SDA and Ipods/AAC

riker1384

I was just thinking, an Ipod with 128k AAC is good enough for me most of the time, even with pretty decent speakers, although I've started to rip at 256k just to be safe. But doesn't AAC or MP3 mess with phase? Could that make it worse with SDA speakers, or other kinds of surround-sound synthesis?

Does anyone have any experience with this?

zingo

I am not sure if those formats change the phase, but I don't think so. However, listening to 128K or 256K on HIFI, you will notice compression and distortion before phase will come into play. Honestly, my ears haven't let me listen to those formats long enough to listen for specifics other than just SQ.

Face

You're missing out on quite a lot. I would do AT LEAST 320, if not lossless.

danger boy

i've been very impressed with lossless quality recently... although it uses up a ton of hard drive space.. it's worth it. why settle for less quality sound?

go lossless or go home!!

riker1384

I haven't actually done any real A/Bs with speakers, but with some decent headphones I wasn't able to tell between CD and 128k AAC. I'm not sure if I've done the same with speakers exactly, but I've listened to some of the AACs and they seem to sound pretty good.

zingo

Between lossless and a "good" compression format, I find that you loose dynamics, depth of sound-stage, naturalness of voices, etc.

Marty913

zingo wrote: »

Between lossless and a "good" compression format, I find that you loose dynamics, depth of sound-stage, naturalness of voices, etc.

+1 on that. I had a Zune 30gb loaded with 192 and up (most 256 - 320). Tried to listen through my 1C' & 2A's and just couldn't stand it - even as background music. Spent 4 days re-converting 2,500+ songs from scratch (CD & vinyl) to lossless. Won't go down that compressed road ever again.

michael_w

It also depends a lot on what kind of music you listen to. Certain songs are very hard to pinpoint differences, while others are glaringly obvious.

dcmeigs

Do yourself a favour and buy yourself an USB external hard drive (like simpletech's Pina Farina design) and use an application like windows media player to rip the tracks in wav files. Then you can let compression software chew them on them and dump the compressed files in a different directory.

Then when you listen at home you can play the real-deal wav files and then use the compressed files for portable listening. This will save you from having to re-rip all your music files when the compression starts to annoy you. It really does bring on listening fatigue.

Marty913

dcmeigs wrote: »

Do yourself a favour and buy yourself an USB external hard drive (like simpletech's Pina Farina design) and use an application like windows media player to rip the tracks in wav files. Then you can let compression software chew them on them and dump the compressed files in a different directory.

Then when you listen at home you can play the real-deal wav files and then use the compressed files for portable listening. This will save you from having to re-rip all your music files when the compression starts to annoy you. It really does bring on listening fatigue.

Agreed, and an excellent approach. It can be a pain keeping two directories in sync but sometimes it's worth it. You almost have to if your MP3 player is 2/4/8 gig. If you have a 30/40/80 gig hard drive player you may want to consider ripping to any one of the lossless formats supported by your player. I'm pretty much down to one directory although my Zune only holds 1500 songs they are all lossless and sound great.

dcmeigs

At home, I have dedicated an old laptop to the job of music file server. I use a wireless bridge so the laptop can roam about the house.

Away, I use an ipod and I keep those compressed files resident on my primary laptop. I can sync those files over the network or by plugging in the external hard drive. I use USB flash memory in my cars and keep them compressed to 256 on 16 gig sticks.

So far I like this system pretty well. Tonight I'm going to take my laptop out to a buddy's house to show him how to connect a USB optical to his computer and toslink to his Rotel DAC. At the same time I can audition his Rotel transport against my laptop through his DAC/Rotel pre/Hafler 200W/SDA 1A setup to see how much I'm loosing playing wav files from my computer vs his transport.

Marty913

dcmeigs wrote: »

At home, I have dedicated an old laptop to the job of music file server. I use a wireless bridge so the laptop can roam about the house.

Away, I use an ipod and I keep those compressed files resident on my primary laptop. I can sync those files over the network or by plugging in the external hard drive. I use USB flash memory in my cars and keep them compressed to 256 on 16 gig sticks.

So far I like this system pretty well. Tonight I'm going to take my laptop out to a buddy's house to show him how to connect a USB optical to his computer and toslink to his Rotel DAC. At the same time I can audition his Rotel transport against my laptop through his DAC/Rotel pre/Hafler 200W/SDA 1A setup to see how much I'm loosing playing wav files from my computer vs his transport.

There have been (more frequently of late) several discussions about compressed / uncompressed, Squeezebox, etc. so I think you should report on your findings. I would be interested and I'm sure others would also. Let's face it, we all love Polk's and generally listen at the highest quality level we can afford. Still, we all probably have iPOD type devices for convenience. A new thread or two covering the two would be informative and worthwhile.

Boywonder

dcmeigs wrote: »

At the same time I can audition his Rotel transport against my laptop through his DAC/Rotel pre/Hafler 200W/SDA 1A setup to see how much I'm loosing playing wav files from my computer vs his transport.

There are a number of discussions comparing high end transport/DAC vs PC based music server sound quality over on the audiogon forums. The discussions get way into jitter, etc. The present consensus appears to be that music servers are very close in performance to all but the highest end transports/DACs, since streaming from the hard drive eliminates jitter issues. Lossless formats are typically FLAC or wav, FLAC's being created with zero-loss software like exact audio copy.

adam2434

Marty913 wrote: »

There have been (more frequently of late) several discussions about compressed / uncompressed, Squeezebox, etc. so I think you should report on your findings. I would be interested and I'm sure others would also. Let's face it, we all love Polk's and generally listen at the highest quality level we can afford. Still, we all probably have iPOD type devices for convenience. A new thread or two covering the two would be informative and worthwhile.

I just got around to starting a thread in the 2 Channel Audio section - been wanting to do that for a few days and your post reminded me.