hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0131.txt

Episode: 131
Title: HPR0131: Adding Stereo to a Computer
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0131/hpr0131.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:54:43

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Well, that's not very, very good. That's standard generic default for music.
But that isn't-
Standard called for what we would call 384 kilobits per second.
But, you know, people discovered that 128 sounded pretty good and was much smaller.
So that's kind of where 128 comes from when it comes to music.
That's what, to most people, sounds okay.
Anybody who's an audio file, you know, who are one of the most unhappy people on the face of the earth,
they don't like it.
Today on Hack a public radio, I think a stereo to your computer.
It's me DeepGeek. Stick with us.
We'll be right back.
So, okay, that intro was actually a sound clip of Stank and Jason Scott.
And Ben rev number 59, which is the sound formats episode.
I thought it was such a great idea to do as an intro for my stereo adding project.
Because, you know, the way he said that and the way Stank giggled, you know,
you know, audio files who are some of the most unhappy people in the world.
You know, I mean, I'm not an audio file.
But, you know, I kind of admire the people who did the podcast thing before me.
And it's going to take me a while to, like, even approach the number of episodes others have done.
So I figured, well, I'm going to be here a while.
So, if I'm going to be, you know, listening to these podcasts before I send them out,
I want to hear what they really sound like.
So, I pursued a little search for better fidelity.
But no, no.
I didn't go out and, like, you know, spend a billion dollars on a home studio.
I didn't go that far.
But, I thought you might want to hear my story first.
So, let me tell you a little story about how this thing got started.
You know, I told you my motivation.
But, so, I decide, you know, instead of using the little crappy desktop speakers,
I'm going to run over to my big stereo.
And my big stereo is one of those all-in-one things.
You know, you know the deal, right?
It's like a 5 CD changer. It's two tape decks.
You know, an all-in-one thing from Sony.
You know, it was a favorite company.
So, I go to radio shack. I buy these cables.
Plug in the back of my sound.
And my motherboard sounds jack over.
I go.
Click play, and that's some music I was familiar with.
Guess what?
It sounded like shit.
I couldn't believe it.
I couldn't believe my ears.
So, you got to imagine me, you know,
strul over the box.
And so, I turn on the desktop speakers.
And I pull the plug out and I'm putting in the desktop speakers and they sound better.
So, I'm like, wait, this is wrong.
The good stereo is supposed to sound better than the shitty computer speakers.
It cost me 20 bucks. I felt, you know, oh, it's horrible.
And it's just started a whole thing with me because it was just unacceptable.
So, what I'm going to tell you about today is, you know, how I overcame that.
And I got, you know, what I think is the ideal sound for me.
Now, I want to say sounds a personal thing.
So, like, I was going to be from my point of view on what I think is good.
And I would love nothing more than not being the last contributor to HPR
to talk about doing something like this.
Because what I think is good for me, I like to hear people who did something else.
And why they think there's as better than what I did.
Or why there's as better for them than how come mine is better for mine.
You know what I mean?
So, that's where I hope it goes.
I'm going to tell you how I did it, why did it, what I think about it.
And I really hope someone, you know, disagrees and makes another episode of Pack of Public Radio.
And I'll get another perspective. I think that would be cool.
So, what was up with those four whistles?
Yeah, I thought instead of just, you know, starting by talking about, like, frequency.
I thought I'd give you a little demonstration.
Now, think about the whistles I just played for you.
Now, the first one you could probably hear fine.
And they got higher and higher in pitch.
And either depending on your age, you heard the sound from Fainter and Fainter.
Or you didn't hear the last one completely.
So, if you're wondering what these whistles were, well, I'll give you a hint.
If you have a dog or cat in the room in there, it is picked up.
I was just tuning on a dog trainer whistle.
You know, most fun three bucks I was spent in the pet store in my life.
You know, you know, call the cat dog for dinner, whatever.
But, you know, I, like, any do dad does something where I'm in for.
Anyway, so, the reason I had this for an introduction to those sounds is because, you know, I want to talk about,
I told you the story about this old stereo sounding bad.
But the question becomes, you know, how do we know what's going to sound good before we buy it?
And we have to measure sound quality in some way.
And we're geeks, right?
