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How to: Get a studio-grade music experience from your desktop or laptop

Love your music? Upgrading two components in your system could bring crisp, crackling audio to your listening experience. We show you how.

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Seeking a studio-quality music experience? All you need is to upgrade a few components and boom--crystal sound.
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So you’re addicted to good music. Over all these years, you’ve honed and lovingly built your collection of Queen, Radiohead, Alan Parsons, Tiesto and Dave Weckl, most likely as high-quality MP3s that wound up occupying tens of GBs on your hard disks over the years. But no matter--when it comes to the best sound, no sacrifice is too great.

We’re going to break it to you: there are things you’ll read about here that will elevate--wholly and completely--your music listening experience like you never thought possible. It involves upgrading two components in your music listening ecosystem--your headphones and your sound card. We’ll get into the specifics shortly, but know that selecting capable, high-quality components here will open an unprecedented amount of resolution and clarity in your playlists that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.

It starts--as with so many other upgrade decisions--with how much you want to shell out. What you buy will depend on whether your appetite for good music is fed by a chocolate ice cream level budget or an all-out croqembouche-level experience: you can go simple, or knob-to-11 elaborate. Of course, this has a direct bearing on what you should be willing to pay: expect to spend anywhere from Rs 6,000 at the entry level to Rs 12,000 for a good, high-definition audio setup, all the way to several tens of thousands for an enthusiast-grade experience. Of course, there is the rarified realm of ultra-expensive personal audio gear that can easily set you back by several lacs. We’re not getting there though--we’ll focus on a more modest yet high fidelity setup that will give you CD-quality to Studio-quality sound from your desktop or computer.

The audio landscape

First, a quick primer on what it takes to generate great sound: three simple components really (see illustation above).

  1. The source: it starts with the songs themselves. You’ll likely have all of your music on MP3. But know that not all MP3s are created equal--there’s a term called ‘bitrate’ that defines the resolution at which songs are encoded. The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality. Most generic music MP3s are recorded at 128Kbps, but this quality level does reveal flaws when heard through a refined sound system. Songs encoded at 160Kbps is a bare minimum for good quality, but 192Kbps and the highest 320Kbps are obviously preferred. However the file sizes get larger at higher bitrates: a 128Kbps weighs in at about 4.6MB while the same song at 320Kbps would by about 11.5MB. If storage is not an issue for you, build your music collection between the 160Kbps to 320Kbps bitrate where possible.

    If you listen exclusively to CDs, even better--CD audio is, by default, higher quality than any MP3. Keen on going even higher? Use songs based on the FLAC format--a lossless file compression standard that is capable of delivering the highest level of audio quality: all the way up to studio-grade.

    For playing back these formats there are several audio applications--from Apple’s iTunes to VLC Media Player to MediaMonkey (my personal favorite).

  2. The conversion and amplification: All of our music today is in some digital format or the other. Be it MP3, FLAC or CD audio, these are all digital encodings of the original performance. To hear them, they need to be converted to analog format--the format that speakers and headphones recognize to reproduce as sound you actually hear. Like any chain, this conversion and amplification comprises a link that needs to be strengthened. The best systems convert the digital files to analog and amplify this signal as faithfully as possible, without introducing any noise or distortion into the pipeline.

    On your desktop computer or laptop, this job is handled by your system’s sound card. The only problem is that with almost every onboard sound card these days, both the digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) and the amplification (for your headphones) are average quality at best. More often than not, they are mediocre. So even if you have high quality audio files, the signal gets tainted along the way and results in a humdrum listening experience. You’ll therefore need bypass your computer’s onboard sound system and instead use an external unit that is capable of higher quality digital audio decoding and amplification. We’ll get to that bit shortly.

  3. The speakers: To finally be able to hear audio, you’ll need a pair of speakers that is able to reproduce the audio signal as faithfully as possible. With personal audio, your ‘speaker’ is generally the earphone bud that came with your phone or MP3 player. This is probably the worst kind of speaker you could use. There is a huge array of headphone options out there to choose from, and almost every brand worth its salt has enthusiast- and professional-grade products that can do justice to your music: from portable to travel to studio models. The bottom line: chuck the bundled earbuds and invest in a good pair of headphones.

The gear

With the theory out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks--the actual hardware. As mentioned earlier, the two components in your audio setup that need to be specifically considered for a good experience are the sound card and the headphones. Working within the Rs 6,000 to Rs 13,000 price range, there are hundreds of product combinations to potentially choose from. I’ve boiled them down to two sets of DAC/Amplifier + headphone pairings.

Creative E1 + Sennheiser HD 180: The Creative E1 is a tiny headphone amplifier that does a much better job of decoding and amplifying audio compared to your computer’s own onboard sound system. This 25 gm package contains an in-built rechargeable battery (rated to go for 25 hours per charge) that can power even large headphones, and is able to deliver CD-quality audio. It also has a low signal-to-noise (SNR) that makes for a clean listening experience with virtually imperceptible background noise and hiss. The Sennheiser HD 180 is a classic set of over-the-ear headphones that deliver great bang for the buck and much better sound compared to stock earphones. Together, these two should cost under Rs 5,800 and will significantly boost your personal audio experience.

Fiio E07K + Audio Technica ATH-M40X: If you’re serious about your audio and really want big, crystal sound, here’s a pairing that delivers. The Fiio E07K is an unassuming little USB DAC/headphone amplifier. It is capable of decoding studio-quality (96KHz/24-bit) audio, has very low distortion (0.005%), and can power a pair of headphones using its in-built rechargeable battery. Paired with the venerable Audio Technica ATH-M40X, the union is magical. Simply plug in the E07K into your laptop/desktop, select it as the default audio playback device from your system settings, and it’s like you’re listening to your music for the first time.

You’ll hear a newfound energy and definition that you never knew existed: a singer faintly inhaling before pitching, to the layered sound of a snare drum or the complexity of a pipe organ. The difference is the sonic equivalent of the jump from olden-day cablewallah TV to today’s Ultra HD television. It is that stark; like a blanket that always muffled your ears is suddenly lifted.

We’re keen to hear your experience with your upgraded sound system. Write in to us, or reach us on Twitter @dna.

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