2. pc-audio
  3. 1147217537

MP3's and the audiophile

I am sure this subject has been discussed abnauseum here. is there ONE single format, whether it is mp3, AIFF, or whatever, that will give me an ACCURATE bit by bit copy of any red book cd? I am planning on loading up my entire collection on my server and later download any album I feel like listening to my ipod which will be plugged to my reference system. I know some will frown at the idea. but I am thinking of something more practical here. something like streaming data from the server via a wireless card into my main stereo. I like the idea of sitting in front of my stereo and being able to control what song i want to hear via the itunes interface or something similar. i've done it before, thing is now I am thinking the next logical step would be to convert every album I own to whatever format gives me the best quality, and I mean by best, exactly how i hear it via CD. I am using CD-DA extractor 9.0 for this task. anyone knows if there's a similar app under OSX that works as well as the CD extractor under winxp?
proghead

Showing 3 responses by ckorody

ckorody
643 posts
 
Your best choice in the Mac space is iTunes which offers you a choice of Apple Lossless (compressed), AIFF and WAV. All of these are considered to be ACCURATE bit-by-bit copies so long as certain options are checked. There is an interesting comparison of the formats on Audiogon Tech Talk Forum - search for #1137630045

The sine qua non ripping app is considered to be EAC which is only available on Win. Hard to say how much better it is or isn't - its certainly not as user friendly.

Regardless of how you get your music to the hard drive, there are only four ways to get it off the drive and into your preamp:

1) USB to SPDIF or
2) USB to I2S, or
3) the SLIM Devices Squeezebox which can work in 802.11g (WiFi) or
4) Airport Express (WiFi) which for the moment is quite as pure a format. There are people who are ecstatic with each of these solutions.

The salient point here is that getting away from a traditional opto mechanical transport is where the big step in quality happens. The rest of it, while rich in nuance its all variations on a theme.

Beyond this Forum, you will find a tremendous amount of information on Audio Asylum's PC Forum. You are trodding a well known path...
ckorody
643 posts
 
Max looks promising - I downloaded it a few weeks back but was unable to get it to work - perhaps a bit more fiddling is in order

Though I have to say that based on how slowly iTunes works through some CDs I am not sure how much better the error checking can be.... But for sure it is more flexible
ckorody
643 posts
 
It's not the same file type - though in the ultimate analysis it is the same data.

AIFF and WAV are the the two datatypes that are used for uncompressed files. In fact if you open a standard off the shelf Redbook CD on your desktop you will see that the songs are AIFF files.

Lossless is a form of compression that doesn't lose any data but does save about 50% on the storage requirment. A 600Mb cd in WAV or AIFF becomes a 300Mb lossless file - i.e. you can store twice as much in the same amount of hard drive space. The miracle of lossless is that nothing is lost, and in fact a lossless file can generate a perfect AIFF or WAV. Apple Lossless is one example

The third format is called "lossy" - meaning that a certain amount of data is lost. The amount of compression can usually be adjusted when the copy is made. MP3 is the classic lossy audio format. Internet radio also relies on lossy compression.

As a general rule everyone who is ripping is doing WAV or one of the Lossless formats. One can always make a MP3 from any of these file types. The mantra is rip once, use many so it behooves you to do a high quality initial rip. The general theory here is that ripping is such a pain that you won't want to do it again.

That said there is no reason to do AIFF/WAV. And indeed there are some downsides in terms of how they handle tags (metadata)
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