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Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10904 05/17/03 03:27 PM
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I agree with you regarding MP3, Chess, but he asked about MP3 so I answered. HDD space is so cheap now, that I'm actually planning on ripping all of my CD's losslessly. but Ogg would be my choice if I wanted lossy compression.

Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10905 05/19/03 06:45 AM
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The problem here is that ogg is essentially a waste of time but for my PCs. We have multiple mp3 CD players at home, one in my car (and soon one in a second car), and a couple of iPods (the old 20G and the new 30G). Hence I use mp3; it makes my life (and my wife's) a heck of a lot easier. There's no shortage of disk space here; my entire mp3 collection uses a small fraction of the 600G RAID array in the basement (480G usable space). There's more than another half terabyte of disk space on other machines at home. Disk is cheap.

Re. bitrate, there are a lot of factors. One is the source material, a second is the target listening environment, another is the encoder (some are better than others), For my car (Alpine CDA-7878, Alpine MRD-F752, MB Quart components, Sunfire subwoofer), for example, 160kpbs with a good encoder sounds very good for most material. It's a convertible, so the noise floor is quite high. But it sounds great when I have the hardtop on too. Less dyanmic range can actually be a good thing here too, due to the high noise floor. On the highway in traffic, the noise floor is at least 80dB if I'm near a truck. You can guess what kind of hearing problems I'd have (and power and capacitors I'd need) if I wanted 80dB of usable dynamic range in such a situation. There are times I wish I had a compressor in the car (wall-to-wall concrete corridors, for example, where rolling up the windows has little effect). Classical music is unlistenable if I have the top down and I'm on the highway. I could compress the heck out of it before encoding, but that takes most of the life out of it and would ruin it when I have the top up.

For the family room, 160kbps is not so good. 192kbps and above is quite good, and 256kbps is indistinguishable from the source for most of my music (assuming a good encoder). But in the family room, I've also got the option of just listening to the original when I want full fidelity. In the car, well, it's tiny and I don't have room to carry a zillion CDs (2-seater, trunk is tiny). I won't give up mp3 CD in my car. Any hard-disk type device would have problems in my car (extreme temperature changes, from below 0F to 100F or more), mp3 CD is the perfect solution for me and my head unit works very well. My next head unit is the Alpine CDA-7998, also an mp3 CD unit. For the most part I've avoided VBR, not because it's worse but because some hardware players don't handle it (they look at the bitrate in the first frame and assume that's the bitrate for the entire file :-(; lord knows what other stuff they're igonring in the frame header, whether or not they lose their minds on corrupted files, etc.).

I'd say WMA is more useful than ogg too, becuase it's more widely supported on non-PC devices. I personally have no interest whatsoever in Microsoft-suppiled codecs, and not a single WMA file.

Make no mistake, ogg is superior to mp3. It's just not supported in consumer audio gear, leaving it relegated to PCs (and I don't see that changing soon, if ever).


Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10906 05/19/03 06:56 AM
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The orange lights aren't indicators at all, they're lighted buttons. There are 19 of them on the face, and they're always lit. I basically never use the front panel (instead use the remote), so it's essentially useless to me. Doe anyone actually use the front panel on a receiver very often, especially when an MX-500 is included with it? I'm not sure, but I suspect that 11 of the lighted buttons only do something for the tuner... they're 0-9 and a +10 button. I think we could all live without those buttons, or at least without them glowing bright orange. :-)

Definitely the first receiver I've owned that looks better when turned off than when turned on. :-) Not a major gripe, it's just the oddball. But the indicator lights (sorround mode, etc.) are a nice blue. They should have stuck with blue for all of the lights or inverted the color scheme (blue for the buttons that are always lit, orange for indicator lights).

Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10907 05/19/03 03:25 PM
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How about the AAC? Is it better or worse than the other formats discussed?

Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10908 05/19/03 03:31 PM
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Point well taken.
mp3s are mainstream while ogg has just not caught on.
I've made exactly 2 audio cds in my lifetime, so i'm not exactly a poster child for the RIAA criminal hunt.
Those were both mp3 based but all tracks were ripped by me at 256.
They sound fine in the car but certainly the home theatre setup can really discern between the mp3 and original. That added environmental noise just destroys the whole listening experience. I hate my car audio now that i've been spoiled with something so much better.



"Those who preach the myths of audio are ignorant of truth."
Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10909 05/19/03 06:59 PM
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Sushi,

Assuming your uses were similar to dwm's, and then aac would stend ill be a poor choice compared to MP3 as it's not that well supported at the moment. You're basically relegated to the iPod and computers plus there is the limitation of DRM (not as bad as most but not as good as ogg or MP3 either). Sound quality comparisons I've read seem to all indicate that aac falls inbetween ogg and MP3.

Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10910 05/20/03 12:00 AM
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"HDD space is so cheap now, that I'm actually planning on ripping all of my CD's losslessly..."

Remember that CDs are lossy to begin with. :P

Re: Sunfire Ultimate Receiver first impressions
#10911 05/20/03 04:01 AM
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Well, I can always hook up my iPod to the receiver as an "endless" juke box for a party. That is one of the reasons why I asked the question; another reason is, of course, my endless curiosity.

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