[Hales]

This is my first post here, but I have been reading the forums for a while now. I would like to start off by thanking the forum members for the great advice on the Sandisk Sansa Express.

I had been looking for something to replace my dead 40g iPod, but did not want to invest in another iPod since the current generation is likely to be replaced soon. I would have purchased a Zune, but the lack of lossless and Audible support left me scratching my head. I decided to just get an inexpensive player that supported audible and eventually pick up a disk based system in the future.

After checking out the Nano, Shuffle, Stone, and Zen, I settled on the Express. For $80 I was able to get the 1gb player and a 2gb expansion card. It sounds pretty good with my Shure e3c headphones and will even drive my Sennheiser HD600s to moderate levels. It also has much better FM reception than my old Rio Chiba.

My problem is that I am unsure of how to encode my cds. It does not support Windows Pro 10 or Windows Lossless. I am stuck with WMA 9.2 (up to 320), MP3 via Lame 3.97, or Wave files. I am also not sure of whether to use cbr or vbr.

My goal is to get the best possible sound, and I need to figure out what the best software and codec are. Wave files are out since I only have 3gb.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Peyotero]

vbr would be fine.

 

[monolith]

I'd go for the V0 preset on LAME. It's pretty much indistinguishable from constant 320, but about 75% of the size. That's what I use for ripping all my CDs.

 

[Hales]

So definitely mp3 over wma?

 

[monolith]

Yeah, I'd take mp3 over wma any day.

 

[Mors]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hales /img/forum/go_quote.gif This is my first post here, but I have been reading the forums for a while now. I would like to start off by thanking the forum members for the great advice on the Sandisk Sansa Express. I had been looking for something to replace my dead 40g iPod, but did not want to invest in another iPod since the current generation is likely to be replaced soon. I would have purchased a Zune, but the lack of lossless and Audible support left me scratching my head. I decided to just get an inexpensive player that supported audible and eventually pick up a disk based system in the future. After checking out the Nano, Shuffle, Stone, and Zen, I settled on the Express. For $80 I was able to get the 1gb player and a 2gb expansion card. It sounds pretty good with my Shure e3c headphones and will even drive my Sennheiser HD600s to moderate levels. It also has much better FM reception than my old Rio Chiba. My problem is that I am unsure of how to encode my cds. It does not support Windows Pro 10 or Windows Lossless. I am stuck with WMA 9.2 (up to 320), MP3 via Lame 3.97, or Wave files. I am also not sure of whether to use cbr or vbr. My goal is to get the best possible sound, and I need to figure out what the best software and codec are. Wave files are out since I only have 3gb. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

If I were you, I'd use mp3 Lame. I'd rip the same track a few times at different bitrates - a 128,192,224,320. See at what point you can't tell the difference between that and the original, and then rip the rest of your stuff at that bitrate. I wouldn't rip everything at 320 just for the sake of it, if you yourself can't hear a difference between that and 192 and 320

 

[Hales]

I can definitely hear a difference in 192 vs uncompressed on my traditional source amp speakers setup. The cymbals seems to dissolve into white noise instead of sounding like cymbals. I have a fairly high end system by audiophile standards with a Sonic Frontiers Line 1 Special Edition tube preamp into a Sonic Frontiers Power 2 tube amp then Hales Revelation 3 or Hales Transcendence 1 speakers. The Line 1 also has an excellent headphone out made for them by headroom. One caveat to that headphone out is that it is tube-based instead of the usual transistor design that headroom makes - so there is too much tube hiss for my e3c but its perfect on the HD600s.

One of my favorite albums is the Jon Brion version of the new Fiona Apple album Extraordinary Machine. Since it was never released I have to rely on my downloaded at 192 mp3s that were burned to CD by Nero 7 pro. One a really good system, the cymbals and macrodynamics stand out as wrong - but not wrong enough to not listen. I would pay $100 for the "real" version of that album

Back to encoding... You are right on what I should do. I will encode some of the tracks that I have listened to the most over the past few years and vary the bitrates. I will then burn those mp3 files back to CD so that I have the option of comparing bitrates on my familiar CD source (playing burned mp3 sourced discs - as well as the original disc) as well as running the headphone out on the Sansa into the big stereo rig. This will also allow me to listen with my HD600s as well as speakers.

I shall report my findings!! Thanks again and let me know if I should refine or change my testing logic.

 

[Febs]

If you use LAME 3.97, be sure to use the -V presets.

I suggest starting with something like -V 5 or -V 6. If you can hear artifacts at that level, move to the next setting (the -V settings increase in quality as the number decreases, so -V 4 is higher quality than -V 5).

I do NOT recommend using CBR under any circumstances for portable use. The -V settings are variable bit rate, and have been highly tuned over the years to produce the highest quality available at a given setting. So, for example, -V 2 will create files that average around 192kbps. However, these files will contain frames of up to 320kbps as necessary, so they will be substantially better than similarly-sized 192kbps CBR files. Despite what some of the posts here at Head-Fi may suggest, there are very few people who can hear the difference between -V 2 and an uncompressed original, and even settings like -V 5 can be transparent to a large majority.

 

[jmourik]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Febs /img/forum/go_quote.gif ...there are very few people who can hear the difference between -V 2 and an uncompressed original, and even settings like -V 5 can be transparent to a large majority.

Certainly true for me. Also, where do you listen mostly to your Sansa? I use my Zune a lot when travelling, so background noise is always there. Which will make it even harder to distinguish between say v3 and v2, etc... So for me it was more important to be able to put more music on my Zune than put the best quality on there. I settled for aac q .45 for now. Until I get a 100Gb flash player that is

 

[Hales]

Thanks - and I will follow your advice on using the -V settings. One of the reasons I prefer metal dome and ribbon tweeters is resolution they provide in the cymbals. I listen to a wide variety of music and when I am listening to jazz albums I want to know if I am hearing brushes on a snare head or brushes lightly tapping on cymbals. Its all about the details for me.

I may even try some quasi blind testing to make sure I am not fooling myself. I should be able to burn a CD from mp3's of various bitrates as well as uncompressed wave files. My Marantz 8260 will show me the CD text data, so in theory I could put it on shuffle, listen until I think I know if its an mp3, and then look at the display to see if I was right or wrong. If I were to put the bitrate of the track in the cdtext data, I would be able to see if there was a level where I consistently guessed wrong.

Thanks again for the help!

 

[jmourik]

Or give Foobar2000 with the abx plugin a try!