We're hackers, we're computer guys, we want to call it.
So, we use numbers.
So, those numbers, you know, get higher and higher.
Now, a human drops off at 20,000 hertz.
And if you Google comparison frequency hearing different animals,
you'll have some interesting reading I show you.
So, like I said in my story, my stereo didn't sound so good.
I knew it wasn't playing back, right, right.
I didn't know why.
So, what did I do?
Well, I went to the internet, I began reading around.
And I found this really, really interesting metric.
It's called harmonic distortion.
And I actually found that there's the tests that the people who make the stereo do
and those people who check up on them by doing their own tests.
And so, you can actually go with a piece of hardware that reproduces sound onto the internet
and Google, you know, that device and harmonic distortion.
And you can see the number and what I found out was that clock radios have a harmonic distortion
or an error of about 10%.
And guess what?
So, did my Sony all-in-one stereo.
So, that was really interesting.
And I also found out, when you look at stereos,
that if you go to, if you use a website, like I know I kind of like a radio check guy.
So, I looked at radio checks website and they had statistics right there on the site for all the equipment.
So, if I'm reading in the specs and they tell you, you know,
the reproduction was tested for up to 20,000 hertz, some say up to 24,000 hertz.
Now, there's no point in you spending your hard-and-earned money.
Buying a stereo system that's going to reproduce perfectly stuff only your pets can hear.
That would not make sense.
That's one of the reasons why I thought that intro quote with audio files are naturally unhappy people was interesting.
So, you know, harmonic distortion.
So, I found out that my stereo had the same as a clock radio, which is not good.
Now, I also googled around different sound cards.
And you can get that for different sound cards.
Now, we're talking about something between one-half and one percent with different sound cards.
So, the lower you get, the closer to 0.09 you get, the more expensive the equipment gets.
But, I just want to sound, you know, I'm a guy who likes a little bit better.
I don't need to be perfect, you know.
So, I said, well, if I could get under 1 percent, I could be happy.
So, what I did was I said, well, I'm going to buy a stereo and plug the stereo into the computer.
And, you know, I want to go a little bit later about why I said I'll buy a stereo.
So, I want to read your check.
I looked at different ones.
I picked essentially a receiver that was on sale.
I knew enough to look up the homework distortion.
The frequencies it could play back.
It was nice.
So, I bought it.
I bought a couple of desktop speakers, which are bigger.
No, not desktop speakers.
I bought a couple of bookshelf speakers, which are much bigger than desktop speakers.
And I bought the cables.
Heard it all together.
And I got really, really nice sound out of it.
So, what's it like, you know, connecting the computer to the stereo?
Well, the arrangement is too complex.
It's basically four parts involved.
You get them at your radio check store.
You know, there's an extension for what's called the RCA cables,
which the stereo is looking for for input.
And those are a male male extender.
And there's two pairs of wires joined that make a trunk that go to the other end of the extension.
So, you need that.
And then there is this Y-shaped set of wires that actually plug into the mini jack on the back of your computer.
And they come out with two RCA jacks.
And the RCA jacks these come out in.
Or males also.
So, they just need these two little round things.
They're female to female converters.
And you plug them all together.
And you hook it into the back.
And then you push OX on the selector.
You power, you know, you power it on.
You push OX on the selector.
You adjust your value.
You've been playing it.
Sounds great.
Now, before I talk to you about what you can do with a,
when you use a computer as a stereo,
because the vista you will have of things you can do with a Linux-based computer being your stereo,
is much different than just buying a stereo.
But before I get into that, you know,
I want to go into some of the logic that drove some of the decisions as I made.
Now, you might notice that, you know, I plugged in to my computer.
I didn't talk about the intermediate step of buying a sound card.
Maybe I should buy a sound card.
I don't know.
The output sounds pretty good to me.
Like I said, you know, younger people might have different perceptions of sound.
So I thought it would be, you know, a little bit wasteful to buy it.
A sound card, because the onboard sound seems to be performing fine.
I'd love to hear other people talk about whether or not sound card or not to get a separate sound card.
The last I heard of it was in the old binary revolution radios.
And those were a while back.
And I do believe that the motherboard onboard sounds,
sound systems have improved a lot over the past five years.
