Just getting interested in loss less 2 channel stereo formats. Not sure which way to proceed. Most of my CD's sound terrible from digital artifacts and high frequency compression distortion. I have a Blu ray player that is capable of 192/24 and is two channel.
Looks like most of the Blu ray audio material available is 5.1 surround though. Will that translate well to 2 channel?
I am also interested in 2 channel FLAC files that have been made direct from the master recordings. Is it better to burn these to disc or play back from a computer?
Any advise or information to get me on my way is appreciated.
Thanks
Looks like most of the Blu ray audio material available is 5.1 surround though. Will that translate well to 2 channel?
I am also interested in 2 channel FLAC files that have been made direct from the master recordings. Is it better to burn these to disc or play back from a computer?
Any advise or information to get me on my way is appreciated.
Thanks
The most common lossless 2 channel stereo format is CD. If CDs sound horrible it is probably due to poor engineering in the studio: compression, peak clipping etc. A 'better' format will simply make this nastiness easier to hear more clearly.
What are these digital artefacts that are constantly being mentioned, I don't seam to hear them....
I use WAV files ripped from my CD's, some sound great some do sound compressed, but it is down to how the CD was done in the studio, not digital per se.
As to bad CDs, a lot are mastered for todays preference of small mobile devices...
I use WAV files ripped from my CD's, some sound great some do sound compressed, but it is down to how the CD was done in the studio, not digital per se.
As to bad CDs, a lot are mastered for todays preference of small mobile devices...
What are you comparing to?
As has been pointed out, that is usually an issue with the source material and mastering, not the format.
No, not very well. It is mixed and mastered for 5.1
Why would you want to burn them to disc? Discs are an archaic distribution format from the time before cheap mass storage and decent-speed internet.
Thanks for the replies. Agreed, it is not the CD format but the production of the music. Too many sound highly compressed and if looked at with a scope or record it to editing software and look at it's waveform, it becomes apparent how bad some really are.
A very few of my CD's sound good, (not great) like Dave Weckl, Ozric Tentacles, Craig Chaquico and surprisingly the older stuff actually sounds surprisingly good. Even though frequency response and distortion figures were limiting, it wasn't compressed as much back then.
Then there's Enya, Enigma and some Pink Floyd that are almost impossible to listen to.
I heard some FLAC files at a friends on a Haffler XL280 and AR 9LS speakers and it was impressive in the lack of noise. There were still some bad sounding FLAC files, but the good ones from high quality sources sounded wonderful.
I have suspicions that the good ones were from master recordings. He had a Pink Floyd album on FLAC that was amazing but the CD sounds awful.
Just looking for some high quality source material, wondering what everyone else is doing.
A very few of my CD's sound good, (not great) like Dave Weckl, Ozric Tentacles, Craig Chaquico and surprisingly the older stuff actually sounds surprisingly good. Even though frequency response and distortion figures were limiting, it wasn't compressed as much back then.
Then there's Enya, Enigma and some Pink Floyd that are almost impossible to listen to.
I heard some FLAC files at a friends on a Haffler XL280 and AR 9LS speakers and it was impressive in the lack of noise. There were still some bad sounding FLAC files, but the good ones from high quality sources sounded wonderful.
I have suspicions that the good ones were from master recordings. He had a Pink Floyd album on FLAC that was amazing but the CD sounds awful.
Just looking for some high quality source material, wondering what everyone else is doing.
FLAC is a lossless encoding format that reduces WAV files by something around half the size without discarding any information...hence the term lossless. A FLAC version of any particular music file will sound no different than the WAV version...it just saves space on your hard drive.
Be aware that a lot of the stuff sold as "hi-res" in online stores is just upsampled CD or SACD material - just like a lot of SACD and DVD-A material turned out to be reprocessed CD material.
Hi-Fi News is the only magazine I know of that actually reviews "hi-res" downloads from a technical perspective (and publishes spectrum plots), but they only review a few albums each month. This month they show that the new JJ Cale appreciation album by Eric Clapton and friends seems mostly to be upsampled 48 kHz material.
Some sites have tried to encourage people to post spectrum plots of hi-res downloads they have purchased, but most seem get shouted down by the "trust your ears" crowd.
