, are the TruBass(tm)(R)(C) knob which makes the sound much deeper without distortion on plain speakers, as well as good old SRS stereo enhancement.

    Wow, i shound like an advertisement. anyway, www.wowthing.com [wowthing.com] - they have a plugin for winamp that works almost as well as the hardware.

  • I use Optimus Titanium Pro 35 headphones. I'd hardly call those tinny. With them I can tell the difference between a VBR MP3 and the CD original, if only barely.
  • How many of us can actually hear 22khz or more? My hearing probably fades somewhere between 17-19khz.. Yes, we can argue about the effects of inaudible high frequency components but cd-quality is more than enough for me.

    Yes. There are a few people who can hear up to 24kHz or so, but that's pretty much the limit. 48kHz should do just fine. What we really need is more resolution. 16 bits just doesn't cut it. I think DVD will do 24. I want 32.

  • Many years ago in Russia (not only, I think) some people sold devices for converting black and white TV sets to color ones.
  • Every instrument that makes a noise, including the human voice vibrates at many different frequencies. The fundamental frequency is the lowest of them all, so low that you can't hear it and it's not what you percieve the over frequency as being. This is not the part of the sound that characterizes what it is. The "overtones" are. They are notes produces simultaneously with the the note you hear, and the overtones's respective amplitudes give any note it's particular tone, or "timbre". Mp3's cut alot of these out as it is theorized that they are sufficiently small in comparison they are "masked" by the main note, and you cannot hear them. If you cut all of them out, what you will hear is a pure sinewave, no matter what instrument. The garbling sound mp3's produce is when the bitstream cannot support enough overtones, so all what we hear is a bunch of notes mushed together, this happenes easily with applause or white noise because there are ALOT of frequencies, just like if you consider a note from an instrument and all of it overtones.

  • This isn't about improving sound quality. Even if their technique actually does make the sound mathematically more perfect, nobody will be able to tell the difference without an oscilliscope.

    This is just a way to leverage existing technology (MP3) and make it proprietary by adding something trivial to it. Kenwood will have players that can use standard MP3 or this new stuff, but nobody else will be able to use the new format without paying $$.

    Suddenly I experience a mysterious shafting sensation in my ass...


    My mom is not a Karma whore!

  • When you play certain combinations of notes on a piano or other instrument you can hear some high frequency harmonics accompanying the chord. Play a simple chord on the piano by hitting any three keys on the keyboard but leave a space between your fingers (10101). Try this on the lower (left half) of the keyboard so the resulting harmonics are not outside of your hearing range. You will hear a much higher note that could not possibly be produced by any of the three keys you hit by themselves. Part of what makes chords sound good or bad are their accompanying harmonics. Since MP3 does not record the high frequency harmonics, most users can hear, but not identify a difference. Harmonic frequencies produced by a given chord are predictable. This Kenwood setup apparently "listens ahead" and reproduces the appropriate harmonic for a given chord.

  • Re:MP3 can sound as good as CD (Score:3)

    by jonnythan ( 79727 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @01:20PM (#977280)
    Aiwa's got one for around $300. And with that Kenwood (Z919 I believe?), it isn't like you're buying a $200 cd receiver and paying $450 for the mp3 capability. The Z919 is, from what I hear and see at least, a damn fine in-dash CD receiver. $650 does seem a bit steep though..I could pick up a good Sony Mobile ES receiver, a decent 4-way amplifier (75-100 watts), and maybe a pair of Infinity Kappa 6x9's for my back deck for all that :)
  • They're easy to tell from the original cds, they come in these files that end in .mp3
  • You ever seen one of those ultra-pc ramblings about race or gender, they sound about the same.
  • So THATS how people write +5 posts. Hmm. I think I'll stick to trolling.

  • Technobabble (Score:3)

    by jfortier ( 141983 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @01:28PM (#977284)
    This sounds like a bunch of technobabble to me. I'm not a professional on this stuff, but here's what I understand about harmonics:

    When a not is played, you get a pitch which corresponds to the name of the note, called the fundamental. Because of the acoustic characteristics of the instrument, you also get a bunch of overtones, which are pitches higher than the note in intervals such as fourths, fifths, and octaves to the fundamental. Different instruments produce different overtones, which causes its characteristic timbre.

    Now I'm not entirely sure about the terminology I used above, but I think part of the point is that if it's going though and adding overtones, you aren't going to get a very natural sound, because everything is go to sound more similar. It might sound lusher, but it won't sound exactly right.

    There's also the problem with a lot of music such as sacred music, which frequently employs high vocals, especially "castrati", now usually counter-tenors (men singing high), or boys who haven't hit puberty. I've converted some of that music to MP3, and although the high stuff sounds thinner than on CD, I don't think I want Kenwood lushening that sound -- part of the beauty of those voices is their purity.

  • Ah, the joys of brainless audiophilia.

    Learn something about the Nyquist criterion. Learn why (and how) an analog wavelength of a certain frequency is mathematically equivalent to a sampled waveform at twice the frequency.

