A Ripping Good Time

An adventure into audio featuring:

• Sound! (an Asus Xonar DSX)
• Action! (CD ripping)
• Thrills! (swapping an op-amp with an OPA2111KP)
• Wildlife! (Media Monkey)
• And a cast of thousands! (my music collection)

When opportunity knocks, you are obliged to take it up on its offer, no matter how dangerous it may be. That’s living life on the bleeding edge of technology and it isn’t for everyone. But for the daring there are rewards to be had, oh yes.

So when the onboard audio of my new motherboard didn’t impress me with its decidedly unmellifluous tones, it left me looking for a new conduit to pump my eight thousand odd music tracks through. It had to have good clarity and not cost over a hundred bucks.

Unlike years past, there aren’t many consumer choices out there. It used to be competitive but the market dried up and shriveled until you had three: Realtek built into the motherboard and Creative Labs or Asus if you go the stand alone route. Oh there are some no name boards out there but the less said the better.

I’ve used them all over the years and learned the lesson that anything is better than Realtek. Oh they’ve made strides thanks to HD Audio becoming a standard, but even Via’s soundcards were better sounding back in the day. With the death of PCI, the hunting grounds got even smaller.

It was that death that cost me dear in the form of losing my Xonar D1. Having entertained me countless hours it still had to be put down. A sad affair to be sure as is so much in the product cycle of life.

A hunt was in order to find the most impressive bang for the buck out there, but I couldn’t afford bearers or a proper safari. I’d have to wade into the jungle by myself to find that elusive sound I desired.

The Hunt

Knowledge is power they say, though I sometimes think it only keeps you from looking like an absolute fool. To find your prey, you must know something about it. A lot of somethings, come to think of it. It has to do with tracks, that much I’ve figured out.

Fortunately for me, I did know one thing: I’d be getting another Asus card based on the C-Media 8788 chip. While they may rebrand the chip to names like AV66, AV100, & AV200, the heart is the same providing 192Khz sound at 24bit quality which is as good as it gets. Sure, other sound chips have the same raw specifications, yet their quality of sound is not as good. For instance, Creative puts out decent hardware crippled by terrible drivers and I wouldn’t be enduring that again.

But which Xonar would I pursue? The DGX was the cheapest, but didn’t have the specs of the others coming in at 96Khz. Besides, the focus on headphone amplification meant nothing to me. Best left to others to bag.

I set my sights on the DX since it was the PCI-E equivalent of the D1. Pricey, but a reliable bet. However, I found myself considering a card in-between the two called the DSX. Slightly less range than the DX at 107dB out and 100dB in, but since it wouldn’t be used for professional purposes not a big deal.

Why the interest in the cheaper card? It has a feature unique to consumer priced soundcards. Instead of soldering the op-amp (operational amplifier) on the board it is in a socket and can be swapped out for something different. Since the op-amp controls the sound output it can make a huge difference in what you hear.

The difference in price between the DX and DSX could be filled with op-amps to experiment with. Forget the hunter being interested, now the mad scientist reared his unkempt head with a demented gleam in his eyes.

After much researching of the habits of various op-amps, the decision was made to stalk down the guaranteed to improve your life LM4562NA and finicky OPA2111KP. Combined with the DSX there was the promise of a high fidelity trophy…

Testing Methods

Since sound is subjective due to individuals having different hearing ranges there was no hooking up of loopbacks or running things through an oscilloscope. If you are the type who believes that is the only way to prove sound quality, I ask you to have your hearing checked with the ranges you plan to test so scientifically. I’d be curious to see if your actual hearing lined up with your experiences when compared to graphs of output.

All testing has been done with Boston Acoustics BA7800 speakers which are more than good enough to bring out the best in music. Headphone testing is limited to a Sennheiser PX200 set through the relay jack in the speakers since the swappable op-amp only effects the rear stereo jack and not the front panel hookup. I’ve had both nearly ten years now so consider them well burned in.

With more storage space on the new PC, I began ripping CD’s to FLAC to replace the MP3 rips I’d been using. FLAC has the benefit of being a lossless compression format, so no audio quality is lost converting tracks to files. It does take up four to six times as much room though.

At the moment, I’m using Media Monkey 4.x to do the ripping and it’s doing a good job. Ripped quality is checked against an online database which sounds the alarm when something has gone precisely right. It isn’t perfect and an improved engine is coming in a revision, but other apps for precise ripping (Exact Audio Copy and CDex) are having the same exact problems with certain tracks.

I have a soft cloth and plastic cleaner on hand to clean CD’s that look suspect or fail to rip multiple tracks. Holding the disc at an angle to increase reflectance helps when inspecting for dirt, fingerprints, or smears. Not a lot can be done about scratches but I haven’t run into any show stoppers even with my oldest CD’s.

