[Karnitool12]

Soo for a while now ive been buying cds and burning them applelossess.  My equipment is healthy.  But im realizing when I listen to the same song on youtube 720 or 1080 its seems to sound somewhat better... Better soundstage, instrument seperation, and just tonality is cleaner..
Has any one noticed this or is willing to try it and give me some peace of mind lol

 

[Head Injury]

Youtube standard definitions of 360p and 480p use 128 kbps AAC. 240p uses 60 kbps MP3. HD 720p and 1080p use 152 kbps AAC. At least as of May 2011. Keep in mind that this is encoded from the original video's audio, so actual effective bitrate is going to change. Since most uploaded videos will have lossy audio anyway, I imagine it's encoding lossy from lossy and causing a little bit of extra (mostly insignificant) damage.

 

[Karnitool12]

I have one more question.. Does it matter what kind of cd burner you use when it comes to sound quality.  Right now I own a 45$ Samsung external usb burner for my laptop

 

[Head Injury]

I'm assuming you're talking about ripping? Taking the audio from the CD and saving it as ALAC? The drive you use doesn't matter as long as there are no errors. If the software you use have some error checking feature, make sure it's enabled. Something like AccurateRip support would be even better. It checks the data in the ripped files and compares it to logs on their servers, sent from other rips.
 
What OS are you using and what program do you use to rip the audio?

 

[Karnitool12]

I use windows and Im not sure about the second I use Ituneslossless with error correction off because it takes extremely long and Ive tried comparing the one w and w/out and couldnt tell the diff but yea ima kinda new to all this stuff.. : [

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

I use windows and Im not sure about the second I use Ituneslossless with error correction off because it takes extremely long and Ive tried comparing the one w and w/out and couldnt tell the diff but yea ima kinda new to all this stuff.. : [

You probably won't tell the difference between high bitrate AAC and Apple Lossless either. So if you're content not knowing if your copies are perfect, just use lossy and know it's still perfect to your ears. Save you lots of space.
 
If you want to be sure your rips are as good as they can be (even if you can't hear a difference) you can go through the hassle of setting up EAC using these steps. Or just enable error correction. How often do you rip CDs that time is an issue?

 

[Karnitool12]

Lol i get maybe 15-20 every 2-3 weeks

 

[Karnitool12]

So using Itunes error correction will help  make an exact of the cd?