Hard Drive/Computer Audio at the SHOW and CES

Hack: You are evidently among the few that can hear a difference between lossless files and WAV files. My aging ears and apparently those of many many others here are not nearly as acute as yours. I stand humbled in your presence. :)

As for vinyl, no comment.

Wdrazek, I am sure my ears are older than yours, but I still can hear lossless and WAV differences. I am always perplexed that others cannot.

Hack, I have known colleagues who still fail to backup their hard work on computers, so I am not shocked that people would fail to backup their music. I have always used Macs and have never experienced a hard-drive failure but will always backup everything.

...and hard drives do fail so what do you do? Have a back up set of drives ready in the event of failure?

While it is true that hard drives fail, there shouldn't be any issue if you place all your music on a large hard drive, purchase an identical drive, and run the pair in a RAID 1 configuration. So to answer your questions, yes you should have a backup.

Those who claim to hear differences between lossless and WAV, can you please describe the circumstances where you discovered the difference? Where did you source the music? How did you convert to lossless (what software)? What equipment did you play both back on?

The reason I ask is that I have heard other people claim to hear the difference between lossless and WAV and when asked to answer these questions, we discovered that there were other variables or factors that were responsible for the difference.

Davemitchell, I largely take this on the advice of others I respect, but I heard a cd burned in lossless and WAV played off a server. The WAV was clearly better with both a cleaner top end and a better sense of the soundstage. I had thought that lossless was as good a WAV up until that time and until recently had found cd servers to be inferior in music reproduction.