FLAC n stuff

[Ond]

Recently I've been getting more interested in getting a digital audio collection together that's not lossy format based, the idea of dispensing with CDs but preserving the quality really appeals.  I'm not talking about portable devices and music on the go, I mean having a nice digital setup to play through my hifi system.  I'm wondering if there are any dedicated hardware units to access a digital collection as an alternative to a PC?  I've looked around but everything seems to be PC or Mac based.  Its a pity the WinCab player doesn't support FLAC.  There's an increasing amount of quality FLAC audio floating around now and I don't just mean of the illegal type.

Anyone got a nice FLAC based setup?

[Ond]

Heh, I can answer my own question on this now.  I Googled for a solution originally without success, but today I was browsing through an audio mag and came across just the thing I'm looking for:

The Sony HAP-S1 High-Resolution Audio Player.




It comes with its own built in amp, can be loaded with 500Gb of FLAC (or other format) files and put on a shelf with your other music components.

It's early days, I think I'll wait for the next version to come out.  For those interested you can check out a review here:

http://www.soundandvision.com/content/sony-hap-s1-hi-res-audio-player

[SavannahLion]

There's some interesting design choices there.

For example, only 500GB? Multi-Terrabyte drives are cheap. The USB port isn't used to expand the storage capacity?
Yeah, I can understand they don't want this one competing with their top tier model which does have the TB drive. However, the top tier model should have mind blowing storage capacity.

There's other strangeness but yeah, I agree with you. You should wait for the next generation to come out. Let the early adopters have this one.

But who am I to talk?

[Howard_Casto]

I'm not so sure FLAC is here to stay.  I mean don't get me wrong, it'll still be around... but as a primary format?

Ogg was supposed to make mp3 obsolete as were 2 dozen formats before it, but it never happened.  It isn't so much that mp3 is good (it isn't) but that changing the standard means that all of these media players that have been released over the last 10+ years no longer work, and nobody is really willing to make that jump yet. 

The only three formats that seem to be viable (aside from wav of course) is AAC, MP3 and WMA.  The reason is fairly simple... if you buy a song from apple it's AAC, from Microsoft it's WMA and anywhere else it'll probably be mp3. 

Since cds don't seem to be going anywhere (again, not because they are good, but because killing the format means every home theatre and car stereo in the nation stops working) I think what eventually is going to happen is hard-drives are going to get so big people will just start using wavs again, because as inefficient as the format is, anything, even a old video game console, can play a wav file. 

I guess what I'm saying is that you might want to hold out two versions, because it might not even last that long. 

[BadMouth]

My cheap Onkyo 5.1 network receiver can play FLAC files from a server or USB drive.
I've never utilized the feature though.

I've run into all kinds of weird issues trying to play my SACDs on my Sony BluRay player.
A half a dozen settings on the bluray player had to be just right and the HDMI passthrough on the receiver had to be turned off.
(all of which I want set differently for everyday use)
HDMI would be great if it weren't for all this "handshaking" BS.

Edit: The interface on my receiver (that shows up on the TV) also looks like a white monochrome computer terminal from 1983.
I think the newer one is better, but check the reviews.

[Generic Eric]

Its not necessarily what you wanted; it does video too.  Have you heard of Popcorn Hour?

http://www.cloudmedia.com/products/popcornhour/a-410  The a-410 cost $248.

[SavannahLion]

Those three formats you mentioned are all lossy (well, WMA has a lossless codec but I've never seen it used), FLAC on the other hand is lossless. Different beast alltogether. If anything, compare it to WAV, not MP3, WMA or AAC

That being said, arguing that WAV files is more useful because it's supported by more older hardware is true but nonsensical when you argue that WAV will return as bigger and bigger storage mediums become more readily available. A microscopic minority of the old hardware will support any of the new larger storage mediums without assistance so why even have that as an argument? Along the same thought-lines you have to have new hardware anyways to fully leverage such large storage so why wouldn't it support FLAC?

[Howard_Casto]

Well because it doesn't.  Flac support is very rare.  Formats don't make any sense.  Don't shoot the messenger, but just to use cds as an example they tried to replace them with  3 or more formats so far, the same with the compressed formats on the pc.  It just doesn't take because there is no real reason for the average joe to swtich over to something else.  I don't think you actually read my posts sometimes.  I never said that mp3 was good, rather that is what is supported. 