    There are problems with CDs; The frequency they chose for sampling (44.1kHz) gives a cutoff of 22050Hz, rather close to the 20kHz that is the _approximate_ top range of human hearing. Also, 16 bits of data turns out to be fairly borderline as well, and low-level jitter is a pretty tough nut to really crack.

    At the same time, crosstalk is unheard of. The absolute noise floor is incredibly low. Tape stretch, surface noise, and so forth are nonexistent.

    A casually thrown together CD will outperform an equally casually thrown together tape or record any day of the week. A very carefully created tape or record will beat that CD. (Mind you, the tape will only do so for a while--tape is an inherently unstable medium.) However, a very carefully recorded CD, even within the 44.1kHz/16bit limitations, will reproduce sound more accurately than any consumer format going.

    Sorry for the long rant, but don't blame CDs for bad engineering, and DON'T blame the "evils" of digital sampling for bad CDs.

    Some links:

    A good definition [wolfram.com]

    Another one, this time with more maths. [stanford.edu]

  • MP3s sound fine. I don't know what everyone is complaining about. I even know of a few live band bars in Manhattan that use 128 bit Mp3s for the in between band music, and it sounds great. I'd rather have better compression rates than frequency handling. Maybe that amounts to the same thing at high bit rates. But I'd rather have smaller files to deal with so I can fit more songs on a memory card or whatever.
  • Obviously he wasn't talking about you, then. :-)

    My AKGs (going through cheap 25-year-old Heathkit
    equipment) make the difference noticible. I'm
    sure your phones do as well. However, most of the
    headphones that people are going to use are cheap,
    tinny, $20 walkman phones; and for that matter,
    they won't _care_ much about the lack of
    perfection in the sound. This is exactly why MP3
    is such a popular (and good!) format.

  • RIAA? (Score:1)

    by Zone5 ( 179243 )
    I wonder how long it'll take the RIAA before they launch a lawsuit against Kenwood for "contributing to piracy" or some such nonsense for their making MP3's sound better.

  • DFX (Score:1)

    by ryry ( 198300 )
    there's this program called DFX [fxsound.com] out already that is a plug-in for winamp, reaplayer, and sonique. You can easily adjust sliders in four sound-control areas: fidelity, ambience, 3d sound, and dynamic boost. finding the right combination is really easy, plus the program works very well. it filters the sound and makes it louder and clearer than normal. you can immediately hear the improvement. plus, it's free! (sort-of). anyways, it's really useful =)
    -ryry
  • :) What is the world coming to, man?

    If it isn't June 27, 2000, I'm going to be writing a nasty letter to the calendar people.
  • There were also filters for television sets sold in the U.S., with blue on the top, flesh tone in the middle, and green in the bottom.

    This was before my time, or else I'd really be dating myself.

    Well, it's not like anyone else would date me, anyway...

  • understanding the terminology (Score:5)

    by operagost ( 62405 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @01:34PM (#977292) Homepage Journal
    As others have stated, this article could certainly have benefitted from the skills of a tech writer instead of a hack. In a sound, there is usually a "base" called a fundamental. This is the sounds your ear perceives as the actual pitch, say, middle C. Above that, there are higher frequencies called harmonics. The number and intervals of these harmonics vary by the instrument, and have a large influence on the tone of an instrument. That's why a clarinet and a trumpet sound different. When I was 12 I had an ear infection which affected my ear's frequency response and made my trumpet sound nasal. Naturally I didn't enjoy playing in that condition. If you were to strip an instrument of ALL its harmonics, you would hear a pure tone, like that from an oscillator, or feedback.

    Actually, what has a greater effect on the way something sounds is the attack. MP3 already handles this quite well for all but the most demanding tasks, when the amplitude of a sound is too high to fit in the selected bitrate and modulates ("shoves aside") the other material. Stravinsky probably sounds poor in anything below 256.

    Anyway, what Kenwood seems to be doing here is our good old friend "interpolation". They've developed an algorithm like that used to enlarge photographs and applied it to sound. In order for this to work, they're going to have to create a device which can actually identify different instruments and supply the missing harmonics. The initial results, like when engineers attempted to create "stereo" from old mono recordings by channel equalization, is likely to be flawed, but I'm sure it will result in a commercially acceptable result. As for me, I'll be listening to Super CD or DVD Audio, whichever wins. I don't want Miles Davis' trumpet to sound like Maynard Ferguson's.

  • Fractions? Um, no. Run a complex signal at say, 500Hz through a spectrum analyzer, and you'll get components at 500Hz, 1000Hz, 1500Hz, and so on. There'll be nothing at 250Hz, 166.67Hz, or any other fraction. Otherwise it couldn't be a true periodic signal at 500Hz.
  • They use perceptual encoding called Super Bit Mapping to squeeze 24 bit audio into the 16 bit CD format. People usually call the result "21-bit".
  • The problem I have with MiniDisks is the cost. The media may be inexpensive, but the recorder is just too much. (Last time I looked was about 6 months ago) CD-R is a good solution because you can play them essentially anywhere. The media is extremely inexpensive, and the burner (assuming a computer burner here, not a standalone unit) is useful for other things as well.

