Also want to point out that at least in the early days, DSD promoters were caught cheating by juicing up DSD releases via significant added EQ.
Also, while talking about DSD, please check out the small but mighty Blue Coast Records.
Sound Quality
First off, I am pleading ignorance here, so my apologies up front, but I need some help on figuring out what this digital stuff is all about. It was simple, just to pull out a CD and play it, but with streaming and such, it seems to be a whole different ball of wax.
After finally finishing the remodel on my home, I've have had a bit of time to sit down and listen to my system. My Aurender N200 came with an SD card loaded with music. Most of it is ripped from hybrid SACDs or at 16bit- 44.1kHz "Original Mastering Recording" CDs, (some are DSF files some WAV files, but all sound the same to me). The music sounds flat and dull but when I play the equivalent song on Tidal in 16bit-44.1 kHz it sounds much better.
I have a second SD card with some HD Tracks CDs at 24 bit-96 kHz that I which sound really good through the N200. Maybe understandable being hi-res, but some say they can't hear a big difference between the two, but I sure can in this instance.
I understand that up sampling, DSD and HQ Player can even bring better sound to the table, but I'm having enough trouble with just the basics here, that stuff is way over my head.
I'd like to rip a couple of my own CDs to a new SD card and try it to compare with the SD card that came with the N200. What is the best method to do this?
As always, your thought & comments are much appreciated!
Showing 5 responses by erik_squires
OP: FLAC is the most common, and offers good compression. You can adjust the level of compression based on how fast you want it to rip. There's only so much it can compress though, so there is also the issue of diminishing returns and that disk storage is really cheap. Unless you are using Apple devices there's no reason to use ALAC. |
+1 @cleeds He’s correct. There is no loss and the extracted data from FLAC, ALAC or WAV is the same. There was a period of time when at least Stereophile was promoting the idea that the decompression process itself could result in audible effects like jitter depending on the device, CPU, algorithm, etc. and that because FLAC and ALAC used different decompression methods the three (FLAC, ALAC, WAV) could actually sound different even though they held the same data. Honestly I’ve never lent that theory much credibility. It certainly is possible that poorly implemented software with highly variable CPU performance could make for poor replay experience but I’ve never actually heard that happen. If it did happen it would be very much replay device dependent, and in the 21st century I just can’t believe devices could overlook these issues and not mitigate them. Decompression, buffering and clock driven DAC is just not rocket science anymore. |
Meh - I find the difference there to be much less today than 30 years ago. IMHO most of what you are hearing is a slight variation in the digital filters.
From a sound perspective, most tools are going to be equivalent, but from the standpoint of metadata management (author, composer, etc.) I find MediaMonkey on my PC to be superior. |