QuestionQUESTION: Just wanted to let you know cleaning my old records with the soap and lukewarm water worked just fine.My next question I want to hook up my laptop to my stereo it has the standard 1/8 inch stereo jack headphones use on the PC so I can do 1 of 2 things,buy the cable that has the pair of phono plugs at one end and the 1/8 plug on the other or since I have some good cables lying around is it Ok to buy an adapter that radio shack sells for about $5 that is a Y connector that allows me to plug the RCAs from my stereo cable into a 1/8 plug?Also do you feel there is a difference in sound in interconnects and speaker cables ? I have seen even the phono plug to 1/8 cables some cost $100.The interconnects I am using are Monster Home Theater 400,s but I got them steeply discounted and they are well built and do sound better than the out of box cables that came with my DVD player but do cables costing ridicously high prices sound significantly better even on a higher end system?
ANSWER: The 3.5mm PC output is a low impedance output designed to power headphones via an internal low power speaker amplifier. The inputs of a pre-amp or receiver are high impedance, therefore even though you can transfer sound from you PC to your stereo it will be mismatched. That means volume, equalization and some for of distortion will exist.
The correct way of doing it is with an internal or external sound card furnished with 1/4" or RCA jacks. The DAC in most PC is on the low end side. Even at best your sound will not achieve an audiophile level diectly from the 3.5mm jacks.
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QUESTION: I am a bit unclear.I thought the sound card is installed internally.plus there is a volume comtrol for the output.I have a laptop I know the old desktop I had used line level RCA outputs also will you get audiophile quality anyway from internet stations or streams from FM stations? I am using it for those applications not listening to CDs or MP3s.Are there differences sonically from cheap to expensive cables?
AnswerMost internal sound cards have their limitations. There are few PC's made 'off the shelf' that can deliver audiophile sound. Internet stations generally stream at a low bitrate. If the stations are up front about the level of sound quality then they would specify the codec and the bitrate that they are streaming. My advice to you is to see if those specs are available. Audiophile can only be lossless files that are very large. Lossless are not the highest qualty. 24bit 192khz will surpass vinyl with the best transcription equipment. That leve of audio reproduction is beyond audiophie, it is called professional performance reproduction. Most newer DVD movies carry that codec. There are some FM stations that tout being high definition. Because of the limitations enforced by the FCC, no stations have enough bandwidth to give you true audiophile quality even though the sound is generally warmer than standard digital.
Think of the signal from a station to your speakers as a flow of water. If the pipe required to get the water flowing at a certain rate is 2" wherever the pipe becomes smaller you will reduce the speed of the water flow. You can look at the signal in the same way. Every part of the chain is important. Generally cables are overrated and expensive cables won't limit as much as a sound card, only specified to deliver a given band width while converting a digital signal to analog. That is the purpose of a DAC. High quality DACs are available as add on hardware and generally connected to your USB port. The information is transferred from the PC to the external sound card and then processed in the analog domain to meet the requirements of analog equipment. PC's are usually not designed to speak to analog equipment. If what I am say seem complex I assure you it isn't half of the picture.
CD's and mp3's are played by radio stations. All internet station store their audio data in an mp3 format, so in fact you are listening to mp3's & CD's processed through every stage of audio digital and analog from the station to your speakers.
