I'm aware that Schiit doesn't consider 32 ohm cans "ideal" here, but my irrational reason was that having enjoyed tube amplification for years, I wanted to try an otl amp, and the new desktop system was a cheap way to do it.
Oh, I listen in a quiet environment, and 11:30 on the volume is just great.
Excuse the bumbling earlier non-post.
This was exactly where I was going with that question - because while they say that, they also show pictures of the thing hooked up to Grados (!!!), and I figured *someone* out there would've tried it by now. Good to hear it works - I'm assuming it's dead quiet (at least until you turn it up to insane levels)? Or is there some hiss/hum?
Can someone explain to me how ripping a cd to a higher sample rate than it was originally recorded at helps anything. How can you get more out of the cd than is there to begin with?
You don't rip it to "higher than it was originally recorded at" - CD audio is 16-bit, 44.1khz, 1411kbit/s; good quality lossy rips will be 16/44.1 @ 320k, fantastic quality will be 16/44.1 with lossless VBR (and will generally come out around 1000k/s). The point is a lot like AudioQuest's marketing spiel - do no harm. You won't ever "unscrew" problems that already exist, but you can certainly try to prevent creating MORE problems.
I agree. Start with good quality lossless files before improving anything downstream. But help me out here; I'm ripping cds to 16/44 or 24/96 depending on my impression of the original recording quality and desire to not eat up too much space. Flac files end up 200 to 600 mb and wav to over 2 gb. What do you mean "...to at least 320..."?
Thanks!
No point in ripping 24/96 - that's a waste of space (the CD is only 16/44.1; there is zero point in forcing SRC). 16/44.1 @ lossless is the absolute best case scenario. 200-600MB per TRACK is absolutely screwed up (do you mean 200-600 per DISC?); I rip WMA-L (same difference) and expect ~20MB per track (some more, some less, depending on length and what the VBR does).
WAV @ 2GB even if we're talking the entire disc is totally screwed up - a complete 1:1 clone of a CD should never exceed 700MB. No idea what you're doing, but it ain't right.
And what I mean by "at least 320" is at least 320k (as in 320k/s) - high bitrate lossy (pick your poison: MP3, WMA, OGG, etc). Generally speaking 320k will be on-par with a lossless rip. And of course you're gonna have some folks who claim they can hear a difference no matter what content is encoded, all the time, in any situation, under any circumstances, etc etc yadda yadda, and others who claim they're the same thing no matter what content is encoded, all the time, in any situation, under any circumstances, etc etc yadda yadda; I think both sides are too extreme for their own good. Personally I rip lossless because I have a lot of storage, and basically don't care about space requirements - I also like having a lossless rip available to re-encode to a lossy file for mobile or whatever other use (not that I've ever done it, but I like having the option). I have a lot of older stuff ripped in at 320k or lossy VBR (which will usually end up around 320k) and don't really hear any compression artefacts - there's much ado about nothing when it comes to "perfect" digital audio methinks.
If space is a concern, 320k is a good place to be; if you have a ton of disk space and don't care, just rip lossless and don't worry about it.
FFrom what I've read/experienced you can't rip to a higher bit from something that for instance, a downloaded song recorded at 256kbps, is going to remain at 256kbps, because the information is just not availiable to get more kbps. But you can rip to a lower kbps.
You can "upsample" or "resample" the data into a larger container, but it doesn't add any fidelity - for example ripping a CD at 24/96; the computer is creating data to "fill in" all of the extra bits on the samples so that it will be 24-bit, and is performing SRC so that it will be 96khz (up from 44.1), but it isn't going to offer any higher fidelity than a CD (and it may actually screw things up, if the SRC is hammed up).
In terms of compression, you're exactly right that you cannot make a 256k file into anything "better" than a 256k file - but you can certainly stuff it down to 128k (you can never "undo" that though, you'd have to start with the 256k file again if you wanted to create, say, a 160k file).
The issue is to NOT rip it at a lower or more compressed rate.
For example if ripping in iTunes, select lossless FLAC and not MP3 or AAC
Exactly. Out of curiosity (I don't use iTunes): will iTunes actually rip to FLAC? Or will it only rip to ALAC? (not that it really matters - lossless is lossless).
Lossless is always the "ideal" when it comes to ripping CDs, but generally you can get away with *some* compression (320k is around 4:1) without problems - and again, I'd really only worry about this if you've either got a teensy-tiny hard-drive (and seriously, disks are cheap these days...), or a mobile device that won't support lossless containers (which isn't entirely uncommon; there's a reasonable list of devices that support WMA-L, I think at least a few Apple components will support ALAC, and I'm sure there's plug-ins or hacks to get FLAC working on some of the more popular devices out there, but otherwise its generally lossy containers).