    Now, granted, if MiniDisc recorders/player were cheaper, I would be much more impressed. Also granted that they are a better solution than a Diamond Rio and co. I personally think the best solution at the moment is to just burn a cheap CD. Sure you should use better CD-R media for archiving, but if you just want a CD you can jam too and don't mind possibly having to reburn it in a couple years, then 70 cent CD-R media are great.

  • Well, the way i see this, is just as another stunt that a company is doing to trying to do, what purpose is there in really making mp3's sounds better, espically at this so called cd quality ? Cd quality is next to worthless unless you have a huge system, the only thing that this could possibly improve is the loudness of the particular song, cd quality i take it means the same as if it were on a cd, well, that seems/is next to impossible.. are a dollar bill, and a silver dollar the same ? all it is doing, is adding some better features, but at the same time, taking away some too..
  • #2 smaerty.

  • Huh? What's all the hype? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Y'Know, Why don't they release a bunch of demo songs with things like this... and show us what all this "Supreme Drive" techno-stuff does? FYI, There is a nice program out there by DFX [fxsound.com], if you didn't know. It's a plugin for Winamp and other players. This too will "take the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental' -- and mathematically re-processes the data through a sound generator to achieve a more natural sound". I like this one, it lets you change fidelity, ambience, level of 3d surround, and dynamic boost.
  • Actually, according to r3mix, MP3 does very well at high frequencies if you encode with LAME [belgacom.net].
  • I'd saya a better analogy would be an uncompressed image and a jpg both viewed through a stained-glass window. Maybe my car has loud road noise, but I can't tell the difference between a mp3 and a cd in it.

    Most MP3s encoded anywhere below 192 kbps distort the high end of the music. The low frequencies also lose the "ooomph". If you turn the volume up above 3, you can hear this. It is not noticeable on crappy speakers, true, but on any quality system it sounds horrid.

    Try this experiment,

    Go buy a copy of Fishbone's new album "Psychotic Friends Nuttwerk".

    Encode the first song "Shaky Ground" at 128kbps/44000Hz.

    Listen to them both in your car with the volume at a reasonabe level. Slowly increase the volume.

    I guarantee you will hear the difference.

  • The real beauty of Minidiscs is the ability to record near perfect digital audio from a relatively inexpensive and very portable device.

    Nothing on the market challenges this niche yet.

  • You are right. In fact I do buy CDs and enjoy them. However, technology will advance. The speakers will bet better. So will amps, equilizers, lines, medium, and everything else. You just cant say that recordings have evolved, from the original records to vinyl to CDs and now to something else. Just wait 30 years and you WILL hear the difference between the then and now technologies. Nothing will ever be good enough. It's called evolution.

  • Re:A few thoughts (Score:5)

    by adolf ( 21054 ) <flodadolf@gmail.com> on Sunday June 25, 2000 @02:49PM (#977303) Journal
    Moreover, it sounds like a BBE [bbesound.com] unit. The folks at Barcus-Berry Electronics have been making magic boxes which claim to replace missing harmonics for years (if not decades). They're everywhere, these days, including inside Sony Wega TVs, and some JVC car stereos (which explains Kenwood's interest).

    I actually own one of their older units. It has three buttons, a knob, and a power switch. To use it, you send a signal through it, twist the knob until things sound bright and shiney, and back down a bit. Sound non-technical? It is.

    There isn't much to be seen *inside* the box, either. Aside from stuff which is standard fare in just about all audio processing equipment (trim pots, a couple op-amps, power supply, some relays...), there's only two devices which stand out. These are really large-looking devices in a bastardized DIP package, emblazoned with the BBE logo. Just looking at them, they seem to radiate magic.

    But this is all off-topic, and pointless unless I give some subjective evaluation of what the magic does for music.
    So, here goes. The effect on music is that it tends to sound a little livelier. Cymbols tend to have a little more detail, snares tend to jump out a little more. Bass sounds fatter, with more percieved string noise. It seems to have very little effect on a clean electric guitar, but can make a distorted guitar almost overbearing.

    The effects are dynamic, and this can be heard when listening to a slightly noisey FM radio station. The noise will tend to breath (get louder/softer, and/or change in character) along with the dynamics of what's going on. This is most noticable (and annoying, once it is noticed) on spoken word.

    That all said, I use it somewhat frequently. I've got a number of recordings which seem to lack life, and the BBE seems to provide some (even if it's a creative, or even destructive, process instead of restorative). It also does a bang-up job of fixing vocals that are turned to mud by a poor PA system, in a live enviroment, and has some usefulness in the studio.

    I tend not to use it on MP3s that are heavily artifacted, as it just tends to enhance the artifacts more than the missing high-frequency components.

