eCKOh wrote:
So instead spend thousands of dollars on equipment to attempt to get the same feel and sound as a turntable??
I would have bought this laptop anyway - I need one (I'm a programmer). It did cost 'thousands of dollars', but only because I wanted a powerful (for the time), small (still) and sexy (somewhat still) machine. It gets a bit massive with the CD drive attached, but its unlikely I'll be ripping a track whilst playing (See below about performance liability)
Laptops have a long way to go along with IPODs.
I don't even see how you can mention them in the same sentance - a peice of crap that just plays one track at a time through a low-quality headphone socket cannot be compared to an extremely high power machine with mixing software on it that can, ooh, ooh... MIX.
Don't want acres of vinyl but will rip the tracks off of some website.
I don't 'rip the tracks off some website'. Quality wouldn't be good enough, plus the performance liability waiver fee (which I pay, bugger all that it actually is these days) is invalid on tracks you don't legally own. So I have crates of CD's. Some are burns, but they're burns of selected tracks off CD's that I own.
On the laptop side of things, tracks are ripped using LAME 3.96/SSE with --vbr-new -q0, varying on 256Kbits/sec. This gives what has been shown, in the same kind of double blinds that vinyl DJ's love to quote, to be indistinguisable from CD. However, the 128Kbits/sec
Ever hear a CD SKIP in a club?? God Help you!!
This hasn't been an issue for two to three generations of CD decks - they buffer significant periods of time to RAM, often as much as 32MB a deck - thats about 2 MINUTES. One hell of a skip to take 2 minutes to recover...
It is a known fact that an analog sounds emit a feeling that digital can not reproduce.
From tests done by the same magazines that claim that 1,000 quid a metre cable is noticably better than 5 quid a metre cable. Right. When your playing to a club full of drunken idiots, the extremely minor quality difference, which I can't perceive myself, isn't worth it. There are also some electronic tracks that I feel are significantly INFERIOR off vinyl, such as most of Fatboy Slim's first album (which I have on vinyl... I also do have good quality decks which I no longer use for DJ'ing)
I'll let you slide on the Pioneers but Van Helden was not a good example and he still uses vinyl...I take Q BERT instead.
He was still Pioneers test case. Did the demo off their current CD deck system, did it again off vinyl. Some large number of wanke... ehh.. 'audiophiles' listening, unable to readily identify which was which.
Numark makes a better CD turntable too...check it out.
I will if I ever get bored of using Windows 2000 to DJ whilst I'm writing my own app for BeOS...