[pbj]

Flac support is very rare. 

lol wut

[Howard_Casto]

We aren't talking about crappy Chinese android boxes with poor playback pbj, or else he wouldn't be bothering with flac. 

[Ond]

Its not necessarily what you wanted; it does video too.  Have you heard of Popcorn Hour?

http://www.cloudmedia.com/products/popcornhour/a-410  The a-410 cost $248.

This is interesting!  Not so much for this unit but for the Popcorn Hour PCH-C300, fitted with a Terabyte drive it is still half the cost of the Sony unit with support for most video codecs as well.  Nice one.  I'll read some reviews.

There is a local reseller here in Australia too.

http://streamaster.com.au/popcorn-hour-c300-advanced-media-player.html

I've actually played with and owned a few media players when they first came out, an Astone unit and then an apple TV.  So far I've found for audio purposes these are not so great.  The Astone had lousy menu options and apple TV basically needs a PC to connect to (for stored files) with no flac support.

Apple media stuff drives me nuts, no wonder people hack them so they can be a bit more useful.

I get Howard's point, I don't think flac is going to replace CDs or anything, there's plenty of stuff that largely remained on the fringes of audio in the past only to fade away after low adoption rates by the general audio community.  For me it’s just about flexibility, nice to have a quality audio collection at your fingertips, play it through the best gear you have in the house.  There are new releases of music in the flac format as well as re-mastered classics.  Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell album is one that springs to mind.  Some re-releases have been reviewed as really good in the flac format, it's possible to cram a bit more audio quality in there so no surprise really.

[Generic Eric]

Pch seems like the thing with the best options outside a pc.   Years ago when I was looking at the pch, I got a WDTV instead.  Which isn't even the ball park really.


I bought the apple tv also.  I don't recommend it at all for any reason, unless you are an iTunes fan.  There are much cheaper options for Netflix now.  At the time I anticipated apple to bring gaming to the tv, which I still don't understand.

Anyway the pch seems like a magical box.  I hope you get one to tell us all about it.

[pbj]

The 'very rare' Amazon Fire can be made to play flac and it's probably the most powerful settop android box out there.  I'm sure I could be persuaded with money to have one shipped to you.

 

[ChadTower]

Or maybe someone has finally come up with a decent use for an Ouya?

[SavannahLion]

Well because it doesn't.  Flac support is very rare.  Formats don't make any sense.  Don't shoot the messenger, but just to use cds as an example they tried to replace them with  3 or more formats so far, the same with the compressed formats on the pc.  It just doesn't take because there is no real reason for the average joe to swtich over to something else.  I don't think you actually read my posts sometimes.  I never said that mp3 was good, rather that is what is supported.

I also think the same about you reading my posts.

I didn't say anything about one format being better than another. I just don't see it as a decent comparison to compare FLAC to MP3. They both service different targets. Like trying to compare a mountain bike to a beach cruiser. People can argue the merits of both until they're blue in the face.

What I'm trying to state is it's a nonsensical argument to include old hardware using new media, ie larger HDDs.

I'm not sure if FLAC should be so easily dismissed. It's not really targeted towards the idea of distribution (size) but rather quality. Given that it's also OS and DRM free, it'll likely weather out other proprietary lossless formats. The Audiophiles are latching onto the format anyways so we'll just wait and see if people wake up from their iPod induced daze and we can start moving forward again.

[dkersten]

I am no expert on FLAC, but let me throw in my 2 cents:

Isn't a typical 5 minute FLAC file around 40 megs?  That means that tiny little 500gig drive can ONLY hold 12,500 5 minute songs.  And that is still over 1000 hours of music or 43 days of listening to music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on shuffle before you would ever hear the same song twice.  Perhaps I don't understand the latest generation of thinking, but unless you are doing video, I just don't see the point in terabyte drives.  When you had to buy an entire album (or CD if you are too young to know what an album is), you were forced to skip the tracks you didn't like.  But when you get to compile your own list of music, you don't have to have everything ever made, only the ones you actually want to listen to.  So I see no justification for needing more than that for storage.

