Quote: Originally Posted by Slaughterhouse
wow...well that was fun reading 5 pages of incoherrent babble at 2 a.m.
WHich brings me to my question. I guess you could call me a audiophile freak.
I'm going into the carputer wave w/o a h/u and am wondering if i'll be able
to tell the difference in sound quality. Maybe not even me as much as a fellow "expert" with excellent ears. I'm goign to spend a good chunk of money on a sound card, maybe an Audigy2, but i just don't want to be dissapointed if i get it all installed and find the quality to be worse than my previous h/u, which is quite good btw. Should i be worried? and yes i read the post.
I have a high end install that runs an alpine multi source head unit right along side my pc, & I can actually a/b sample the same tracks side by side,& really the best answer is that the difference is so subtle that you will have no real problem being happy with pc audio. I listen to mp3s for hours on end & it is very enjoyable, although once in a while when I hear a certain track I'll imediately be reminded of the difference. if you played a track that i am familiar with I can usually be able to tell if it is an mp3 or a cd/dvd on my system, but the difference is so slight that i'd have a harder time telling most of times if it was material that i wasn't so familiar with.
while i do believe that the sound quality is superior with the alpine over the pc, I will also admit that's it's not by much a lot of the times & a lot of less critical listeners can't even discern any difference at all, or at least can't tell much difference & the universal answer from the masses is that they both sound awsome....
the pc runs through my alpine processor, from a soundblaster extigy, but i have run systems straight from the pc with similar results,but you WILL need at least a line driver(s) to feed your amps a clean strong input & this of course assumes that everything else that would plauge even a head unit install is in check, IE; no funky ground loops or rfi interference, etc...& everything else that would affect a conventional install still comes into play; speaker placement & effective frequeincy coverage... if your system sounds great to you before a pc transplant I'm sure it will still sound great to you after...
I just recently realized that there are a few compression techniques that are totally lossless in the transfer to the pc, unlike common mp3's & I am anxious to sample this as soon as I finish a few mods under progress....