Windware CEO blog

To get the best out of audio experience, here are a few tips to do so. This is based on Windows as I connect my speaker on Windows desktop machine. Some steps can be applied on Mac as well.

The source

First, there is the CD. It’s probably better to import (rip) the CD onto computers, as if you are playing from a CD, then some noise of the disc rotation can be unhelpful. To import files, it is always better to rip using lossless audio format as it only takes some more space but hard disks are getting bigger and bigger and it’s to the point that it’s hard to fill those disks.

For formats, FLAC is an open format that is popular and another is ALAC (Apple Lossless) which is created by Apple and works very smooth against iTunes, iPods and iAnything. So, if you use Apple products around or iTunes to play back music, it’s probably a good bet to rip using ALAC which can be done easily using iTunes itself. Lossless formats have no quality setting as lossless means lossless that signals should be identical to that of the original, only compressed as in ZIP files, when decompressed, it should be back without losing any information.

The OS

Windows has sound configuration in the control panel and it must be tweaked to get the best out of it. (Excuse the Japanese version of Windows…) In the sound configuration, choose the speaker that you are using and disable the rest (also on the recording tab if you don’t use them) by right clicking and uncheck the box that says, play sound on Windows startup on ‘Sound’ tab. After choosing the right device, you might want to configure it from the left lower button to choose ‘full range’ if your speakers are supposed to provide full range audio. Then hit ‘Property’ and go to the ‘Level’ tab and make sure all volumes are set at 100% and go to ‘Sound Clarity’? tab and make sure to check the disable button for any enhancements as they just simply degrade the quality. And onto the ‘Advanced’? tab and choose the audio format of the source of your audio. If you just ripped audio out from a regular CD, then it is typically at 16bit 44100 Hz and do not try to ramp the setting up just because it looks better with bigger numbers and make sure both of the exclusive settings are checked.

The player

Player has a lot to do with the quality of the sound but people’s preference vary much but I’ve listed the famous ones in a past post but I’m going to explain for iTunes and Foobar2000.

iTunes

Open the ‘QuickTime’ preference in the control panel as this also controls the iTunes output. And pick ‘Windows Audio Session’ from list of available outputs. Now, open iTunes and go to ‘View’ and ‘Equalizer’ setting and make sure it is disabled and turn the volume all the way to maximum on the upper part of the interface. You should adjust the volume on the speaker or the external sound unit if it has one. Now it is set to play the audio straight from the lossless file out to the speaker with least loss of information.

Foobar2000

This needs a little more tweak since there are more options to choose from. It can either do ASIO or WASAPI mode, of which the former needs a separate download if your sound device already does not support ASIO output. Both of them needs support plugin for Foobar2000 as well. (ASIO, WASAPI and ALAC support if you encoded in Apple Lossless format. FLAC is supported by default.)

ASIO

Once the plugin is installed, you should be able to find the output listed as ASIO in the Foobar2000′s preference at the output device section. This is a rough implementation of the ASIO that works on any sound output device and is not too user friendly, so please consider searching for how to set it up properly. You should need to assign each channel’s output to each of ASIO’s channel in the setting and if configured properly, it should show a little ASIO icon at the taskbar tray when playing.

WASAPI

This is much easier to set up as choosing the WASAPI as the output device on the Foobar’s output device preference will just make it work.

In my opinion ASIO makes better sound as well as automatic sample rate conversion in case you have audio with higher quality than a CD, such as DVD Audio makes it a better choice, albeit the complicated setup and persistent system tray icon that does not go away. In either case, you should try all possible sound setups, even others mentioned in my old post to figure out what is best for you. But it also comes down to interface ease of use than just pure sound quality and I kind of feel that these two apps provide the best interface while maintaining high audio quality.

Storage

I think that content of this section is exclusive to this site as I have never come across this being talked about elsewhere but usually people store audio files on a hard disk and it is probably better to store them on SSD (but 256GB SSD are quite expensive still these days let alone 512GB) as there will be no spinning up and down and have no noise related to file operations.

And there exists a method to play files out of memory called ‘memory playback’ sometimes seen on players on Mac which caches the content of the audio files in the memory before the file starts playing, thus letting go of the disk while playing and it actually does sound better at the cost of slight delay when starting to play the file.

And this was sort of coincidence but since I didn’t want to lose my audio file collections, I stored my files over to Amazon S3 file storage service as a backup and just figured I’d just play the files directly from there, and wow, audio definitely sounds better than playing directly off local drives, even than from SSD. I think this probably works in the same way as memory playback as the files being played are not accessed from local drives but from memory as audio files are cached from network access and then played from there. It even eliminates the machine playing from having any media storage attached as well.

To do that, you need to sign up for S3 with a credit card and get access to it (please search for the methods and for the record, it costs $0.10 / GB of storage (with reduced redundancy option on) but it’s a great way to back files up.) and you need to be able to mount the files as a network drive under Windows and you can try WebDrive or TntDrive for that (both have demo version), but I prefer the former as it is much more polished, with little extra price tag than the latter. (On Mac, only ExpanDrive can stream without downloading the entire files off S3 to begin playing. Rest of the solutions require entire files to be downloaded first, which has no use for this.) Once you mount the drive, you can simply add files to iTunes or Foobar or anything and start playing and since it can start playing with little cache to start with and continuously fetches the rest while playing, the delay is quite minimal while boosting the audio quality on any audio player. But do note, if you want to do this, you need to have a bandwidth to stream lossless files stably (possibly just around 1mbit/s) and if you are using Amazon S3, the download will be metered and charged for your usage which could be as big as $50 a month if you keep streaming off lossless music everyday but to boost up the quality further, I’d say it’s a doable deal.

And do note that some countries have questionable rules regarding streaming your own files of a music file to your own computer that it might not be allowed to do so but that depends where you belong to.

Hardware

As for the sound output device, it is advisable to get an external sound unit as it bypasses the signal noises within computer casing compared to having a sound card installed inside a computer. Fortunately, these days, there are many USB sound units to choose from, from entry level to totally expensive professional classes.

You should also consider lowering the noise level of the computer itself by creating a minimal system that is about Mini-ITX class and just leave out a separate GPU out altogether to reduce the amount of fans used on the computer. Nowadays when SSD has become mainstream, it is possible to create computers that makes zero noise with no fan, no spinning at all and it should make a really comfort experience with no external noise to care about.

And it is also said to make sense to use a high quality power supply to reduce noise on the circuit and it is probably a good idea to get one of the ‘80 PLUS‘ certified power supply unit. It is good for heat as it transfers the power more efficiently to the computer without releasing them as heat inside which also means the fan on the unit can stay quiet at the same time lowering the electricty usage for the computer.

Speaker

This is quite out of the focus of this article as there are too many to choose from and I have not much experience except just a handful of speakers I have used in the past. So, you need to go out and find the best for you, there is no ultimate best as everyone’s preference differs as everyone likes different taste of food.

Misc

No one seem to mention this on audio related sites but do clean your ears often :) Doing so may make you feel like you upgraded your sound card…