WAV or Apple Lossless Encoder?

Look, I am a EE with over 30 yeard design experience. We can debate the theory and the science until the cows come home. The fact is there are differences here, and comparing .wav to .wav files does not explain it.

One person that did this experiment repeated it with a Transport rather than the Pace-Car reclocker and concluded that if the jitter is very high, you really can't tell the difference. It's when the jitter gets really low that the difference is obvious. The Pace-Car is only a FIFO, it does not change the data in any way.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Way to go guys, you scared the sh#t out of Conedison8. That'll teach him.

Way to go guys, you scared the sh#t out of Conedison8. That'll teach him.

LOL. I'd be curious to compare a lossless file ripped on EAC that was ripped that way (retains all of the tags / song info - I assume that is possible), to the same song ripped to lossless in iTunes. I'm sure that it's probably already been done ad nauseum - anyone?

As far as Conedison8's pissin' his pants, I'd reiterate that upstairs, on a far more resolving system with a Modwright Transporter on the front end I could clearly hear the difference. Downstairs, in my office system, which is very basic, with a MHDT Paradisea via USB, I would be very hard pressed to identify differences in the three files I was comparing. As I suggested from the very beginning of the thread, if you want to figure out which format to rip to then do these tests yourself, with some of your favorite cuts of music and sit down and compare them and see what difference, if any, you hear. The only drawback to doing this is that if your system changes dramatically towards the more resolving, your observations may change and you may end up wanting to re-rip your library. I'd agree with Peter's opinion that the difference isn't something that screams at you, though I found it immediately apparent albeit subtle.

For everyone who is concerned about my nerves and well-being, if this was the biggest concern that I had in life, it could be a problem.

I want to try the experiment outlined by Peter_S, Dtc, et al, which Steve had urged me to do weeks ago. In my case, I can rip on a PC using EAC, but would then want to move the file to a Mac for iTunes playback since that is my music server platform. Seems to me this hardware/OS platform change introduces a significant additional variable. Have others of you crossed platforms in your tests, or kept it all on PCs?

Marco: am I correct that Slimcenter converts all files to FLAC for transmission and the Transporter then de-compresses? How might that factor into the results?

I'm a total adherent to Dtc's call for good experimental design, which is woefully lacking in so much of what we do in audiophile land. I don't mean abx, just good isolation of variables.