[david8090]

Hi all,
 
I wanted to check this with you guys. I am going to import all my music from scratch again (I've always imported with compression) into iTunes (OSX). But there are a few things that I want to check first:
 
- Is it true that a CD is the ultimate quality?
- All files on CD are WAV which is the most uncompressed (and quite inefficient) format? 
- All FLAC uploads on internet are ripped from CD, right?
- Will I lose any quality when importing with iTunes using ALAC?
- Is it true that songs on compilation CD's (eg. "the best of the 80's") are often significant less quality than a CD from the actual artist itself?
 
Thanks all

 

[adisib]

I'm sorry its forcing all of my text to run together and be unreadable, not my fault the post is like this. Why is head-fi not putting in line breaks that show up in the editor all of the sudden? 1. For humans, yes. 2. Data on a "Red Book" CD is PCM. WAV is a container that usually holds PCM data. It is uncompressed, because rarely do you need to fit more data on a CD than it can already hold in that format. Compressing it to something like ALAC would just require more CPU usage to decompress it during playback for no useful benefit on a CD (while it is beneficial on a hard-drive). There are Compressed CDs, or "MP3 CDs" also termed "Yellow Book" that hold data in MP3 format so more songs can be stored if needed for some reason, but I've never actually seen one. 3. No, digital downloads can come converted from the DXD master. Any music that has a higher sample rate than 44.1k (typically 48k, 96k or 192k) don't come from a CD, unless they are "fake" HD files. 4. No. If anything, you could gain an inaudible amount of quality by having multiple reads making sure there aren't any read-errors getting put out. 5. Never heard of this, it seems doubtful.

 

[RRod]

  - Is it true that songs on compilation CD's (eg. "the best of the 80's") are often significant less quality than a CD from the actual artist itself?
 

 
The mastering for "best of" albums can certainly be different. See the dynamic range database for one set of comparisons.

 

[david8090]

I'm sorry its forcing all of my text to run together and be unreadable, not my fault the post is like this. Why is head-fi not putting in line breaks that show up in the editor all of the sudden? 1. For humans, yes. 2. Data on a "Red Book" CD is PCM. WAV is a container that usually holds PCM data. It is uncompressed, because rarely do you need to fit more data on a CD than it can already hold in that format. Compressing it to something like ALAC would just require more CPU usage to decompress it during playback for no useful benefit on a CD (while it is beneficial on a hard-drive). There are Compressed CDs, or "MP3 CDs" also termed "Yellow Book" that hold data in MP3 format so more songs can be stored if needed for some reason, but I've never actually seen one. 3. No, digital downloads can come converted from the DXD master. Any music that has a higher sample rate than 44.1k (typically 48k, 96k or 192k) don't come from a CD, unless they are "fake" HD files. 4. No. If anything, you could gain an inaudible amount of quality by having multiple reads making sure there aren't any read-errors getting put out. 5. Never heard of this, it seems doubtful.

Thanks mate. That answered my questions Never heard of DXD, seems interesting
 
@ RRod: Wow that's cool. Thanks !