    Given the apparent lack of details about the Kenwood Supreme Drive thing, one can only be lead to assume that they use a similar process to the BBE to "restore" (ie, create) lost harmonic information. If so, it'll be a useful thing. But, it will not be all things to all people, and no signal processor (no matter how many buzzwords you associate it with) will ever be.

    (as an aside: Most FM radio stations process everything until it's just gelatinous muck, lacking absolutely any dynamic content, and with the spectral content smoothed out so that no song sounds and better or worse than any other - instead, they all sound bad. The MBAs who play general manager say it's good thing, because a) it makes their signal as loud as (or louder than) the competitor across town and b) they think the consistantly-mediocre quality will entice listeners to stick around longer than they would if they could hear the true nature of a recording. Frankly, it just makes me flip the dial to NPR or one of the local college stations, as they suffer from none of the hideous all-things-to-all-people processing that the 50,000-Watt buggers do.
    It's unfortunate that people feel the need to have "digital" radio, when standard analog FM could sound almost perfect (and certainly better than MP3) if they'd just stop fucking with it.).

  • Hell, I'm willing to bet that in ten years, people are going to start talking about file formats that produce better than CD quality.

    ***Headline from 2010***

    Scientists at Xerox/Parc this week announced they have created a better than CD Audio format.

    "We are very excited about this, it should revolutionize music as we see it." Said one bubbling scientist. This new format, tentatively called V.I.N.Y.L. produces audio at an astounding rate and volume. "The only problem we see, is the format is about 3 times as large as CD's."

    Ok that was stupid.

  • Anyway, what Kenwood seems to be doing here is our good old friend "interpolation".

    I would guess that it's actually closer in concept to the "detail textures" feature that some of the 3D game engines (e.g. Unreal Tournament) are employing nowadays.

    What you get is a lot of apparent detail, which looks "good" because it effectively masks extreme pixelation (as well as the blurring caused by filtering); however, it has virtually no resemblance to the "real" detail that would have existed had the textures been created/sampled at higher resolution in the first place.

  • I'm afraid the only way to deal with this is to be harsh. It's utter rubbish. The whole point of lossy compression is that it removes elements bof the audio signal that are 'masked' by others, such that their absence is minimally noticeable. Once these elements are gone, they're gone for good.

    Not really. I don't think anyone is getting what they are actually trying to do here - not surprising as the article is dumbed down.

    Say you are ripping a CD track to an MP3 - the MP3 produces something like the original but with errors, mostly in the high frequency range. Now take the original, subtract the MP3 output and you get the error. Now encode the error using a different format. You now have a (still lossy) compressed version of the sound with less error than the MP3.

    Of course, this means less compression and you'd have to weigh it up against using a higher bit rate, but i don't see any reason it won't work.

    If the method is any good, the real question is, what IP covers this method? Are Kenwood going to produce "free" encoders / decoders and 2 years later start charging royalties?

  • Now, I'm reaching the point where I can tell the difference between 160k and 192K on some songs. Add to that what I've learned about encoding (and the fact that it's constantly evolviong) and the questions of what to do arises. Should I re-rip my CD's with LAME? (I did that once to go from 128K to 160K and MusicMatch). Should I Wait? Should I just go on?

    This is just my personal opinion, so take it for what it's worth... I've been using Xing myself (on Linux) for some time now. I was quite satisfied by the quality, and I'm encoding using VBR (at 75-85). I'm not an audiophile, but I'm not one of the people who can't notice a difference between mp3 and CD either. Before Xing, I was using bladeenc (which as I understand is quite poor), and I was suffering when listening to music encoded at 160kbps. I read the comparison at r3mix.net carefully, and I tried LAME right away to see what I was missing. What I found out was that, for me, there wasn't much noticeable difference. I don't have a reason to doubt the results on r3mix.net, but maybe Xing is just good enough for casual use, but not for archival. I encode my CDs for convenience, so archival quality is not important for me. I just want to be able to listen to my music with my headphones and not notice obvious artifacts.

    Of course this has to do with my ears, equipment and the kind of music I listen to. LAME was considerably slower than Xing on my machine (K6-2/450), so I decided against using it. Xing gives me half or better of real time, and LAME was considerably more than real time. I don't know if this is true generally, or maybe LAME is not optimized for K6-2s at all. In any case, I say that if you encode the same music with both encoders and you prefer the sound of one to the other, and you don't have a problem with the speed, go with the one you prefer... Ultimately, you are the only one to decide which sound you find better. Whichever one you choose, I suggest that you use VBR, which uses a different bit rate for each frame depending on the complexity of the music at that point... This way you get a lot of data on complex music, and less data on simple music... Good quality and small file size.

  • Much better than some of the CD sound quality is quality that humans can hear, but without some of the high frequency pitches. 9 times out of 10, sound is distorted by high frequency timbre or static that we can do without.

    So, I say Kenwood didn't have anything better to do, so they invaded the MP3 market with something useless that their consumers can pay for. Your options are most plausible.
  • er, no. My range, up to at least five years ago, allows me to hear ultrasonic burglar detectors.

    Most annoying. I think I'm finally, in my early thirties, losing my ability to hear them. Drove me nuts as a kid...

