Burning audio cd from itunes

Personally I see absolutely no point in spending money on good replay equipment if what you feed it is inferior and 256 is inferior I feel. There is a school of thought that feels a CD ripped to Wav and then burned to a blank CD sounds slightly richer. I have not tried that though

Are you just copying 256k files and burning them to a CD, kind of like data storage, but your CD player can still read the 256k files off the CD.

Or are taking 256k audio files and burning them to a CD to make an "Music Audio CD" like they sell in a store?

 

The better the DAC, the better the 256k mp3 music files sound.

....what?

 

 

To answer your question tojamm, if your DAC on your CD player is indeed audibly better then the answer is yes. The burning process will not do anything to the sound if it is working correctly.

I would think the "music audio CD" you made from a 256K source would not sound any better the the original 256k file.

As your not adding anything to the burned Audio CD that is not already in the original 256k file.

So burn the CD as a "storage" CD keeping the 256k as is.

 

Interesting and intriguing idea. However, I don't really see how the process could improve sound in any way.

 

 

Pretty much this.

regarding the ripping a cd from wav, I don't either but this has been around for a while and some of the UK HiFi press seem to think there is a difference. I don't have a decent enough CD set up to test this theory though and in all honesty when I get back into home based HiFi again it will be vinyl!

I don't think most standalone CD players are going to be able to interpret a storage CD though.

 

Really no need to test it, the theory has no merit. A wav file contains the exact data that a CD has bit-for-bit. The pits and landings of a CD are translated to 1's and 0's and are given a header and a wrapper to store some additional info and let the computer know how to handle the data within it.

 

Any change of audio data as a result of ripping a CD and burning it(given no DSP is added when burning/ripping) is going to be the result of errors. So if there's any change, it's not going to be good. Maybe an additional artifact or two...

Edited by chewy4 - 12/11/12 at 8:47am

Note that many iTunes files sold on the iTunes Music Store don't come from CD masters and have durations that don't fit CD boundaries exactly (mod 588), so unless your burning software takes some precautions to burn all the files as a single stream while appropriately moving track boundaries, you might get unwanted gaps between tracks in the resulting CD-R.
Edited by skamp - 12/11/12 at 9:40am

I would think there at at least a decent number of CD players that can read an mp3 (and other music) files?

Guess it's better to invest in a USB flash drive instead of a CD player then.

It's probably more common in recent one's; I haven't really been keeping up with modern standalone CD-players to be honest. All of mine have been redbook only, but for all I know mp3 cd support could be a standard by now.

 

You need to consider that if it's yellow book format a lot more things are required. The CD player needs to recognized and decompress the audio data which would require for it to have some memory for a buffer, and it would need to know the algorithms required for decompression as well. I don't think there's a lot of standalone CD players that can handle yellow book in that many formats unless that's something new. MP3 is the farthest I've seen this tech go, but like I said I haven't been keeping up. Maybe AAC CD support is a new thing.

 

Considering you are handling lossy files, you want them to go through as little transcoding steps as possible. If you want to put your mp3 songs on a CD, just copy them directly by making a data CD, don't convert them to Audio CD.

There won't be a difference in sound, no. The storage CD will have the advantage of meta-data retrieval(if your CD player has a display for this), and less time spinning the CD because of buffering.