[FTLOSM]

Long story short, came in greeted by many, explained need for good headphones got lots of great advice, ordered up Senn 595's and Senn EH250's and a Portable Amp Electric Ave PAV2 and all that should be here soon.

Now that the equipment end is figured out onto maximizing the Rio S50 I have in terms of HOW and WHAT WAY is the best for sound quality in terms of taking my cd collection and putting it into the Rio.

Yes eventually I would love to upgrade the mp3 player but for now it will do, till my visa recovers a bit from the headphones and amp LOL, but I have a stack of cds here that I want to put into folders on my pc then on my Rio, and I wanna know for the best sound quality what programs do you guys use and more important what settings do you use to convert your cds to mp3s etc.

I currently use an older program called Audio Catalyst 2.0 and encode my cds to 192 kbit and the rest is basically the defaults of the program, seems to work ok and all but wondered if there was anything I should be doing (higher bit rate, certain setting, not use mp3 but some other extension etc etc)

I have only done a few cds and that is what totally sparked the use of my mp3 player again here, altho at this time I am still waiting for headphones (have some junkers here) before I spend a ton of time putting in all my cds I wanted to confirm that the process I am doing it in gives me the best sound I can get.

Thanks for everyones help so far, and I apologize if this is in the wrong forum.

Bill

 

[davidd]

I'd use Exact Audio Copy and Lame 3.97b1 using vbr -V 2 if I was ripping to mp3. you can get more info on this kind of stuff at hydrogenaudio.org

 

[azncookiecutter]

eac and lame 3.97 is the best way to do this. And everyone here will tell you that. Go V0 if you want max SQ.

 

[spiritwalker]

i dont know if you want to try it, but try audiograbber and the lame 3.97b. the bitrate depends on the type of music your listenin to as well, i listen to a ton of rock and stuff like that so, 128kbps is fine, some songs need 192 or even 224, but 128 is usually fine for what i do. if your listenin to music that has many instruments playin at once, a higher bitrate is probably needed, and if you can, try usin ogg vorbis, the best encoder imo.

 

[nph134]

I've been reading in to this sorta thing lots recently.

I just bought some Sennheiser HD650s and a WNA headphone amp and realised my entire collection of CDs I ripped at 192kbps with Lame sounds ***** through this gear, although sounded fine with my cheaper headphones and mp3 player.

I got a Sony D-NE20 portable CD player and use the line out so as to avoid the problems with mp3s and reduced sound quality.

I'm planning to redo my cd collection at 256 or 320kps (grrrrrrr!) and put all my fav cds on an ipod nano to see if i get get decent sound that way too.

Anyway the upshot is after reading around lots is:

128kbps - Fraunhofer encoder definitely best (u can get it with CDDA 8)
192kbps and above - Fraunhofer and Lame pretty even here with frau just winning.

encoding at 256kbps is a good trade off between file size and quality as the difference between 256 and 320 quality wise is not huge.

best for ripping: Exact Audio Copy-0.95b3
encoding: I'd say CDDA with Fraunhofer or cddex with Lame (which is free)

One worrying thing and the main reason I bought the portable CD player is that I did a quick phase/frequency analysis (both by ear and using Adobe audition 1.5)and found even at high bit rates (256 and 320 with hofer and lame) that the phase information in the mp3s is pretty ******. Not bad enough so u notice much with dance/rock/mediocer recordings.....but if u have top notch headphones and listen to a good recording of classical music the mp3 will sound "muddied" compared to a wave or CD. The soundstage is reduced and the instruments have less separation and generally that little bit extra sparkle and magic is gone

I'm in the process of doing a proper phase / frequency analysis of different encoders at different kbps compared to wav file so I'll post that here if anyones interested when I'm done.

 

[fjf]

http://www.ubernet.org/index.php

 

[Chri5peed]

If you've been reading on this nph, then why is there absolutely no mention of VBR in your post?

VBR = Variable bitrate, and not anyones opinion but below 320Kbps: VBR > ABR > CBR.

ABR = Average bitrate, CBR is constant...

 

[azncookiecutter]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spiritwalker i dont know if you want to try it, but try audiograbber and the lame 3.97b. the bitrate depends on the type of music your listenin to as well, i listen to a ton of rock and stuff like that so, 128kbps is fine, some songs need 192 or even 224, but 128 is usually fine for what i do. if your listenin to music that has many instruments playin at once, a higher bitrate is probably needed, and if you can, try usin ogg vorbis, the best encoder imo.

uh, 128 kbps is pretty much unlistenable, even with only a moderately decent rig. Unless you only plan to use that music only for exercise needs, and that's when it is acceptable. But for regular portable use, such as commuting, 128kpbs will not be acceptable.