    --

  • In some ways, compressing audio is similar to generating 3D graphics in real time -- think Quake.

    If you're building a 3D game, you have to live with finite processing power. You can't render anything nearly as complex as the real world, so you approximate. You throw together some geometric meshes, some textures, a lighting transformation or two, and see what you get. The important thing to note is that it doesn't matter whether or not your rendering is accurate -- whether it is a good approximation of real-world physics. It just has to be believable. It just has to look good. You tweak your models and your code based on what your eye tells you, not necessarily to make it more realistic.

    The problem of compressing audio is similar. If you want accurate sound reproduction, you buy the CD. Assuming your speakers are good, it will play back sound that is as perfect as the human ear can detect. However, if you want to compress the audio, you strip out as much information as you can bear to improve the compression. If you can sweeten the sound by pulling some "fundamental harmonics" out of thin air, more power to you.

    The point is, if you want accuracy, compression won't cut it. If you just want a pretty good sound, then go listen to a Kenwood-Supreme-Drive-compressed file and see what you think.

  • Some company put out players that could apparently do similar high frequency tricks with CDs. I only got a partial sucess on my 'consumer electronics trivia' skill roll just now so I'm not sure of the name but it could be the 'legato link' feature on Pioneer (or maybe Yamaha) decks.
  • As a person who spends a lot of time in his car, I can see the value in this. Maybe I am an audiophile, but I can hardly listen to tapes in my car. When I burn a bunch of MP3's that I downloaded off of Napster on to a disc, You can definitely hear the difference. Even at high bitrates. The reason for this is that since you have more background noise, you tend to turn things up louder, and at high volumes is when you really hear the difference between lossy MP3 and CD audio.

    A good analogy would be JPG to an uncompressed image. From a distance they look the same. But as you zoom in it looks like crap.

  • Hmmm...this is odd. There is a near identical post to this one by "Yu Suzuki" in the thread on PDF's. Am I just catching on to something, or is one of the greatest video game designers in history auto-posting this ramble. Can someone clue me in? I mean, Yu Suzuki's games rock, but he sounds a bit like Bob Dole when he posts. Perplexing...
  • Umm... no? The average human ear can only hear up to 16,000 hertz. At that level, the sounds are extremly faint. Even the best hearing is only at 20,000 hertz Two web sites about it: http://www.sfu.ca/sca/Manuals/ZAAPf/r/range.html http://www.ktsw.swt.edu/mc3309/hearing.html
  • > I've used mini-discs for a few months but I
    > got sick of them quickly.

    I've used them for years, and am not sick of
    them yet.

    > Copying is mostly done with analog connections,

    I use digital connection *all* the time. I believe
    digital is used far more than analog, but...

    > so copying a 74 minute MD takes 74 minutes...

    even with digital, 74 minites takes 74 minutes,
    unless you have a unit which copies faster.
    These units are new, relative to MD itself, but
    they're not that expensive - I was suprised.
    A lot of bookshelf systems [minidisc.org] can copy at double speed,
    and there are CD/MD units [minidisc.org] which can copy
    at 5X speed.

    > This is why I switched to the Rio 500. It's got
    > a USB interface, so it only takes a minute or so
    > to copy a CDs worth of music.

    Copy, sure, but how long does it take to encode
    that CD? Remember, an MD unit is actually encoding
    too. Maybe it's become faster than when I last
    tried it. I guess it depends on how fast your CPU
    and CDROM drive is.

    Furthermore, unless I'm much mistaken, right now,
    you need a computer to do that copying. IMO, until
    they remove the computer from the equation, MP3
    fail to be a success in the consumer marker, and
    will remain a gadget for geeks. I'm a geek, and
    if I had the patience to bother with encoding
    CDs through my computer, then I might be tempted
    by an MP3 unit, but I can't be bothered.

    > Waste of time, and doesn't encourage keeping
    > your MDs up to date.

    Fair enough. However, the high cost of the media
    encourages you to keep MP3s on a computer, rather
    than on the media, which makes me less inclined to
    listen to them. I prefer to keep MDs like I would
    a cassette or CD collection. I don't mind MP3 per
    say, but personally I prefer to keep my music on
    the media I'll be playing it on. If I have MP3, I
    can record them to MD quite easily. Of course,
    you often lose quality with MP3, compared to
    ATRAC, but I'm no audiophile, so I probably
    wouldn't notice.

    All a matter of personal preference, I guess.

  • It's the encoder that counts (Score:5)

    by The Optimizer ( 14168 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @02:03PM (#977318)
    I'm not an expert on MP3 encoding, but I am in the midst of learning what I can in the interest of archiving my personal CD collection with the highest practical quality.

    Take a look at this link:

    http://www.r3mix.net/

    Basically the author encodes various songs and test .wav sounds with different encoders/bitrates and analyzes the playback as compared to a 44khz .wav file of the original.