As fortune would have it, the package arrived unexpectedly early with the new op-amps while been ripping the CD collection. That gave me a rare opportunity to listen to the same music within an hour to 90 minutes on the different op-amps. Multiple formats at different bitrates were used to get a full picture and replicate the random shuffle normally listened to.

Tracks used include:

• Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution – AC/DC (VBR MP3)
• Sweet Jane – Cowboy Junkies (M4A)
• Runners High – The Pillows (FLAC)
• Destroyer – The Kinks (24bit/96KHz FLAC)
• Blade Runner End Titles – Vangelis (FLAC)
• Mars – Holtz (24bit/96KHz FLAC)
• End of Line – Daft Punk (M4A)
• Ticket to Ride – The Beatles (320 Insane MP3)
• Black Magic Woman – Santana (FLAC)
• and many more from jazz, electronica, classical, and rock

Media Monkey 4.0.7.1511 was used for playback using the WASAPI option in the output plug-ins. This enables bit perfect audio at the cost of exclusive use so no other sounds will play from other applications. Hey, if you are wanting to listen to music at high quality you don’t want other things interrupting it anyway. Windows Control Panel was used to verify I had the sound output set at 24bit/192KHz. I leave it there for watching Blu-rays and have had no issues.

Realtek ALC892

My impressions from my article on building the new PC can be found here. In short, the onboard audio was better than previous incarnations, but bass heavy and dull sounding after coming from the Xonar D1. Music is dead and lifeless.

Xonar DSX Stock

The DSX features a Texas Instruments NE5532P in its op-amp socket. Supposedly a neutral design, it has good range and blew the ALC892 out of the water, into orbit, and then out of the solar system. Highs were no longer muddy, but clear (if a tad bright) and the mids nicely separated. Bass was improved as far as detail goes, however it was bunched together to my ears and far too punchy which caused it to bleed over the lower mids.

Xonar DSX with OPA2111KP

The Texas Instruments Burr-Brown OPA2111 is a highly regarded op-amp in the music industry and amongst enthusiasts. It's a favorite for headphones or monitors with a sound described as warm. That’s a way of saying it isn’t perfectly neutral and sounds a bit like old stereo HiFi gear.

Swapping the op-amps was easier than I’d been led to believe, but then again I have the tools for straightening pins since I’m a scale model builder. People who consider these parts tiny don’t know tiny. It ended up a little crooked but firmly socketed.

Costing north of $17.00, this isn’t a cheap upgrade compared to the LM4562 being just above $3.00 so it got tried out first.

And last.

The difference was immediate when I started playing music. The bass was tight, accurate, and controlled. Highs were even clearer with finer detail and the separation I’d mentioned about the mids with the stock op-amp. Speaking of mids, they are superb and every click or roll of the tongue could be heard in vocals. Even comedy albums of standup material sounded natural and real.

Quieter and more detailed across the entire spectrum without favoritism was the first impression the OPA2111 made. That impression stayed intact after all the tracks I threw at it.

It is a trope in writing about audio upgrades that you start hearing things you’d never heard before and consequently people like to argue that it is placebo effect. It isn’t when the music you’ve listened to over and over on the same equipment for years suddenly reveals instruments out of nowhere. A wider soundstage is the obvious description of the effect, but this goes beyond that.

I was multitasking when a passage in “Vigil” by Jack Wall yanked me out of my mucking about with graphics editing. That’s a track I’ve played to death the last few years and can run it at will in my head. Yet here was an entire instrument I’d never heard delicately accenting the main motif over my speakers. Even the D1 had never brought that forth on headphones!

Factoring in this being a lossy compressed M4A file and my mind was blown. It stayed that way for a good long time as I listened to more music. Any complicated music became a rich tapestry of sounds with the OPA2111. Symphonic and electronica benefited the most with picking out individual instruments made almost too easy. Takes all the challenge out of it if you ask me.

But what about pop and rock?

The best way to describe the sound is that it is like being in the recording studio or at the concert. You. Are. There. Simple as that and wonderful for extended listening.

Is the OPA2111 warm like many have described? Yes, but only a little. For a comparison, I’d call the Xonar D1 slightly blue and the DSX with the OPA2111 slightly red if they were video monitors. Contrast is well defined, gamma is excellent, and brightness is just right. It reminds me of listening to good high end stereo gear of yesteryear minus all the pops, crackles, and hisses of vinyl LP’s.

The end result is that I’m not bothering to test the LM4562 out. I’ve found my perfect sound already and can feel it in my bones. The little ones in the ears, to be precise.

With over 200 CD’s to rip this is going to take awhile, but it will be nice knowing there is no compromise on the sound quality. The adventure will continue as I get to hear everything as it was meant to be heard.

That qualifies as a happy ending and a successful hunt, doesn’t it?