It is like trying to justify having 15,000 games on your computer when you are actually going to play maybe 300 of them.. Sure, some day you might actually want to play that 6th revision of that slot machine rom you have never even looked at.. Yeah, right.  Just like you might someday want to hear all the other music that Iron Butterfly recorded.  Uh huh..  Frankly I don't think there are more than 12,500 songs ever recorded that are worth listening to, and even if so, unless you own them all on CD and are ripping them to FLAC yourself, you probably won't find that many out there in a lossless format. 

Just sayin..

[lamprey]

I happen to have media PC for my home theater (as well as some other viewing areas). There are many offerings that cover a lot of bases. For my needs I'm mostly about the movies os I keep all my blu-rays, dvds (all 10 of them) and my cds on my media server. I keep all my CDs as flac. If I do need to support a different device (say the iPod in my car), I just transcode them all the Apple Lossless.

To your specific question, there are lots of "devices" out there that will play flac. Did you have any certain requirements/features you wanted? Did you want to be able to play flac over you network or just load up a local HD?

One device that I've come very close to buying for my movie watching is the Dune-HD 3D. They do however, make a bunch of different products, so if you don't care about playing blu-rays and other media they have cheaper devices too. As I said, I have not owned one myself, but I have heard very positive things about there products.

 

[lilshawn]

Frankly I don't think there are more than 12,500 songs ever recorded that are worth listening to, and even if so, unless you own them all on CD and are ripping them to FLAC yourself, you probably won't find that many out there in a lossless format. 

Just sayin..

just go ahead and start here: http://www.24bit96.com/

As an example, a 9-minute and 25-second live recording from the band Phish weighs in at 18.4MB for a 256-kbps MP3 file, 67MB for a CD-quality FLAC file, and 126.2MB for a 24/96 FLAC file.

well, with internet as fast as it is today, it's not worth your time to pick and choose individual songs it's just easier to do the whole album, heck even their entire discography.

I agree that 99% of the worlds population isn't really all that concerned with the loss inherent with MP3 encoding. but if it does, and you are one of the >1% that have an ear and sound system capable of showing the flaws in a lossy digital format, then sure, flac is for you.

The receiver media system that OP linked is likely an entry level type of system, while not for a pure audiophile listening experience... it's probably in the low end range in terms of "HIGH quality sound".

if one wishes to enter the realm of high quality DIGITAL audio, it really starts with a good high performing ADC to convert the original audio to digital format and a high quality DAC to drive your sound system.

anybody who "cares" about quality would be fine with a 256kbps MP3 or even cd quality flac. anybody SERIOUS about quality have quarter million dollar sound setups and wouldn't touch digital with a 10 foot pole anyways.

(don't touch my tube amp and record player peasant)

i keep my mp3's and videos on a media server as well. no problems streaming bluray over the network to my geexbox. it plays  everything i've ever thrown at it ogg, mp3/4/5 flac whatever. 

[dkersten]

As an example, a 9-minute and 25-second live recording from the band Phish weighs in at 18.4MB for a 256-kbps MP3 file, 67MB for a CD-quality FLAC file, and 126.2MB for a 24/96 FLAC file.

As I said, not much worth listening to...   

I am kidding of course...... maybe..

And that is even smaller than my example, so more than 1000 hours of lossless digital music on a half terabyte, which in my opinion is more than anyone will ever listen to.

For me, CD is good enough, so FLAC would be too, and unless I am doing some kind of serious listening, which I almost never do anymore, MP3 is more than good enough.  In fact I don't even bother to have much music on my devices, I just stream Pandora when I want music.  I listen to audiobooks when I drive long distances, radio when I drive in town, and Pandora is streaming throughout my house when I listen there.  Haven't put a CD in my car in 3 or 4 years, and didn't even bother to upgrade from the factory sound system in my current vehicle that I have had for almost 4 years.  If I REALLY need to listen to music and I don't have internet handy, I always keep a couple hundred songs on my phone.  But anymore we are connected 99.99% of the time so there isn't much point to it.

[Generic Eric]

Can I get in on the 'n stuff part?

Did anyone see that audio gram stuff the audio guys used to determine if a flac was a transcode from an mp3?  Something like that would be great to have.  I always liked those posts.

[yotsuya]

I used to love playing FLAC 'n Stuff at a local arcade back in the day. Cool game.