    The results show a range of differences between encoders. The most popular encoders (xing), which I had been using myself in Music Match (latest version replaced it w/ Fraunhofer I think), just whack off all the frequencies above 16K hertz, no matter how high the encoding bitrate. As I understand it, that is just an arbitrary decision made by whoever implemented the encoder. If you encoder goes to 22Khz, is the Kenwood technique really necessary?

    Another very interesting surprise was the finding of a bug in the latest Fraunhofer encoder as used by MusicMatch. Using the "Very High" quality setting (most people don't - it drops encoding to about 0.2x speed) the results were much worse than low bit rates at lower qualty.

    What we have is no real consistancy in MP3 encoding between different sources. Different people use different rippers, encoders, and bitrates. I can download the same song 5 different times from the net, and I'll bet the files won't be identical.


    And therein lies the problem as I see it -- this processing approach that Kenwood is working is on is going to vary in effectivness depeding on the encoding of the MP3 in question.

    One thing I wish was done, was for there to be fields in the MP3 ID3 header for:

    1) Encoder/Software Name

    2) Encoder/Codec version #

    3) Encoder setting (Bitrate + options)

    These would be a great use in determining quality at a glance, as bitrate alone doesn't tell me that much.

    The truth is most people I know use MusicMatch at about 160Kbps on Fast mode. It's a matter of convience - being able to just stick the CD in the drive, and in 10 minutes it's ripped using digital extraction from the CD. I've done it myself on about 1600 songs from my personal collection of 1200 cd's.

    Now, I'm reaching the point where I can tell the difference between 160k and 192K on some songs. Add to that what I've learned about encoding (and the fact that it's constantly evolviong) and the questions of what to do arises. Should I re-rip my CD's with LAME? (I did that once to go from 128K to 160K and MusicMatch). Should I Wait? Should I just go on?


    And finally, I still have this question: What about playback? Is there any difference between playback engines? I've got a RIO 300 w/64 Mb and I use it all the time. If I buy a newer device will it sound better? When I did a JPEG decoder years ago, I put in two options for the IDCT - faster vs higher quality. Not much difference between the two, but some.

  • >And finally, I still have this question: What about playback? Is there any difference between playback engines? I've got a RIO 300 w/64 Mb and I use it all the time.

    I haven't done any real serious testing between playback devices, but I also have a Rio 300 -- and I think it sounds terrible. My 300 makes every MP3 sound like AM radio, even when I plug in good headphones. There is no comparison between the Rio 300 and WinAmp, IMHO.

    Other players I haven't listened closely to. But my Rio is worthless.
  • It all depends on your tastes really. I bought a pack of 10 odd blank MDs for about £15 ($20) quite a while ago (that's about 12 hours of music). I rotate through a new disc every couple of weeks, and usually just leave the thing recording before I go to bed. Oh, and the SPDIF out on my Vortex 2 card keeps the quality up. (that or I just use the HiFi's SPDIF out)

    If your musical tastes really change that quickly, then fair enough, an MP3 player is probably your best bet, but you are then limited to a very small selection until the next time you get to a computer. There's no way you're gonna beat MDs for capacity/price.

    *sigh* I just wish Sony would release an MD data drives again. (so I can record the music directly with my PC, and use it as a giant floppy!) That should kill off those portable MP3 players.
  • ... 5579430 5559834 5703999 5706309 5736943 4942607 5701346 5214742 5227990 4821260 5321729 ...

    MPEG audio layer 3 is patented (see the subject line) and all uses (except for free(beer) distribution of decoders) require a patent license, which has $15,000 minimum annual royalties [mp3licensing.com]. Commercial decoders (including without limitation anything that comes on a commercial GNU/Linux distro such as Red Hat) cost USD0.50 per unit. Encoder licenses cost USD5.00 a piece for the Fraunhofer encoder (patent and object code) or USD2.50 a piece for something like LAME (patent license only).

  • While this might somehow help make those Xing encoded 128kbit mp3s you get off napster sound a bit better, what is it going to do for people who already know what quality sounds like? All the mp3s off my CDs are encoded at 224kbit with GoGo, they are impossible to tell from the original CDs, even on good sound systems. Also, isn't this technology going to end up in one of Kenwood's $650 MP3/CD car decks. The kind of people who would pay $650 for a car deck obviously know what to encode their MP3s with (or they *should*) This all just sounds like hype to me BTW.

  • Is this really necessary? (Score:4)

    by DeepThaw ( 63775 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @12:57PM (#977329)
    They cite the possible uses as car systems and portable audio, but these aren't perfect listening environments. In either situation, background noise is going to effect the sound quality anyway. They don't tell what bitrate they're improving the quality at, either. This may just be a way of trying to fill in the gaps at 128kbps or some other low bitrate, where a higher bitrate MP3 would still sound better.

  • I where they get the missing harmonics... (Score:5)

    by jeroenb ( 125404 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @12:58PM (#977331) Homepage
    ...you probably need to insert the original CD when you want to listen to Supreme Drive MP3s. This also solves the piracy issue.

    Brilliant eh?

