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Going over to the Dark Side?

Oh no! So, I finally succumbed to temptation yesterday and got the new 30GB iPod. When I got it, I figured I would store all my songs in .WAV or Apple lossless. Yesterday I spent 6 hours choosing songs from a variety of disks and loading them into iTunes via Apple lossless. Sounded great. But now I'm getting greedy. I think about all the CDs I have (over 1000 easily), and the fact that the iPod would be used for listening while skiing, flying, or in the car, none of which is an excellent listening environment. I already have a reference music system, and at home I'll be listening mainly to vinyl, with the occasional foray into CDs. Now I'm thinking that I could easily triple or quadruple my storage by using the highest AAC setting (320kBS) instead of Apple lossless for my iPod and store a lot more songs.

tonight I ripped a version of a song in Apple lossless and in AAC. I keep listening back and forth through my powered studio monitors. There is a difference, but it seems slight. Then I think of the tiny earbuds, the listening environment, and I hear the siren song of the dark side of lossy compression calling. Oh no!! Run away!!!

Has anyone else faced this dilema, and what was your solution?
arafel
pitdog75
34 posts
 
>Edsilva i recently purchased a U24 and plugged it into my stereo, right now im using its own little onboard DAC and the music is much qieter than from my cd player. it says in the instruction for the Waveterminal that the analog out is -10dB, any way to go around that? or it is supposed to be that way.

one more thing - if you use a separate DAC, lets say some Theta, than the DACs output level determines the loudness, right?
ckorody
643 posts
 
Anything single ended (RCA) is -10. Always been that way. Works fine over reasonable length cable runs such as you are likely to have in a home rig.

Balanced outputs (XLRs) run at +4 - its the format that the pro's use for all low level work (mics etc) Among other things, it makes it easier to do those 100'+ runs.

Had Waveterminal gone balanced they would not have been able to deliver the size package or the price point. That is what is so interesting about that product - it sounds so good and does so much for so little. It targets the low end/prosumer studio market - that's why it has the 1/4" phono jacks
edesilva
768 posts
 
Ckorody is spot on as far as my understanding goes...

And, to your last point, the bits going over spdif are just bits--the level is going to be determined by your DAC's output, regardless of the input. (Unless, of course, you have something fiddling with gain in the digital domain like kmixer--you don't want that).
pitdog75
34 posts
 
thanks guys, it just kinda puts me off a bit when i compare my sony cd player with u24 and the cd is so much louder. i don't have a preamp with a possibility to regulate the level of individual inputs, ah well.
ckorody
643 posts
 
Pitdog -

The Waveterminal is powered by the USB bus - so not a whole lot there to run an amplifier section. What is interesting - and may make you feel a bit better - is that all the modded Squeezebox and iPods coming out of RedWine and Bolder have 1V outputs as opposed to the the 2.83+V outputs we normall expect to see. Again very little juice running around in those things. And quite a drop in level.

In my experience cables are very important in this kind of situation.

Beyond that you could go to a passive preamp to attenuate (reduce) the outputs of your other gear to match. Or an active preamp to kick the signal up. At that point it all gets very component dependent and you might do better to simply use the U24 as a bridge to a DAC
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