2. pc-audio
  3. 1411245936

Computer Audio

Have a CD based system with an Audio Research LS2BMKII pre, Sony 5400ES SACD driving 2 Sumo Andromeda II's which (one each) drive Acoustats 1100's. One channel each side for base, one for the panel. Fully treated dedicated music/office.

Have about 700 CD's on iTunes in the format iTunes records them. The latest Sony with a 1T memory was interesting but I think the way iTunes takes digital is not the way I want to go for files and would need to reload everything, but that new Sony does not have provisions for input. Any ideas? and thanks.
midareff

Showing 2 responses by audioengr

audioengr
3,282 posts
 
I'll second the re-ripping with dbpoweramp. If you can put up with the inconvenience, ripping tracks to .wav files will yield the best sound quality results. You may lost some tags and album art though.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
Yes, DBpoweramp compares to Accurate Rip if this is enabled.

I have done FLAC, AIFF and ALAC to .wav comparisons at shows for probably 7 years now. Its easy to hear the compression effect of these, even on a show system. Why do they do this? I can only speculate. Maybe has to do with the offset or floating point rounding. Maybe has to do with erroneous behavior when the CODEC is running real-time.

Every time I play FLAC, AIFF or ALAC files, I notice a "tunnel" effect. This is kind of like compression. Makes the sound stage narrower. I only have .wav on my server and that is all I play at shows.

There is one exception. The Antipodes server playing FLAC and .wav files sounds identical from what I can tell. There is a lot of custom software running on Linux there.

You don't need to keep the .wav files. You can always create the .wav back from them.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
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