  • Same thing, I'm afraid.

    44100kHz means 44,100 samples per second. 16bit
    means each one of those (44,100) samples is 16
    bits long. Classical music may be more revealing
    than (most) metal, and is often better recorded,
    but there's nothing particularly magic about it.
    Actually, if you want good 'revealing' music, find
    a minimally-processed recording of solo piano
    works. Chopin and Beethoven work very well for
    finding faults in audio recording/playback
    equipment.

    I suspect, now that I think about it, that you're
    thinking of the jitter problem that plagued early
    CD players. When you got down to quiet passages
    (which you're more likely to find in, for
    instance, solo piano), then you've only got a few
    effective bits of amplitude; thirteen of those
    bits may be full off, squeezing the useful
    information into the remaining three bits. This
    problem was exacerbated by the fact that most
    early CD players under $1000 actually only used
    14-bit DACs.

    Curiously, the best way around this turned out to
    be to _add_ some digital jitter to the signal.
    There have been other methods and refinements,
    but the bottom line is that it's long since a
    decent player will suffer from this effect.

    Colin
    (who loves his vinyl and turntable just as much
    as his CDs, for the record)

  • I've always thought the expression "CD quality" was pretty stupid. Is that equivalent sound quality to a 1992 Saisho CD walkman or 12,000ukp worth of Linn CD12?

    IMHO anyone who says MP3s are indistinguishable from CDs has never heard a good CD player. (But what do I know? I buy all my music on vinyl!)

    Rob
  • range. Now take the original, subtract the MP3 output and you get the error. Now encode the error using a different format. You now have a (still lossy) compressed version of the sound with less error than the MP3

    It's a nice idea, but...

    With a psycho acoustic lossy format, such as MP3 (Or Ogg Vorbis), taking the diff, and encoding that is pretty pointless. You've gone to all the trouble of working out what part of the signal you can throw away, as part of the psych acoustic compression, and then you just encode it all back in again?

    The _only_ time I can see that being useful is for streaming applications, where, when the data rate drops low, you stop sending the diff, and automatically drop to a lower quality. However, that implies you can get a bandwidth of the order of CD rates. Hardly mass market.

    On the point of encoders, if they've added anything to the MP3 file, then it's either an improved encoder engine (compare LAME with early MP3 encoders), or will require a new pair of encoder / decoder. So much for still being MP3.

  • Bah, the only way to encode mp3s is with Xing's encoder with VBR set at normal/high. Bits used only when needed, what could be better? I personaly CDs that i encoded that do not sound good unless encoded at 320 kbit. The VBR takes gives those parts enough bits but saves on the rest. Xing's audiocatylist offers VBR at any level desired. The only drawback is that file size varies on the complexity of the track.
  • I've always thought the expression "CD quality" was pretty stupid. Is that equivalent sound quality to a 1992 Saisho CD walkman or 12,000ukp worth of Linn CD12?

    The latter one, if you can tell the difference.

    When people say "CD quality", they are reffering to the full 22.05 khz frequency response, and the 96 DB dynamic range. A 'proper' CD player will output that. However, due to problems with the digitisation (aliasing etc), most CD's do not use the full range available, and top out at 20 khz (because it's a _lot_ cheaper). Thus a cheaper CD player may not bother doing it all properly, or use crappy analoge amps for thr final stage, because no one can tell.

    Also, most CD pressing plants do _not_ press CD's to be good, they press them to be cheap. This means that the error rate on the disk is pushed to the maximum, before people complain, because that means faster pressing, which is cheaper.

    Generally, classical CD's are pressed better, because you get people with better ears listening to them, who can tell the difference between partial interpolation, and real sound. [this is one reason the classical CD's are more expensive - they do actually cost (slightly) more to produce].

  • I can think of a context in which this vaguely defined technology may make sense...

    MP3 encoding relies upon a psycho-acoustic model of sound which is employed to decide which components to throw out. This is what Fraunhoffer has a patent on, and is why LAME is legal while BladeEnc is borderline at best.

    Perhaps Kenwood has done something similar the the LAME team and cooked up an alternative psychoacoustic model for hearing which makes for better sounds than Fraunhoffer's.

    Or perhaps it is indeed a load of crap.
  • Adding noise can REDUCE the percieved errors of quantitization. It's called dithering, and is common with images, and works (and is often done) with audio too.

  • Where it 'takes' that information from exactly (Score:4)

    by gtx ( 204552 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @01:00PM (#977355) Homepage
    Where does it 'take' that information from exactly? Having studied harmonics and data compression, and played with mixing both, I can tell you exactly where it comes from. I've narrowed it down to a few possible sources:

    1) int(rnd * 255) + 1
    2) "drop your shorts, bend over... this is going to feel a bit snug, but we have to get those missing harmonics."
    3) in case you didn't pick it up that was a reference to OUT OF THEIR ASS!
    4) (telephone ringing) "hello?" "yes, we were just wondering if you've seen any missing harmonics recently, or if you have any you could donate." "Oh, sure! I've got a box of those in my garage!" "Thanks! We'll send somebody over to pick them up. Please leave them in a box outside of your house."
    5) int random_harmonics(); (sorry if this doesn't look right, it's been 3 years since i've coded c)
    6) maybe they're LYING! do you honestly think that you'd be able to tell the difference?

  • A few thoughts (Score:3)

    by seizer ( 16950 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @01:01PM (#977356) Homepage
    Does this new Supreme Drive work on other sound formats? If not, Ogg/Vorbis is on its way - maybe Kenwood should focus on that instead.

    Is this new tech actually just guessing the new high frequencies based on the sound it "hears"? If so, that's adding to the music in ways that might not actually work. And this has been done already - see Wowthing [wowthing.com], which although being pretty cool, can murder some songs (I'm thinking Bon Jovi, here ;-)

    People who really really really *really* care about enhanced quality are probably going to buy the original CDs anyway, and won't be interested in buying (I'm assuming buying) Kenwood's Drive.

    MP3 is still proprietry. This is not a good state of affairs. Kenwood developing for this is not what I want to see =)

    --Remove SPAM from my address to mail me

  • In answer to Timothy's questions (Score:3)

    by ChadN ( 21033 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @01:03PM (#977357)
    My guess is that the software computes a spectrum (using short-time FT or Wavelets [iastate.edu], or some other method), looks for harmonic patterns in the lower frequencies (which tend to be attenuated less by lossy compression techniques), and thus regenerates high frequency data to fill in the attenuated harmonics. Audiophiles are probably NOT going to like the results (as well as being philosphically opposed; by its nature it trades one type of harmonic distortion for another), and non-audiophiles will be mostly indifferent, IMHO.

    Still, I'd like to listen to the results on some good monitors...

  • Snake oil (Score:4)

    by clarkma ( 32199 ) on Sunday June 25, 2000 @01:04PM (#977358)
    I'm afraid the only way to deal with this is to be harsh. It's utter rubbish. The whole point of lossy compression is that it removes elements bof the audio signal that are 'masked' by others, such that their absence is minimally noticeable. Once these elements are gone, they're gone for good.

    Apart from the fact that the Excite article is embarassingly technically inaccurate, e.g. "Supreme Drive takes the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental'", it's obviously just a rehashed press release.

    All they can do is add distortion - now that distorion may in fact have a 'natural' or pleasing sound to it, just ask anyone who prefers valve (vacuum tube in the US) hi-fi amplifiers, by virtue of being mostly even order, but it's distortion none the less.

    Ugh, I hate technobabble, especially of the purposefully misleading kind. Anyone who understands the technology and claims this is meaningful is media whoring.

    Told you it would be harsh.

  • Re:Is this really necessary? (Score:4)

    by Cuthalion ( 65550 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @12:34AM (#977364) Homepage
    I guarantee you will hear the difference.

    You seem very sure, and I would have felt similarly until this last week.. One of the users of our mp3 player software sent us some mail saying "Hey, I found you can make a 4 MB mp3 into a 240K uncompressed audio file, if you reduce it to 8khz 1 bit audio! Check it out, this sounds pretty good!" with a file attached.

    Just goes to show.
  • > Hell, I'm willing to bet that in ten years,
    > people are going to start talking about file
    > formats that produce better than CD quality.

    Sure, just sample 22 bits at 96kHz and compress with a psychoacoustical lossy codec. For any given bitrate a decent lossy codec will have higher apparent quality than a 'lossless' encoding. The term 'lossless' is actually a bit of a misnomer since plenty of information is lost in the analog to digital conversion.

    'Lossless' compression is really just lossy compression with a particularly stupid method of determining which bits to discard.

    BTW, video compression is where it's at :)

    Ryan
  • I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee for a good one, especially a hardware one that would go quickly. I'm building a computer for my car, it'll play MP3s, have a GPS system, possible one or two systems that I'm prototyping for work, and mostly, to see what I can do with it.

    My two home machines are a K6-3 (Win2K) and K6-2 (RedHat Linux), but at work I use an Athlon 700. I'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee for a decent encoder, with hardware being preferable. I was hoping to rip my CDs and my girlfriend's CDs so that we can listen to them in the car on road trips without flipping through CDs. Right now, I buy CDs that I was for driving, but the ones I like seems to acquire scratches relatively commonly, only busting out the actual CD when I ride with a friend or visit my folks would be a nice improvement.

    If anyone can help me out here, I'd appreciate it.

    Alex
  • Now if I could only figure out how to dub my beta movies onto miniDisc. :)

    MiniDisc is far from dead, it might not be popular for pre-recorded stuff (at least in the US), but as a format for putting music onto its great. For $2 I get a disc holding 74min of audio, how much does 60MB of flash cost for a Diamond Rio? The players aren't much larger than the discs themselves and there are many to choose from from a whole bunch of manufacturers. I wouldn't put MD in the same boat as Beta.

  • I think the idea is that the technology will work with EXISTING MP3s (as a playback enhancement)...

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