[Ond]

As I travel to work on the train this morning I’m listening to music on my phone with  cheap in-ear headphones.  Assuming it could even play FLAC files would I be able to tell the difference between FLAC and MP3s on it?  No way.  Can I tell the difference on my PC sound system (it’s also a run-of-the-mill system) maybe, dunno.  Can I tell the difference on my HT system (Denon amp, good speakers)?  Yes definitely, especially lower quality compressed audio just sounds muddier less defined.

So I was looking for something easily accessible to play music on the weekends through the HT system, without having to turn on a PC or dig through the CD collection.  That’s it, no wall of text required.

If I'm copying a CD  it’s just as easy to keep a master FLAC file and transcode this to whatever format is handy.  It’s just nice to have the original quality on hand.
An audiophile once gave me some good advice, “if you can’t tell the difference, stop spending money”.  The FLAC tools for managing music I use are all free to download.

[Generic Eric]

You can flac you want to, you can leave your mp3 behind♩

I'll try to look up some better descriptions of those tools I was referring to. It looks like audacity can do spectrograms. How do feel about the Loudness wars?  I'm not big into audio stuff, but I find the spectrograms interesting from a technical standpoint.

Also, Ond didn't ask to be talked out of flac. Come on guys.

[ChadTower]

You can flac you want to, you can leave your mp3 behind♩

And if your friends don't flac, so if they don't flac, then they're no friends of mine.

[Flip_Willie]

I listen to almost all my music on my PC, and I have been ripping all my music as flac for a while now. Mind you, I can't tell the difference between flac and mp3s >=192 kbps, but storage is cheap these days, so why not? Maybe one day I'll have the killer audio system that will require losseless audio.

My home setup is simple compared to most audiophile standards. I use the Asus Essence as an amp/dac and Beyerdynamic 880 headphones. I use the Audio-Technica M50s at work (That's a very good and fairly cheap headphone BTW).

I also just use Winamp for flac playback. As far as I'm aware, there is no better desktop software available for managing a music library and music playback. I have 12,600+ songs in my library and winamp has always impressed me with it's speed and flexibility. Since AOL dropped winamp, I no longer rip to flac with winamp (AOL obviously dropped the Gracenote subscription when they dropped winamp). I've been using ExactAudioCopy for a while, and it works pretty well and is free!

As I travel to work on the train this morning I’m listening to music on my phone with  cheap in-ear headphones.

As it has not been mentioned, the Sansa Clip can play flac and it is tiny and even has a built-in clip! Once again, I can't imagine that you'd notice the difference, but it will save you from converting your flac to mp3 just for portable use.

Also, if you're really looking for ways to blow your money, then the fiio X5 is a good "high-quality" portable option that supports flac.

[MonMotha]

A major driver for keeping lossless archives is that you can re-encode to the format-du-jour and at an appropriate bitrate/quality (for lossy codecs) for the device-du-jour without any generational loss.  For example, keep FLACs around on your media server and encode to 192kbps MP3 for your cheap MP3 player that can't do any other formats and has limited space, 256kbps Vorbis for your high-end Android phone with lots of storage, AAC for your iPod, etc.  Even a relatively anemic PC can encode about as fast as the flash memory in most portable devices can be written, anyway, so there's no real downside to this aside from needing the space on the media server, and 3TB hard drives are cheap these days.

I've found that, at what are now "normal" bitrates for common CODECs (lame -v0, ~192-256kbps for Vorbis and MPEG4 AAC) the lossy version is transparent to most listeners on even high-end reproduction gear.  The issue is that going between those lossy formats, potentially even once as might happen to support a device with limited CODEC support where the archive copy is lossy, will eventually produce artifacts that even somebody unfamiliar with psychoacoustic compression will easily identify.  If you always start from a lossless archive, that's never an issue, and you can always play the lossless version on things that support it for gits and shiggles.

That's the value of FLAC or other lossless formats.  Nice thing is that, even if FLAC does fade into nothingness, as long as you can make one last dying gasp with the decode, you can, without any loss, decode it into whatever format is the new hotness.  I know plenty of people who did that with their old Shorten and APE archives to turn them into FLAC.

[lilshawn]

well, Western Digital is pushing out a 10tb hybrid SSD/platter harddrive  i think 100mb/file is a non-issue at this point in the game.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2604311/wd-leapfrogs-seagate-with-world-s-highest-capacity-10tb-helium-drive-new-flash-drives.html

[dkersten]

File sizes will always be an issue as long as the transfer times between devices is as slow as it is.  10tb doesn't do you much good if you can only transfer it at 5-10mb/s.. And many SD based devices are 5x slower than that.  I suppose as long as you have the time to wait an hour or two to move a few hundred songs to your phone or ipod it is OK.. It is great that I can throw together 40 terabytes or more of SAN storage for only a few thousand dollars in my server rack at work, but backing that up offsite or even just moving files from here to another location is ridiculously slow.  I am happy with the leaps and bounds in storage technology, but size is far from the only thing that needed to improve.

[lilshawn]

Well that's kinda still the problem... usb3 or die. Or...something faster. For file servers you should have gigabit or faster. Fiber optic for a business.

For all intents and purposes go big, go hard, or sit and wait.

A" few thousand" is a pretty good indication you are entering the low end of server life.

[dkersten]

A" few thousand" is a pretty good indication you are entering the low end of server life.

I wouldn't say low end, but certainly entry level in terms of "enterprise" hardware.  They aren't the top end Dell or HP SAN units, but overall they are solid units (redundant power supplies, swappable controller units, etc) and with no drives they only run about $4k each, and I use sata drives instead of sas which saved thousands of dollars and allowed me to have quadruple the capacity for the number of bays, all while keeping the performance difference over a "typical" internal server disk system (15k SAS drives in a raid5 array) somewhat neglible.  I also went iScsi using gigabit Ethernet instead of 10gbit fiber or a direct sas connection, but it gives me flexibility with my servers while also keeping costs down.  Each san and each server has an aggregated pair of gigabit Ethernet connections with a second aggregated pair on a second switch just for redundancy, and while the overall transfer rate is only about 65-75% of a typical internal enterprise level disk system (in practice, not in theory), in my applications (mostly database and file storage) it pretty much doesn't affect the performance of the overall system because my application is not large file transfer intensive.  And at a fraction of the cost of an enterprise SAN.  All in my storage system is just under $10k, where the equivalent in a pair of Dell or HP SAN units with ~20tb each would cost well over $25k. Under different circumstances I can see spending more, but for my purposes it works just fine.

But the point isn't about the type of hardware you use or the internal performance of that hardware, it is that once outside the internal infrastructure, getting that much data moved from point A to point B is a chore.  Try moving a terabyte of data from a server to a desktop - regardless of how fast your storage system and network is, it is still relatively slow.  Painfully at times.  Put that data on a portable drive, and even with USB3.0 you are limited to the speed of the drive controller, which is no longer fast when you start talking terabytes of data.  Now try sending that much data to a solid state device like an SD card or a cell phone's internal memory.. Or worse, an offsite cloud storage over your puny upstream internet connection..  Might as well go make yourself a snack, or just call it a night.. Or take a drive to the coast.. it might be done when you get home..

[Ond]

Good.

[lilshawn]

I agree, it's a major bottleneck. but you'd be surprised at how many large enterprises like google and SETI rely on "sneakernet" because transferring the sheer size and volume of files just can't be done with any sort of speed OR efficiency.  It's much easier to remove 120TB of hard drives, place them in a box and overnight it somewhere than to wait days for it to transfer over the internet.

the latency of sneakernet is horrible (ping of 86,400,000ms), but the throughput can't be beat. 


hopefully in the future these bottlenecks can be reduced (or eliminated) but until then... 

for all intents and purposes though the current capacity of USB flash drives of any form are generally in the <tb range (only just recently have tb drive begun selling in the market). it doesn't take all that much time to fill them. (still inefficient compared to a crapload of sata6 SSD's in RAID0 but whatever)

you don't really want to copy your music library anyways you want to STREAM the data as you need it. no sense "caching" all the data on your device "just in case" just get what you need...when you need it.

of course the larger format of file you have the better connection you need. I wouldn't recommend trying to stream 24/96FLAC over the cellular network to your iphone since it would eat up your data pretty quick. but a script could easily be made to downsample your music data down to MP3 quality on the fly as it's being sent out to your iphone...but that's neither here nor there. Even at a paltry 1/2 megabit upload rate you can have a 3mb MP3 transferred before it's finished playing.

[dkersten]

lol, 2.4 hours of latency would suck.. but hauling drives sucks more, and even internal drive speeds are not that fast when writing, even on SSD's. 

