Lossless Files Vs CD's

I can pretty much repeat what Al said but I won't bother with someone who makes ugly suggestions.

Dvavc - If you are coming to Newport show, bring a thumb flash drive with your ripped files on it. Make one FLAC and the same track wav. See you in Hilton 1001.

Thanks,
Steve N.

Dvavc

I'm not sure why you responded as you did, but know that the folks that are sharing with you are just sharing their opinions, albeit that they are also quite well informed. Two of them are EEs as they stated and I'm in real estate.

I've never been involved in any way in the audio industry and I have absolutely no connection with anyone in this thread, beyond that what you've seen on this public and anonymous forum. See my further comment below*.

If you can get to Newport, you'd do yourself a great favor. Steve, from all I've seen in these forums, is a straight-up guy. Knowledgeable and courteous. *I did shake Steve's hand at the show last year. But I can say that he'd not know me from Adam and am quite sure that he would not remember our brief encounter last year.

I will be at Newport and do plan to stop by Steve's room on Saturday sometime and can't wait to hear what he has brought to the show this year.

The analogy of ripping to a Xerox copy is flawed. There is loss in copying a non-digital source, but there can be exact copying of a digital source.

If the digital computer file->DAC had been invented first, and then someone designed a way to copy the bits to a ten cent piece of plastic, spin it at high speed and bounce a laser beam off it, we'd see it as a Rube Goldbergian sow's ear, and inherently problematic.

Dvavc came to my room at Newport and proposed an experiment, which we tried to demonstrate.

His assertion is that ripping CDs is a flawed process because he hears a difference when playing back the same track on a PC or Mac using first the CDROM as a transport and then with the ripped track playing back from hard disk.

The problem with this comparison is that it is NOT apples to apples. Because the playback hardware paths in the computer for CDROM and memory/disk playback are entirely different and they actually use two different clocks, I would expect these to sound very different. This has nothing to do with the rip quality.

A better experiment is to playback using the same method, but drive through a reclocker like my Synchro-Mesh before the DAC. This removes any differences in the playback hardware. This would allow one to hear if there are any differences in the data from the CD and the ripped file.

If Dvavc had the patience, we could have done more experiments like this. Too bad his mind was already made up.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio