need crash course in using digital music.

You made the right call with the PW duo - by far the best 'simple' and most versitile implementation available in my opinion.

Your only real concern; be sure you are downloading music ONLY in full resolution lossless files (wav, flac, ALAC). HD Tracks and a handful of other sites are offering hi rez downloads in addition to redbook (16/44.1) formats. If you are a classical fan there are several good pieces out there. No iTunes or Amazon downloads - they only offer lossy formats and a lot of them have digital rights management encoding that won't work with the PWs.

I'm not positive, but I think the PWT will do all the lossless formats out there. If not, a simple format converter like Easy CD (poikosoft.com) can get them to wav format. At that point, just burn them to disk as files (not a music disk) and you are good to go - the PWT and PWD will take care of the rest. For high res, you will need to burn them to DVD disks. Consult the PW manuals for the proper disk format types to be sure you burn what works. If you want to do an all digital library at some point, the PWD will have a Bridge option available in December.

I'm picking up my PWD tomorrow and can't wait to play with it. I've heard the PW series a few times over the last few months and I really think they did it right.

thanks for the tips guys. been "studying" digital music all day and have picked up alot. unfortunately i'm staring from zero and still have a long ways to go.

Shazam-look forward to hearing your impressions. i'm pretty pumped up myself. should have mine next week.

do have a few more questions if you (or anyone else) doesn't mind helping.

didn't see any WAV files at HD Tracks, but did come across the FLAC ones you mention. aiff is a no-no from what i understand so it looks like FLAC is going to be my main option downloading. should i be converting the FLAC too WAV?? (i read WAV was not compressed at all like aiff??)

regarding the downloading and burning:

so don't use i-tunes at all?.... even in that FLAC or WAV mode for importing high res music?. i-tunes is really all i know. feel kinda comfy/safe in my i-tunes world and do like the whole "playlist thing". will step out if i have to. any suggestions on downloading/burning software that is easy to figure out?(if i-tunes shouldn't be used for importing/burning)

got the DVD disc part but didn't know not to do a music cd. just burn data/files/folders is what i'm getting out of this?. they will play in the order burned i'm assuming so "playlist" can still be done.

also...any idea of how much music can be burned onto a dvd in WAV or FLAC?

thanks again

Hey Levy,

What's up? I'm glad to see that you're getting your priorities in order!

Did you ever move your speakers yet?

I'll try to answer some of these.

Levy03: ""didn't see any WAV files at HD Tracks, but did come across the FLAC ones you mention. aiff is a no-no from what i understand so it looks like FLAC is going to be my main option downloading. should i be converting the FLAC too WAV?? (i read WAV was not compressed at all like aiff??)""

The FLAC is the way to go on HD tracks, you shouldn't have to convert it to WAV.

There is a negligible difference between compressed and not compressed files, Compressed is like a zip file, it's compressed however no data is lost, just like unzipping a zip file of photos.

AIFF is Not compressed either, as you are asking above.

ALAC Apple Lossless and compressed
AIFF is Lossless and not compressed
FLAC is Lossless and Compressed
WAV is Lossless and not compressed, but it can also be compressed.
AAC is lossy which means data is lost, it's not an exact copy. It's also compressed, so this is the one to avoid, as well as MP3's.

Goggle the above codecs, and select the wikipedia links.

Keep in mind non-compressed files take up much more space, but hard drive space is cheap now, compared to audio cables, right?

Levy03: ""regarding the downloading and burning:

so don't use i-tunes at all?.... even in that FLAC or WAV mode for importing high res music?. i-tunes is really all i know. feel kinda comfy/safe in my i-tunes world and do like the whole "playlist thing". will step out if i have to. any suggestions on downloading/burning software that is easy to figure out?(if i-tunes shouldn't be used for importing/burning)

got the DVD disc part but didn't know not to do a music cd. just burn data/files/folders is what i'm getting out of this?. they will play in the order burned i'm assuming so "playlist" can still be done.

also...any idea of how much music can be burned onto a dvd in WAV or FLAC?""

You can use iTunes, I love iTunes it works great for me, and I use Apple Losseless or ALAC, with phenomenal results.

I have a MAC, so I use the Songbird Media Player, for High Resolution FLAC Files on my MAC, everything else goes through iTunes.

FLAC doesn't work in iTunes, but there are other media players to choose from.

One High Resolution Album in 24bit/96khz is approx. 1GB-1.25 GB using FLAC Lossy-Compressed). So, approx. 3-4 Albums would fit on a 4GB single layer DVD.

Are you a MAC or a PC (windows)?

You should also read as much as people right here at Audiogon; under LEARN, Audiophile Forums, PC Audio Forum.

You'll eventually get a music streamer, to stream all of your music directly from your computer to your Audio System, so don't go too crazy burning too many DVD's just yet. PS Audio is supposed to come out with a bridge/streamer eventually.

Also Check out the other link for Computer Audiophile in the above post.

This should keep you busy for a while.

Rich

FLAC stands for FREE LOOLESS AUDIO CODEC.

It has several encoding bit rates which allow for it to appear compressed, yet it is simply allowed to reamin lossless in variagble file sizes.

Whatever the perfect Wave plaer setup will read, is your way to go.

WAV issues surround imbedded meta data, ie., tags. Track, album artist info, etc. As they will appear fine on one hard drive (media players) data base, transferring them to some other drive or player you will lose the info associated with them and wind up with Track 01, 02, 03, etc. and have to manually fill all that out later on.

WAV is what many media player/CD burning software use to write with, converting into WAV then into CDA. Some don't though.

J River Jukebox has a GUI which looks like an older version of iTunes... so that could help.... it's free, and supports about every format playback wise. FUBAR too supports a bunch of media types. It's interface however isn't very intuitive. Winamp also affords you many playback options given all the plug in's it allows for. Monkey's Audio also is another choice and has a free version.

I feel the media player itself determines which file type it is best suited to play.

EAC is a really good ripper and allows for various formats with it's plug in, but it's not the simplest to setup and use. Setup is the issue there mostly, afterwards, it's not that hard. natively, it will rip to wav or FLAC... and you can save the wAV files too.

Think of WAV files are temporary files. Waiting to be burned, or converted.

I find it a toss up between WAV and FLAC sonically... and it depends on the media player. If all of them are getting ripped to disc in your deal, I'd recommend you stick with the file types which imbed ID Tags permanently. Discs get scratched, lost, etc. hard drives die too so you'll want to have files whose data you won't need to worry about losing, down the road... BTW... I find FLAC having more resolution than apple lossless too... though not tremendously.

Lastly, the notes on uncompressed and compressed are a bit out of wack IMO. The media player, and system in use will be a key more so than the file type. Are they different sounding? Some. Again, not remarkably though. Burned onto disc I'll say there is, but played directly from the hard drive the sound diffs are quite minimal, and most often you can't really tell if you don't know in advance which is being played... AAC, or AL. I can usually tell FLAC & WAV from the previous two however.

Good luck.

I thought I would confuse you a little More!

Correction: "One High Resolution Album in 24bit/96khz is approx. 1GB-1.25 GB using FLAC Lossy-Compressed). So, approx. 3-4 Albums would fit on a 4GB single layer DVD."

In the above statement, it should read, FLAC Lossless Compressed, not lossy.

Rich