Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo MP3's vs. CD's

I can't tell the difference between a 320 kb/sec mp3 and a FLAC. Perhaps with really high end gear you can. I suspect any differences would be to do with dynamics and soundstage.

I still rip my CDs to FLAC though, and my vinyl, because I don't like the idea of losing anything from the original, and I have the diskspace.

For Nero users there is a free plugin on the web that lets you burn FLAC files back to audio CD format.

A nice tool for people who like to use FLAC files.

Yes, I use it to burn compilation CDs for the car.

So how large is your FLAC collection?

I'm now up to about 13k music files on my PC. of those about 3.5k are now FLAC but I'm in the process of going through everything and re ripping, downloading to FLAC format.drive space is becoming an issue, who would have thunk 2 terabytes wouldn't be enough space for video & audio files!! If you're looking for a player, i recommend Foobar. I've found its given me the best sound when outputting to my PC speakers or to my M60's/QS4's. I'm constantly impressed how well my Receiver can "surroundize" some of the songs.

Well, this is my first post as a new owner of a pair of M80s, so hello.

Anyways, I'm running a Squeezebox duet hooked up to my 3808ci (had the SB prior). All my music is stored on a Linux box in the bedroom, encoded in FLAC (compression level 8). I encoded to lossless when I lost all my MP3s ripped via Exact Audio Copy.

Another good reason to go lossless is that if a new format comes out, you can transcode to the new format without any degradation in quality. Converting a format that's compressed to another compressed format will result in degraded quality. The alternative would be popping in all your CDs again to rip to the new format. . .done that, been there. Not a fun experience.

If you haven't checked it out yet, look at dBpoweramp. It will let you rip to FLAC, tag your music from four different sources (including Album art), and comes with a utility to transcode all your music to other formats. It's not free but was worth the fifty bucks for me personally.

Whatever ripper you choose, makes sure it does "secure" rips. Do it once the right way. Unless you periodically enjoy ripping your library for weeks on end.

Long run I would love to have all lossless on a hard disk or via stream once that day comes just not to have to wonder, however, Rhapsody connection via 3808 was definitely listenable, whereas running a decent iRiver or Samsung (or Sandisk) portable player into the HT system with Rhapsody content was interesting but honestly was no cigar, and running the Sandisk into the car audio with decent speakers was no contest in comparison to HD Radio, which mostly seems to beat analog audio by a fair margin.

If you encode at a reasonable bitrate with a proper encoder(this is key), you'll never notice.

I would, however, use a better codec. MP3 is over 20 years old. Use Vorbis, or Musepack; anything performs better than MP3. A lot of modern players are starting to support these codecs. My Rio Karma supported Vorbis and FLAC since 2004. They do much better on blind listening tests than MP3 at lower bitrates, and at typical bitrates do much better on test clips that MP3 fails miserably on.

It wasn't until I modified a PCM1716 based D/A converter with a good output stage & linear power supply that I could really tell a difference between certain MP3s and the original file. Even after I did this, a good LAME --preset standard MP3 vs. the original WAV was something I could not determine with better than 12/16 in a blind test, and neither could a lot of the people listening. This is on a good system in a decently treated room, so I wouldn't go nuts about it.

With the D/A in this yamaha receiver I had before, none of that mattered. It was like a veil. This current D/A had a 4558 IC for the output stage, which is like a distortion pedal(probably why it's so often used in distortion pedals!), and masked lots of artifacts present in 128k material. The new DAC with new output stage, new film coupling caps from PCM1716 to output IC, bypass caps on output stage, and new PSU cost $115! When I saw a PCM1716 based DAC going for $79.99, I knew it'd be worth the time to open it up. It beats a lot of the audiophile esoterica nonsense I've seen going for $1500-$5k & up in standalone CD players that use 5 year old D/A chips and output stages with 5532s from 1976.