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Today's Featured Head-Fi Blog: A Japanese headfier's monologue (Sasaki)
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I've alwayz wanted to dig a dead thread. But it just goes to show encoding and ripping is still just as important as componets in home and portable audio.
... eats away at my Irivers storage space. I only encode at that because the Iriver doesn't take a version of lossless, at least I don't think it does. I need my home rig before I run out of space!
Assuming you have an H1x0 model, you can use the Rockbox firmware on your iRiver instead. It supports FLAC files
Assuming you have an H1x0 model, you can use the Rockbox firmware on your iRiver instead. It supports FLAC files
River H140 (optical out) -> Headroom Micro DAC -> RSA Emmeline SR-71 -> Sennheiser HD 650 (stock cable)
Wow. That's pretty cool! I own an iHP140 myself but the size of the
flac files are too large. It might only be useful for favorite tracks only.
I use ogg files with a setting of 5. With my Shure E3c's, the sound
is not disappointing at all.
Tell me, does a Headroom DAC really do that much for the sound on
the iRiver? Me & my friends all have iRivers & I passed on your interesting
rig info to a colleague (a vinyl guy with 30 years of audio exp) & he
thought a micro DAC would be overkill. Please share your thoughts
with regard to the Headroom DAC & its usefulness (or lack thereof).
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Home Setup:
Xitel USB > [RCA Cable] > Shellbrook Audio Hybrid Head w/ Regulated Power Supply > Grado SR-80
I have just ripped my Buena Vista Social Club with my laptop (Dell Inspiron 4150 with Debian Linux), and compressed it rightaway with oggenc (quality 3). After that, I plugged my Sennheiser 650 to my Azur 640A, and compared the cd sound (Azur 640C) with that from the computer. I cannot tell the difference, honestly.
Regards,
I wanted to edit my post, but somehow I cannot save changes... Anyway, I just wanted to write "Dell Inspiron 4150 with Debian Linux", and "I used oggenc with quality setting 3". I realized my post wasn't that well written... Sorry!
Note that there is quite a range of difference in MP3 quality depending on the compressor you use (at the same bit rate). Some low quality compressors roll off high frequencies to simplify the compression, others have dips in the frequency response all the way through. The better ones tuck the losses behind dynamics more, and have a flatter overall response.
Do a web search on this, as I have seen one site somewhere that did a comparison between 4 compressors and the differences were quite startling - even when all were at the same bit rate.
I realize on a site like Head-Fi, people are going to be judging encoding rate based on the sound quality, but on the flip side, you have to consider the encoding rate itself and the extra kilobytes even a slight change to settings will generate.
If space is more of a premium than sound quality, obviously one will need to weigh the advantages of each VBR setting and determine if the setting is worth it. 400KB extra per song for 100 songs = 40MB less available space; if you turn a setting back to reclaim that 40MB, that's 40 more megabytes of music you can stick onto a CD-R! And on a 700MB CD-R, that can be valuable.
It all comes down to how much sound quality you want per kilobyte. The absolute minimum anyone should use should be VBR limited between 96 and 192 kb/s (ripped by EAC, encoded with LAME of course).
Also you Head-Fi'ers seem to be forgetting the point of using MP3. Of course I understand the desire to have as much sound quality as possible, but MP3 is used because it compresses WAV as much as it does. It's designed for the kilobyte zealots, not the audiophiles.
Linear Mode