Many big cities are already launching gigabit internet, and in most cases it is $40-80 per month.. I think it is a pipe dream and won't last given the current technology, but I would sure love to end up as a beta tester or just one of the lucky ones to get to use it before it turns into the service equivalent of vaporware.  I have seen screenshots of people hitting 125+ megabytes per second.. Many internal drives can't sustain that, lol.

I have a high power radio between my two buildings that realistically hits about 650 mbps (about a block away), but even so I can barely get 50 mb/s to a nas on that end (there is other traffic, and NAS units are slow), and just my daily 64 gig compressed backup of my main ERP software database takes a couple hours to send over each night.. Sure beats hauling tapes or hard drives, which are both things I had to do for a long while.

The only thing I have against large format "anything" combined with the cheaper drives these days is that it is now my nightmare to try to move that data to somewhere safe.  So I sort of *sigh* when people just figure it is ok to start storing huge amounts of data.. It's great right up until something goes wrong and they have to back it up, move it, or restore a backup, lol. 

[Ond]

I'll take quality over minor inconvenience any day.  Flac is not for some. Brevity is the soul of wit.

[dkersten]

lol, I am not trying to discourage you at all, and in fact I commend you for desiring something better than a crappy MP3.

But that being said, I just purchased a high quality USB3.0 hub for my desk at work (powered by a 4 amp power supply and using it's own chipset to control the hub), as well as a usb3.0 micro SD reader and a new 32gig sd card (my old one was glitching in my phone).  I got it all hooked up, plugged in the fresh card, and proceeded to drop a couple gigs of MP3's (from an SSD drive on a sata III interface) onto it, just to test it.  The transfer rate was around 9 mb/s......  Underwhelming at best.

Portable tech just isn't there yet, at least in terms of capacity.. It's like having a huge auditorium with one 28" door to get in and out.  Great to have the space, but a pain in the butt to get anything in or out of there..

[Ond]

For anyone interested I've provided some links below to the free tools I like to use for managing FLAC.  There are plenty of ‘all in one’ audio converter packages, some also free, which I've tried but many tend to lack the features I like in the separate tools.

For ripping CDs to FLAC format I use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) http://www.exactaudiocopy.de

For managing FLAC files including transcoding to other formats (both lossless and lossy) I use CUE Tools  http://www.cuetools.net/wiki/CUETools_Download

For turning FLAC files back into CDs I use Burrrn http://www.burrrn.net/?page_id=4

I like Xion http://www.xionplayer.com as a really simple player to play audio files on my PC.  It has a skinning system which is really easy to create your own skins in Photoshop as well.

I recently rescued a Denon DVD 2900 from otherwise expensive repairs, anyone who knows this unit is a really nice CD player as well as an exceptional DVD player.  They can be found fairly cheaply these days second hand, it was expensive back when I bought it (around $2K).  I searched in vain for a repair solution on-line, so got brave and just pulled it down and fixed it myself. If anyone has this unit and the tray has problems, I can help.

[bradx]

I am no expert on FLAC, but let me throw in my 2 cents:

Isn't a typical 5 minute FLAC file around 40 megs?  That means that tiny little 500gig drive can ONLY hold 12,500 5 minute songs.  And that is still over 1000 hours of music or 43 days of listening to music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on shuffle before you would ever hear the same song twice.  Perhaps I don't understand the latest generation of thinking, but unless you are doing video, I just don't see the point in terabyte drives.  When you had to buy an entire album (or CD if you are too young to know what an album is), you were forced to skip the tracks you didn't like.  But when you get to compile your own list of music, you don't have to have everything ever made, only the ones you actually want to listen to.  So I see no justification for needing more than that for storage.

It is like trying to justify having 15,000 games on your computer when you are actually going to play maybe 300 of them.. Sure, some day you might actually want to play that 6th revision of that slot machine rom you have never even looked at.. Yeah, right.  Just like you might someday want to hear all the other music that Iron Butterfly recorded.  Uh huh..  Frankly I don't think there are more than 12,500 songs ever recorded that are worth listening to, and even if so, unless you own them all on CD and are ripping them to FLAC yourself, you probably won't find that many out there in a lossless format. 

Just sayin..

hey now, lets not be trash talking iron butterfly!!!  unconscious power, for instance, is a great song.  they could pack just as much power into a 2 1/2 minute song as a 20+ minute one!