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New Apple Lossless encoder??

Category: Digital

"Discerning customers and audiophiles want true CD audio, and now iTunes can give you that quality with the new Apple Lossless encoder. You’ll get the full quality of uncompressed CD audio using about half the storage space. You can copy music in this format onto your iPod or iPod mini, to take perfect audio wherever you go."

Can anyone explain this technology and is it a true statement that all of the sound information encoded on a CD can now be downloaded to an iPod and replayed with that same information and quality???? Or is this just hype and misleading info??
dbk
myjunktrunk-58ab
1 posts
 
I used iTunes with Apple Lossless Encoder to import some on the album SKYLARKING by XTC. The song "Dear God" had a lot of hissing and scraching in it. Did I do something wrong? I just bought the 60GB iPOD.
tomoy
2 posts
 
The concept behind lossless compression is sound. It should generate output identical to the CD original. A relatively full explanation can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression

Shorthand example: if a digital signal is 111111111100000011111111110000001111111111000000, that takes 48 characters to describe. I could also describe it as 3x((10x1)&(6x0)) which takes 16 characters to describe. In terms of data file size, I've achieved 3:1 compression. What's obvious is that you need to be able to decompress (translate the formula) in realtime. Compression formulas are much more complicated than this little example, but for computer chips these days, this is a very easy task.

Having said that, I've NEVER listened or compared or tested Apple's output, but I expect that feeding to a good D/A converter would yield CD quality.
soundwise
39 posts
 
it is still a compressed format and is convenient but not the same as transpiort and dac combo with good digital cable...of course analog still sounds better than all of it!!!
cwlondon
1,210 posts
 
I have not done any A/B blind testing. As an audiophile, of course I shy away from any sort of objective, scientific methods.

But anecdotally, I think my WAV files undoubtedly sound the best, and as I have said in many other threads - why even risk a loss of sound quality when hard drives are only getting cheaper!?

Also, it really irritates me that I spent a lot of money downloading Apple alledgedly "lossless" files that I can't use on open source players like Foobar. Even worse, I think there are some other protective codes which might limit playback to a certain number of computers?

I like the iTunes interface, and would happily pay to download WAV files, but I am otherwise staying away from Apple.

They are closing to spirit in Microsoft than their ads would have you believe.
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