Compare: Direct CD listening v. Apple lossless listening - Page 17

Actually there is... I hang out with a lot of serious record collectors and music fans. The topic for discussion is usually which version of a particular record is the best... sometimes it's the original LP, other times a remastered CD is better. It all depends. It's good to talk to people who have a wide range of experience with music. You get a lot better tips for how to make music sound better than you do with gearheads.

See ya
Steve

It would cost me a LOT of money. I have seven iPods tucked into a small shoulder bag. Each one has a different type of music on it- jazz, rock n' roll, classical, pop vocals, blues, etc... All together it adds up to about 120 gigs and many many months of music. If I wasn't able to compress the music, I would need an awful lot of iPods to be able to carry that library of music around with me. The best part is that at the compression rate that I use, I can't hear a difference doing a direct A/B level matched comparison. I'm not losing anything, and I have a lifetime of listening in a small shoulder bag.

To me, music is a lot more important than inaudible sound quality differences.

See ya
Steve

Its inpracticality to you is not a fault of the format. I do not have a single problem.


Perhaps why I use it. I lost the txt file I had of reasons to use Lossless, suffice to say there were a lot.

I know of one, if you've no problem with its size, why not use it?

gearhead moi

Well, sure, of course I always try to get a sense of people's opinion on mastering when more than one version is available. I meant more like, what if there is only one version, and one doesn't like it?.. But I can answer to myself, this is also sometimes done - I just remembered a recent discussion among Metallica fans. There is a particular album that almost everyone feels is not bassy enough, and fans were exchanging tips on how to make one's own "remaster"...
And more recently, Radiohead was offering fans a re-mastering contest: separate tracks to download, make your own master, compete with others...

Actually, I understand Steve used the word gearhead not meaning one who has many gadgets, but rather someone who obsesses more about sound (SQ) than music.

As for the storage capacity, yeah, I guess I was referring to the current iPods Classic, holding 160 GB each, and computer HDs. On my PowerBook's 80 GB HD, yes, music does take up a lot. But external storage is cheap, my next HD will be 500 GB, for peanuts

I'd love it if more than 2 or 3 people I knew could talk about that while we share a pint.

I guess if people get the absolute maximum quality possible for their budget/circumstance then that's all they can do, and that's great. But to inform people with discussions like this on how they can get better results is great too. I'm the opposite to an expert, and learning all the time, but i'm sure there are people who don't know about kbps and would benefit from discussions like this. If 128 kbps sounds average to me, and say I can't tell the difference between 320kbps and 10000kbps, wouldn't I still be better off with 10000kps if I could? Again it comes down to preference and circumstance. I use a CDP and have no storage issues.

You just have to find the right bar...

I went to a club the other night to see Little Jimmy Dickens perform. He's 87 years old- the grand old man of the Grand Ol Opry, having joined the Opry in 1947. I looked around me, and the audience contained a number of celebrities (Brian Wilson, Harry Shearer), but the vast majority was record collectors that I recognized from record swap meets and parties at music friends' houses. If you took all the records owned by all the people in that small nightclub and stacked them up, they'd reach to the moon!

See ya
Steve

If you use a CD player, you have no choice but to burn to redbook CDs.

Generally, it's good to find your threshold through experimentation with bitrates and different types of music. Then up the encoding quality a notch to provide a little headroom for error. Filesize that you can't hear is fine if you don't listen to a lot of music, but my advice is always to listen to a lot of music.

See ya
Steve

Lossless is great for archiving. I have a wall full of CDs. I just want to fit them all in a small bag too. iPods generally perform very poorly with long songs in lossless, and it's always better to have more music to listen to when you are away from home.

See ya
Steve

So much of this is dependent upon the DAC isn't it? Digital out from Mac source converted in a high quality (very high quality DAC) is going to compare favorably to a high end CD player to my ear. Much greater difference when making comparisons to an iPod or even iMod.

Not necessarily. To test all this I did an interesting experiment last night. I have an Arcam Transport / DAC and I plugged in my Mac via optical. The Arcam DAC (Delta 250) also functions as a sort of digital pre-amp because you can switch between 7 digital inputs (via remote) so there is no issue with comparative volume levels. All these then fed a Naim pre/power set and Ruark speakers.

The Arcam transport playing redbook sounds better than the same material via uncompressed AIFF straight from the Mac's internal HD no question. Intersting. What about comparing another copy of the same disc playing into the DAC from my DVD player (Pioneer DVD-575A) via SPDIF and switching between all three sources?

The Mac HD and DVD player are hard to tell apart. Maybe the DVD player has a slight edge here and there but this could be the SPDIF sounding better than the Optical from the Mac, even using a high quality glass optical interconnect.

But the Arcam transport sounds a lot better than either adding a sense of dimensionality and realism to the recordings. This is a fairly decent set up which would have cost around 3500 USD about 10 years ago, so not madly expensive.

Why does the the Arcam transport sound so much better? one possible explanation is jitter. It's coupled to the DAC via SPDIF but also has another optical coupling which carries clock data. Another perhaps is the Philips swing arm mechanism sounding better than a DVD transport.

Bottom line for me is if I want to listen to digital music I want the best reproduction I can afford and conventional CDs still offer this, mainly because the hardware is more mature I think.

Yes the ipod is convenient and lossless sounds great on headphones on the move, but at home I am prepared to put up with a little more inconvenience, choose which piece of music I want to actually listen to from the shelf and slap it in the drawer, when I can't be bothered with firing up my turntable of course....

I trying my hardest.

Might this be the program:
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