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XLD is a must for accurate Mac rips

I posted this on another site and thought I'd share the experience here also.
The other night I was listening to Roger Water's Amused To Death through itunes and thought I noticed less of the "Q" sound effect. I popped in the cd to do a side by side comparison and sure enough the spatial effect was greatly diminished through the Mac Mini. All of the music seemed to be there but lacked that spatial openess the Q sound provides.
A few weeks ago I installed XLD on the Mini so this morning I decided to rerip the cd with XLD to check the accuracy of the itunes rip. The difference is not subtle. I used track 12, Three Wishes, from Amused To Death as the test track. On this track a woman's spoken voice is located about 3 feet out from and two feet in front of the left speaker. With itunes standard AIFF, the voice was nearly centered between the speakers. After reripping the track with XLD, the voice took it's proper location outside the speaker plane.
This tells me if you want bit perfect or closer to bit perfect rips, music must be ripped through XLD and not simply itunes. The good news is perfect copies are possible. The bad news is I'll have to rerip the 500 or so cds using XLD in order to get it.
If you aren't familiar with this cd or Q sound, what it does is throw sounds all over the room for effect. When things are set up correctly, you can actually hear sounds directly behind you. It's a gimmick, but it serves this particular music well.
My music is ripped to a Mac Mini which feeds a Monarchy Super Dip via the toslink out, which inturn feeds a PS Audio DLIII via coax. CDP is a Resolution Audio CD-50 which has a high quality variable out to allow level matching.
Any thoughts?
timrhu
timrhu OP
2,779 posts
 
itunes was set to rip to AIFF with error correction on. XLD is also ripping to AIFF. As far as I can recall the only setting I changed was to have cds ripped upon insertion. Set to rip and eject when complete.
While cds are ripping there is a progress display. It takes quite a bit longer to rip with XLD as itunes. Probably at least three times longer.
I have done a comparison with another selection. The song is Famous Blue Raincoat by Tori Amos. I get so much more from her version than I do from Jennifer Warnes, but that's another topic for discussion. As for the comparison, the results were the same as Roger Waters. Standard itunes sounds very good but not quite up to the original cd. With the XLD rip I can not distinguish it from the original. A boring description but what else needs to be said? To my ears, and I was intently listening, all of the richness of the original is there in the ripped file.
bugman03
44 posts
 
Thank you Timrhu for the link
jdoris
972 posts
 
Sounds like I should give it a try, Timrhu

You also have to point where to put the ripped music each time which threw me for a while.

Meaning you have to manually direct the tracks to your library?

John
gocubs999
156 posts
 
I notice that XLD offers playback capability. Though interested in using for just ripping, I use Amarra for playback and file conversion and do not want XLD to disrupt the Amarra playback in my system. Are there settings in XLD that would allow me to shut down the XLD playback capability to just use for ripping cd's?
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
XLD is the only ripper I recommend for MAC. Uses Accurate-Rip by default. iTunes does not use this. XLD a good job of converting FLAC files to really good sounding .wav or AIFF files too.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
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