CD-Rom drive

[fishtankfish]

Does the CD-Rom/DVD-Rom/whatever optical drive you use on your computer for music make a difference in sound quality? i'm not referring to the soundcard at all, just the drive. I use Windows XP and someone told me that XP uses digital extraction so it shouldnt matter. Can anyone shed a little more light on this situation?


thanks

 

[Asmo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fishtankfish Does the CD-Rom/DVD-Rom/whatever optical drive you use on your computer for music make a difference in sound quality? i'm not referring to the soundcard at all, just the drive. I use Windows XP and someone told me that XP uses digital extraction so it shouldnt matter. Can anyone shed a little more light on this situation? thanks

Yes it does.

You want a good drive that has good DAE (digital audio extraction), any well known modern CD/DVD drives today are good, LG, Plextor, BenQ, etc, so its really not a big deal unless you have a noname cdrom.

For playback directly from the CDROM, its best to rip to hard drive. I think that is fairly obvious.

 

[Fr_eak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fishtankfish Does the CD-Rom/DVD-Rom/whatever optical drive you use on your computer for music make a difference in sound quality? i'm not referring to the soundcard at all, just the drive. I use Windows XP and someone told me that XP uses digital extraction so it shouldnt matter. Can anyone shed a little more light on this situation? thanks

they do make a different

i upgrade my CD-rom from a lite-on CD-RW to a Plextor Premium. There is significant improvement in SQ.

In the spec/description of the Plextor Premium, it has one sentence saying "high quality audio extraction"

 

[fishtankfish]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Asmo Yes it does. You want a good drive that has good DAE (digital audio extraction), any well known modern CD/DVD drives today are good, LG, Plextor, BenQ, etc, so its really not a big deal unless you have a noname cdrom. For playback directly from the CDROM, its best to rip to hard drive. I think that is fairly obvious.

so when you say best to rip to a hard drive...i have my collection ripped but its at Lame VBR ~192, is that still preferrable?

 

[Asmo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fishtankfish so when you say best to rip to a hard drive...i have my collection ripped but its at Lame VBR ~192, is that still preferrable?

Well, lame extreme VBR preset is great for mp3, but preferably its best to rip to FLAC, APE, or ALAC (these 3 choices being lossless) to store your music.

 

[fishtankfish]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Asmo Well, lame extreme VBR preset is great for mp3, but preferably its best to rip to FLAC, APE, or ALAC (these 3 choices being lossless) to store your music.

I have about 250 cds, how much hard drive space would that require in lossless? and foobar will run lossless right?