Storing CDs

[ChuMpion3]

Have spent the holidays putting my collection onto the car's hard drive. What a positive difference in quality. I do not know if it was my old iPod, a crappy Bluetooth connection on my iPhone or something else, but the quality of the CD sound in the car was eye opening. I have the HK sound btw.

[danniexi]

lossless will always be better than a lossy file... especially over crappy BT.

[sittingmongoose]

What was the source originally that sounded bad? Pandora, ripped MP3?
Also Bluetooth is always junk, always use a usb cord if you care about sound quality.
Believe it or not you can actually rip CDs on your computer a certain way and transfer them to an MP3 player and they will sound better than the original cd. I didn't believe it but my coworker (who is a freak of nature when it comes to being an audiophile) showed me and demoed the difference and I was floored. It's a pain in the ass to do though and I don't have like any CDs so it's not really useful to me.

[sittingmongoose]

There are ways to reduce jitter on the disc using a blue marker around the edge which allows for a better transfer. Then using better software than normal, you can read the cd better than any CD player normally could and then also encode it to digital better than a CD player can. I am also referring to ripping it lossless into wav. When you rip it lossless though it isn't truly lossless, there is loss in the transfer. And there is also loss when the CD player reads the original cd to play it through the CD player. My friends method reduces that loss significantly. It ends up bringing the sound stage to life and improving positioning.
Again I didn't think it would make an improvement because of what you said but it does.

[vonmayr]

Originally Posted by sittingmongoose

Believe it or not you can actually rip CDs on your computer a certain way and transfer them to an MP3 player and they will sound better than the original cd. I didn't believe it but my coworker (who is a freak of nature when it comes to being an audiophile) showed me and demoed the difference and I was floored. It's a pain in the ass to do though and I don't have like any CDs so it's not really useful to me.

There are two methods to rip from CD to a lossless file that you can then play back at much higher quality levels. Both store data at roughly half the density of what's on a CD (but it's much larger than the MP3 method, which uses lossy compression).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLACFLAC compression is open source. The major benefit of this method is that it is open source and very quick to encode and decode. The major drawback is that it isn't supported by Apple which means you can't use the files on idevices. Why? Because they have their own lossless compression algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless ALAC is Apple's lossless compression format, and can be played from idevices because it creates MP4 files. It was originally a proprietary Apple software, but was released open source in 2011.

One more link for more data: http://www.mcelhearn.com/the-abcs-of...s-music-files/

Originally Posted by sittingmongoose

It's a pain in the ass to do though and I don't have like any CDs so it's not really useful to me.

I guess that's one of the benefits of owning a metric shit ton of CD's and holding on to them!

[sittingmongoose]

Yea I have like 3 CDs so the method was lost on me but the ones I have my friend filled with his magic method and in wav format which is the highest quality format and everything supports it however it's the largest file size

[sittingmongoose]

Yes they run on pixie dust. If a computer is low on pixie dust then it won't read files correctly.

[dmnc02]

Originally Posted by Railgun

It's a green marker, and has been shown to be a bunch of bunk. This isn't going to turn into a $10,000 power cable thread is it?

Loss in the transfer? Do you know how a computer works?

http://marlene-d.blogspot.co.uk/2012...en-marker.html

The green marker is indeed a "bunch of bunk", but timing jitter is not and can be measured: for example, Stereophile measures the jitter spectrum of every CD transport it reviews. The issue is not a loss of bits, but small shifts in the timing of the transitions between 0's and 1's. The timing of the bits matters for a digitized waveform.

[dmnc02]

Originally Posted by Railgun

I get that. But that's nothing to do with the source or how you encode hence my comment about the signal path.

It does. The electrical noise produce by a spinning transport affects jitter and so does the noise produced by the additional processing required to decompress on the fly lossless compressed formats. That is the reason ripping CDs (or SACDs) to an uncompressed format does sound better (in a system having sufficient resolution) than using a CD transport or ripping CDs to a lossless compressed format.

Of course, all of this is largely irrelevant for car audio.

[dmnc02]

Originally Posted by Railgun

There's no reason a physical transport that's correctly setup should sound any different than non physical media provided the above.

What I am trying to say is that there is a reason (jitter) and it can be measured (as Stereophile does).

If you believe that audiophiles who are willing to spend a lot of money on a transport or music server (when they already have a very good DAC) are fooling themselves, that is fine: just keep in mind for perspective that most of them look the same way at what car enthusiasts do

[sittingmongoose]

I'm not an expert, my coworker is. Whatever he does for whatever reason. It makes the music sound better on a flash drive than it does off the original cd. I'm not good at explaining the reasoning behind it but I know for a fact it does because I have heard it several times.

I've heard the difference in his systems which are phenomenal. On my systems with are great but not the best and even in my m3 which sounds terrible and my for escape which has a decent Sony system for what it is.

My original point was, believe it or not you can make songs sound better through a ripped wav of a cd than the original.

[Irishsig]

I like 8 Tracks.