Guide to entertain yourself at home

Most of us Spaniards are going through a few days of forced confinement at home and this is when we should take the opportunity to keep ourselves distracted, doing things that we normally cannot do due to lack of time.

If you are an audiophile or music lover, here are a few very practical activities that could keep you busy these days off and that will improve the way you enjoy your favorite music.

Rip your CD collection

We say ripping to the action of digitizing and storing our CDs in a file on a hard drive, in this way, we can easily classify this file by musical genre, making its location much easier when we want to play it while not occupying physical space in House. It is obvious that there are hardly any physical CDs sold anymore and the manufacturers of CD players are also shrinking. On the other hand, more and more, there are good portable digital players, DACs and streamers equipped with a USB input that can store or play from a hard drive, a good digitalized music collection organized by musical styles that would delight any fan. Even if you have hundreds of CDs stored for years of dedication, it's all about getting started. Why not get excited now that we have time?

Ripping a CD can be done in two different ways. The most experienced with computers, will know an infinity of programs that offer this procedure, of course, it is required to have one of these programs installed on our PC or Mac and to have a CD drive. There are free versions that you can find on the internet, most of them only in English, and we recommend making sure that the ripping can be done in WAV format, (without any compression in the process, if we have plenty of hard drive) or if we do not have so many free gigabytes , it may be better to choose the FLAC format (it compresses when storing and decompresses when playing but without any loss in the process, considerably reducing hard disk space). If you are a Mac user then we apply the same thing only instead of WAV it is called AIFF and FLAC on windows is called ALAC on Apple.

Please, never choose the maximum ripping speed allowed by the drive used because it will increase the risk of "jitter" or errors in the interpretation of digital binary codes. It is best to bet on an average speed among all those that appear.

The other method is much simpler, although it requires investing some money. Best recommended for demanding audiophiles who want to ensure they get the highest quality music without any hassle or computer skills. It is about resorting to ripping devices that can be found on the market, equipped with CD transport that already have the necessary software integrated to carry out this function and every time we insert a CD, it will ask us if we want to play the disc or rip it. If we have previously configured the ripping options to do it by default in WAV or FLAC, it will only be a matter of choosing to rip. There are models of very complete and high-quality rippers, such as the Bluesound Vault 2i, which is also a streamer, equipped with a good 2TB internal hard drive (2,000GB) and many other interesting features such as a 32-bit DAC compatible with files of maximum DSD or MQA quality as well as multiroom functionality, link to streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz, etc. and a very convenient free control app that works great.

Please, in no way do the ripping in MP3 format, this supposes a huge loss of musical quality, think that a CD, recorded in stereo PCM format, is equivalent to about 1411Kbps while the best MP3 can only give 320Kbps .

If you are a proud owner of any Astell & Kern brand portable player, your sure bet is the PEM15 MKII brand specific ripper. A small and robust device to which you only need to connect via USB cable including your A&K player to rip and insert the contents of your CD into the hard drive of your laptop while capturing the album cover and other information, what we call the metadata, with a very high quality, that is why it will only offer you to choose between FLAC or WAV format, whose properties we have already explained above.

Create playlists on a streaming service:

Who more or who less already knows what streaming is and what services can be found on the internet that offer them to us. Companies like Spotify, Tidal, Deezer and many others are already very popular and there are many of us who use one of them often, be it free with advertising and limited quality or those who prefer to pay a monthly fee (very reasonable if we pay to what we save on record purchases), of those that offer a higher level of sound quality.

Of all the known services of this type, we can affirm that the one that offers the highest level of quality to date is the French Qobuz. This platform supports high-resolution files at 24 bits and 192KHz with an increasingly wide musical catalog, although it is true that it is mainly oriented towards classical or jazz music. You can choose between 4 subscription levels, the Premium in MP3 320K for €9.99 per month, the Hi-Fi in FLAC at 16 bits and 44.1KHz, just the quality that any CD disc would give us for €19.99 per month, the Studio in 24 bits and up to 192KHz Hi-Res for €24.99 per month and then offers the Sublime+ level that works with the same quality as the Studio level but adds the possibility of permanently downloading this type of files by storing them in our hard drive forever for a fixed annual fee of €299.99. Allows free trial without obligation.

For those looking for a more varied and extensive music catalog, our recommendation would be Tidal. A company owned by well-known musicians like Beyonce and her husband Jay Z, among many others, who refused to let Spotify get rich by exploiting their copyrights by paying a small portion to these creators. To overcome its enemy, Tidal opted to raise the level of sound quality, achieving a really wide musical catalog and practically at the level of Spotify but sounding considerably better. Tidal offers two levels, a basic one equivalent to the best offered by Spotify that renders MP3 at 320K, therefore highly compressed, at a monthly price of €9.99 and a superior one called Hi-Fi that works with the 16-bit FLAC codec and 44.1Kbps, that is to say, absolutely the same quality as any CD disc for €19.99 per month, with the addition that we will also find at this level many Master recordings equipped with MQA that are a real delight and that we recommend exploiting if your DAC or Streamer was compatible. It also offers a free trial period of one month with no commitment to permanence.ñadido que también encontraremos en este nivel muchas grabaciones Master dotadas de MQA que son una verdadera delicia y que recomendamos explotar si su DAC o Streamer fuera compatible. También ofrece un periodo de prueba gratuita de un mes sin compromiso ninguno de permanencia.
As an example, at Concerto AV we have a Hi-Fi account on Tidal and we have already made a series of playlists to our liking of various musical styles, you can even find a specific one that we use for demos in our rooms with different equipment and that , if you're a Tidal user, you can find it here:

Clean up your vinyl collection:
For those who have a good collection of vinyl records at home, we expect that they will be highly appreciated even though some are already old and are beginning to suffer clear deterioration due to natural wear and tear during playback, caused by the inevitable friction with the needle and the deposit of dirt as well as static that it acquires on contact with various surfaces including our own hand. To recover all the splendor in your vinyl and even improve its sound, there is nothing better than resorting to a specific automatic cleaning machine to eliminate static and your vinyl shine like new again by introducing a liquid specially indicated for this into its tank. To learn about some of the ones we can recommend from brands like Pro-Ject, Music Hall or Nitty Gritty, just follow this link:

There is also the manual option with the Pro-Ject record Washer MKII for only €99.

To complement the perfect maintenance of our esteemed collection of vinyl LPs, nothing better than sheathing their beautiful covers in transparent PVC that keeps them free of fingerprints and involuntary scratches or even changing their inner plastic sleeves that produce a lot of static for others more suitable than they get rid of static noise as well as adding better protection, like those of the Simply Analog firm.

And of course, there are many other tools with which we can carry out the proper maintenance of our turntable so that it performs in optimal conditions through accessories to clean needles manually or automatically, digital or analog scales to know that we have our capsule perfectly calibrated for weight, levels to ensure that we have the turntable completely level, something essential if we want to extract the stereo sound from both sides of the vinyl groove without any loss, clampers that add weight to the vinyl and prevent any curvature it may have due to heat, guaranteeing a perfect coupling of the needle on the groove, stroboscope to make sure that the revolutions are correct or a good base where to place our turntable to free it from mechanical vibrations.

To meet them follow this link:

Surely, any of the activities that we have proposed will keep you entertained for a long time and you will be achieving an improvement in the way you enjoy your musical hobby.