Some of the upsampling is really easy to see using free tools such as audacity, but in some cases it is trickier. Lots of tracks that really look like they were badly resampled from SACD *could* just be the result of crappy studio processing...
Thanks for the info. I suppose there may be something to be said for the 'trust your ears'
position. If you can't tell the difference on your own system there is little need to look further. But having a quantitative methodology to make that determination before one buys is a nice thing to have. What sounds good on one system may be unbearable on another with greater transparency.
position. If you can't tell the difference on your own system there is little need to look further. But having a quantitative methodology to make that determination before one buys is a nice thing to have. What sounds good on one system may be unbearable on another with greater transparency.
I have to say that I have had pretty much the opposite experience, realizing that you really can't 'trust your ears'. At least I can't. When I downloaded "hi-res" albums, I always first listened to them before looking at spectrums and analyzing empty bits - and there was very little correlation between what sounded great or less great, and what sample rate they happened to be for real.
As many before me have noted, we have a huge double-blind test in progress. There are now thousands of "hi-res" recordings available for download, and most people have no idea if they are the real stuff, or upsampled/resampled/zero-padded. Do we see music and hi-fi sites have lots of discussion about how album X "really sounds like real hi-res" while album Y "doesn't have the hi-res feel"? No. People who like the music like the music. People who are convinced hi-res sounds better will think hi-res sounds better. All totally independent of whether albums X or Y really are true hi-res, or just upsamples from CD material.
Some people will argue that it is the upsampling that provides the superior quality, regardless of what the original material is - but that ignores the fact that pretty much all modern DACs upsample internally anyway.
As many before me have noted, we have a huge double-blind test in progress. There are now thousands of "hi-res" recordings available for download, and most people have no idea if they are the real stuff, or upsampled/resampled/zero-padded. Do we see music and hi-fi sites have lots of discussion about how album X "really sounds like real hi-res" while album Y "doesn't have the hi-res feel"? No. People who like the music like the music. People who are convinced hi-res sounds better will think hi-res sounds better. All totally independent of whether albums X or Y really are true hi-res, or just upsamples from CD material.
Some people will argue that it is the upsampling that provides the superior quality, regardless of what the original material is - but that ignores the fact that pretty much all modern DACs upsample internally anyway.
Julf...I think you have it exactly right and I would go a bit further. While low-res MP3s become obvious for their loss of quality I do not believe many listeners can discern a 320 kbps MP3 from the source WAV file, let alone discriminate true hi-res files from padded hi-res files. The quality of miking, mixing and lack of compression artifacts and other gimmicks are far more crucial to listening enjoyment than simple bitrate variations.
Somewhere in those studio files there are relatively uncorrupted, preprocessed files. Also, some albums have been released on vinyl records and CD formats. They can not use the same compression with a vinyl recording as with CD due to physical constraints. This makes me wonder if bad sounding CD can be found in higher quality FLAC formats.
FLAC is like Zip, it encodes the original digital audio exactly, if you decompress it and burn the CD, it will be bit for bit identical to the original, including the crappy mastering if any.
You can check out the Dynamic Range Database :
Album list - Dynamic Range Database
Recently I downloaded a FLAC torrent for the reissued/remastered full Queen box set. I listened to it. It sounded like crap. A quick look at the media player's scope plugin revealed almost constant clipping. The original (old) albums that I ripped to FLAC a long time ago don't clip and sound fine. I trashed the files.
Besides the Dynamic Range Database, it seems the only way to know for sure if an album has been compressed to death is to torrent it. If it is good, that doesn't stop you from buying it. Personnally I'm not going to support the loudness wars by putting my money on destroyed albums.
You can check out the Dynamic Range Database :
Album list - Dynamic Range Database
Recently I downloaded a FLAC torrent for the reissued/remastered full Queen box set. I listened to it. It sounded like crap. A quick look at the media player's scope plugin revealed almost constant clipping. The original (old) albums that I ripped to FLAC a long time ago don't clip and sound fine. I trashed the files.
Besides the Dynamic Range Database, it seems the only way to know for sure if an album has been compressed to death is to torrent it. If it is good, that doesn't stop you from buying it. Personnally I'm not going to support the loudness wars by putting my money on destroyed albums.
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