I heard that.
So I still think it sounds better than my old stereo,
because I'm coming from the old one stereo to a real stereo.
So it sounds good to me.
I don't know.
Like I said, I'm also feeling out hoping another HPR recorder will answer me back in a way,
and give me more information.
Maybe make me go show me how I can go even further.
So, you know, I decided to stick with motherboard.
I did look around now.
I have an Nvidia chipset motherboard with an AMD based computer on it.
So I didn't find my specific motherboard listed,
Googling for harmonic distortion,
but most of the Nvidia's had that statistic harmonic distortion under one.
So I thought it was pretty good.
Now, the other thing I decided against that I noticed was that a lot of people were going to five channel.
Now, when I get music, typically I either convert a CD I already have
by bar or CD from a front of the library, and I convert.
So my master, the CD, is two channel.
You know, I don't see the point of getting the five channel,
because the stuff I listen to is going to be two channel.
And I kind of looked around the web, and it looks like,
but I'm not sure how it works, but it looks like it's a computer simulation of what five sound,
a electronically generates five channels from a two channel input.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I thought stereo was just fine.
As far as having multiple speakers, my receiver has outputs for two sets of speakers.
Marked A and B, so if I ever want to surround, I can get another pair of speakers,
put them behind me, and put speaker B, run all four speakers at the same time.
So that was another decision I want to make.
Alright, when I come back, let's talk about what you can do with a computer for a stereo.
Acre public radio is community radio.
Please consider recording your own episodes.
We always love to have more material,
and our administration will be most helpful in getting you out there.
Hey, it's Steve Geek.
Thanks for sticking with me for so long.
And I want this to be a good episode.
I want to get into some detail with you guys.
So one of the things that intrigued me was the concept of doing more
with a computer and a stereo than just a stereo.
What do I mean by that?
Well, think about a stereo, right?
You know, you push FM, you listen to the radio.
You pop a CD, you listen to a CD, you pop a cassette, you do a cassette.
Maybe you record a cassette.
Maybe you mix up your own music and make a mix tape.
Okay, and that's kind of the extent of it.
But you know, for the past five years now,
I've been downloading a lot of internet talk shows.
As you all know, I've been downloading music, you know,
free samples, whatnot,
barring things from a library, converting them, you know.
When I started listening to podcasts,
I used to convert the podcast into a CD,
put it into my car for the CD in the car stereo
and listen to the CD of the podcast.
Now, I just load that file into my Cowan digital media player,
put on headphones in the car and drive all over the place.
So it changes, but the point is you get more digital.
So, some things beckon.
And one of the things that really beckoned
was the fact of having the high quality for music,
as well as when I get to download Japanese animation
or TV shows on the internet.
It sounds so much better when I watch video now,
because I pump the video through the big speakers,
makes a hell of a difference.
So that's one thing you can do,
is that you become a truly multimedia PC,
you know, and the kind of computer accessories you get,
like I said, my desktop speakers for the computer,
which will create a lab's make,
were better than the Yolan 1 stereo,
but still there's something about a bigger speaker.
I don't mean the case of the speaker,
I mean the actual speaker.
I replaced the earbuds for my Cow and I River,
with the biggest headphones I could find,
and it sounds that much better.
Conversely, I found out this can get you in a little bit of trouble.
I actually, you know, made a poor sound quality recording,
you know, and it sounded good on my big bookshelf speakers.
When I got onto the headphones,
it sounded like crap.
So I went the other way.
So there's something about the big speaker that adds to everything.
Now, since I'm playing podcasts,
since I'm playing download stuff,
now I don't have to convert to something if I don't want to.
Now, Linux does all kinds of things with multimedia.
We all know about what a wave file is.
We all know what an MP3 is.
A lot of us know where an object is,
and a lot of us know what a flack file is.
Well, now I'm going to public libraries,
get music I like, converting it into flacks.
And flacks, maybe you get twice as much in the same space.
Now, I don't know any stereo I can play a flack on.
I don't want to confine myself to my portable digital media player.
So now I'm basically playing flacks for almost all my music.
And I'm getting a lot more music.
And another thing that's interesting is once I began listening to flacks,
my disk drive began filling up.
