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[nyc-ink]

I upgraded last month from a P3-850 to a P4-1.6, frankly I've been very impressed with the improvement in audio quality, and was wondering if anyone else had the same expierence.  Sound with the P4 seems to me to be much "brighter" with great defination, and greater stero seperation too.
Brian

[thjoyofcooking]

i would bet that it has more to do with the motherboard's sound card than the actual processor, assuming you had to get a different motherboard.  as far as my limited knowledge goes, i would think the CPU would have very little to do with the audio quality or sound.

[nyc-ink]

New mobo, but same sound card, soundblaster live value.  Intel's page claims P4 does a better job at audio playback.  I'm just wondering if other's can bare this out.
Brian

[JimH]

It's hard to imagine how the CPU could affect sound, provided the old one was fast enough to decode without breaks.

[KingSparta]

I remember hearing this about the 233Mhz Intel chip with MMX

----------------------------------------

The Intel® Pentium® 4 processor is designed to give you superior performance for digital music, 3D gaming, digital imaging and video, and more. In addition, the Pentium 4 processor provides you with enough power to handle innovations on the horizon such as DVD authoring and MPEG4 video.

[Severian]

Yeah: I'd be more interested in hearing "The Intel Pentium 4 can rip an entire CD to LAME VBR in less time than it takes for your CD tray to travel in and out of the drive."

[sub-24]

It must be true P4 is so goood.

It used to take me 60 mins or so to listen to an entire CD.

Now with a P4 i can listen to the whole CD in 10mins.

[DocLotus]

Hi Brian;

It depends on several things.  For example…

I went from a 133MHz P I (no P II or P III) to a 2.2 GHz P4 with the same sound card (a SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum) and there was no difference in sound quality as the Audigy is carrying all the sound channels & not the motherboard.  The sound was great on both machines.

I also tried the built-in 4 channel Creative sound chip on the new motherboard (a Gigabyte GA-8IRXP).  It was ok, but not as good as the Audigy card.  Also the Audigy has built-in Dolby 5.1 surround sound plus a lot of other neat features such as a remote control.

If you replaced the motherboard & were using a sound chip on both your old & new motherboards, then yes, the sound should be better on the new motherboard as there have been a lot of improvements in sound chips over the years.  Again this is more dependent on the sound chip & not the processor.

When Intel talks about big improvements in multimedia in the P4, I think the big improvement they refer to are more in the video then in the audio as Creative & others has had the sound end of the equation resolved for some time now.

Have Fun!!

[TURBO]

Doc. You are right but when the cpu talks faster to the video and other channels, the time to decode music algorithms are improved, due to the fact that the system is taking less time to do the calculations. Besides that, the registers are released faster leaving the highways of sound open for new waves to be decoded. All this happening at the speed of the processor and ide controller.

Let the sound waves run the highways of your brain as they were light pulses, only then, you are going to discover the colors of music.

[nyc-ink]

That last line sounds something from a Dylan tune!
Brian

[Severian]

Doc,

What's your feeling on that Audigy Platinum? Does it accelerate LAME encoding speed, or just with their bundled encoder. If the latter, can you call that encoder as an external from inside MJ? And how's that remote? Can you control MJ with it?

Enquiring minds want to know...

Thanks,
Sev

[RemyJ]

I've got the Audigy Platinum Ex.

The MP3 encoder is fast but there are no "quality" controls (like LAME's -q option) other than bitrate and it's not accelerated by the Creative hardware itself.  It spins my 1.8Ghz CPU at 100% while encoding and has a speed about LAME's with a -q7 (which makes me wonder)

I'd also suspect the DAExtractor.  It has an option for "error correction" but no explanation of exactly what that means other than "Ensures CD tracks can be ripped reliably".  It's way too fast to be reading sectors multiple times and comparing them.

I don't trust either.

As for the remote...No MJ support.  You can control the volume directly and you can send MJ preset keyboard commands (PgUp/PgDown, Left, Right, etc) but I can't find any way to actually control the player.

Still, the sound playback is great and it has lots of IO including both optical and coax SPDIF in/out jacks.  All the other crap bundled with it is just that.

Remy

[DocLotus]

Hi Sev;

Looks like Remy may of answered you questions.  Thanks Remy.

I'm hoping for the Audigy RM-900 remote control support on MJ in the future.  Am also hoping for the ATI Remote Wonder support for MJ in the future.

The Audigy Platinum in general is a wonderful sound card (my 4th Creative SoundBlaster).  Noise free with great output.

The Live Drive that goes into a 5 3/4" drive bay is great.  It has among, other things, inputs & outputs for...
Analog Line with volume control, SPDF Digital, Midi, SB1394 Fire wire, Inferred sensor (for the remote) & 2 microphone inputs, both with volume control.  There is also Fiber optic input & output referred to as “Optical”.

What all this means is you will be set up for digital camera input (both still & video), Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound, & almost any analog or digital  input or output device you can think of.

Combining the Audigy Platinum with the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon DV8500 or 7500 makes for an outstanding audio / video hardware combination.  Both products are at the  top of the heap in current technology.  I’ve had 7 TV tuner cards in my computers over the years & can say the current line of ATI All-In-Wonder video cards works as advertised.  After all the problems I had with other cards, I can honestly say that I love the ATI cards for doing the job (& that’s not easy in a computer).

Have fun!

[Severian]

Good info, gentlemen, thanks. It was a question I'd been meaning to ask for a while. So, ultimately, the conclusion that I seem to be hearing from both of you is A) Great card, worth the $, but B) their claim to 9x or whatever MP3 encoding acceleration is basically some kind of marketing hallucination, is that right?

[DocLotus]

Hi again Sev;

Encoding speed is based on 3 or more things...

A: Your processor speed.  Example I went from a 133 MHz P1 to a 2.2 GHz P4 with no other changes.  Ripping speed went from 0.7 to better then 8.7.

B: The ripping format... MP3, WMA, ORG Vobis, etc.  Some rip much faster then others.  There can be a 2  or 3 to 1 difference in ripping speeds on the same machine with different formats.   I use WMA at 96 KBS (very fast, stable, accurate, & fairly small files).  If you use higher bit rates with any format it will take longer as it is producing a much larger file on your hard drive.

C: Available memory can also have a small effect on ripping speed.  If you are always low on memory, then the Windows Swap file will come into play during ripping.  This can drastically slow things down as the Swap file is very slow compared to RAM memory..

Have fun!!

[RemyJ]

and...

D:  The device you're extracting from.  Many el-cheapo drives advertize a read rate that's not the same for digital audio extraction as it is for data.  I've seen specs of drives that say max 48X read but in fine print say max 24X DAE.  

E:  The extraction mode.  In MJ's Digital Large Buffer mode, the extractor supplies data to the encoder faster than it can process even on my 1.8Ghz XEON.  The result is a pegged CPU. In MJ's Digital Secure mode, extraction is slower than the encoder and usually results in about a 75% average CPU load.  

If you decide to do your own comaprisons between formats, make sure you separate the testing of extraction and encoding.  Rip to WAV to text extraction speed in various modes, then use conversion to encode to various formats.

Remy