But did I sweat?
No, because I had all the options of the computer at my disposal.
So what I began doing was I began moving them from the disk to CDs and DVDs.
Now, it's pretty cool to get two CDs onto a data CD with the flack files.
The free lossless audio code make sure that I don't lose any original data.
Not that that would be a big deal.
High quality MP3 would certainly have enough sound that you'd barely notice.
But when you begin instead of using CDs and begin moving files to DVDs,
it gets the file management gets a little hairy.
So, you know, you do create a DVD just like a CD.
But the density of the DVD is so much greater than the CD.
I took all my Mozart, a bunch of other, all my Beethoven,
a few other random classical CDs,
converted them to flacks from all in one DVD.
It was like 16 CDs to one DVD.
So, what I had to do was,
is we limit myself to four different artists per DVD.
So, you know, you don't have to go hog wild with compression just because you have it.
You still have to manage it and be able to look at something and say,
oh, my Beethoven and my Mozart, if you list like 50 or 60 artists on one CD pop,
you know, it's going to be a little inconvenient for you.
So, I began using that, then it would mount the CD or DVD,
kick off XMMS, and set the stereo,
and go to bed like that, you know, with the stereo playing.
It's cool, you know.
One thing I did was I used the shutdown command to turn off the stereo automatically.
So, if I had to say 90 minutes of music,
I would do shutdown space dash H,
space plus 90,
and 90 minutes, the computer would shut down.
Well, another session was playing the music,
and I would also hit the timer on the stereo.
So, that's cool.
And what else is cool about that is, as you know,
I recently did an episode, a short episode on batch processing.
I could kick off a few batches to run in that 90 minutes,
have the stereo going, turn off the screen,
hit the sack, fall asleep gently with music playing in the background,
and come back to it all in the morning.
We might email to see what my batch files did.
What could be better than that?
Well, before going into the gig tidbit for the day,
I'd like to wrap up by telling you all what I'd like to find out about,
what I don't know about,
and perhaps we'll be fodder for future HPR episodes.
I'd like to know about receiving streaming.
All right, now Linux has a few players that receive streams,
but I noticed that a lot of the commercial radio stations
kind of do this.
I don't know.
They send it to a web page that only works with Internet Explorer.
So, I'd like to know how to get around that.
I think that'd be something cool to know about.
It's a know about what the 5.1 channel sound experience is like.
As a person who's interested in stereo classical jazz rock,
is anything being recorded for that format?
This is something I don't know.
So, I'd like to hear about those things.
Today's gig tidbit,
converting waves to MP3s,
making your file smaller by using variable bit rate.
Now, we all know when we record on the computer,
we normally say either use the command line recording program,
such as A record, which is short for also record,
also being the advanced Linux sound architecture,
or perhaps we record an audacity.
Normally, a lot of people edit an audacity,
and audacity has a built-in function,
where if you have WAME in your computer,
it will make an MP3 for you.
You do export as MP3,
and in your preferences, you can set, say,
most people leave it safely default for 128 kilobits per second.
Now, as far as I know,
there's no way of doing variable bit rate MP3s.
Now, variable bit rate is interesting,
because if you record that one same file
as 128 kilobits per second, variable bit rate,
it'll only be in that mode of 128 kilobits per second,
when it needs to.
When you have less busy sound or quiet,
it'll drop down to a lower bit rate for those sections,
and this can save significantly significant space,
significant file size on the MP3s you create.
So, if you want to save some space,
and that sacrifice a lot of quality,
or perhaps you want to use a higher bit rate,
and have it be a variable,
and make it so that you have a variable bit rate
at a higher bit rate for the complex sections,
and a little bit rate for the regular stuff,
and have it be the same size as a lower quality MP3
you'd make with, say, 128 kilobits per second fixed bit rate.
You might want to explore using LAME
with the variable bit rate option,
dash VBR or dash VBR dash new.
That's been today's kicktipit.
Thanks for listening to Hack a Public Radio.
Have a great day.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
That was Track No. 11, from the album Big Dipper by Drop Trio from Magnetune.com.
Thank you for listening to Hack a Public Radio.
Thanks for listening to Hack a Public Radio.
Thanks for listening to Hack a Public Radio.