Lossless file VS CD

Roon file playback is, by far, the most satisfying digital music listening experience I've ever had. The CD's are gathering dust on the shelves.

 

I'm with you on several points.

First, even though I have had a USB connector on my Peachtree Nova in 2011 and after with the iNova, I don't like to have anything connected to the USB ports on my computer. I want to use my computer as a computer and not a streaming device.

If I put on an album, then I like to play it through in the order that it was recorded. I don't like to randomly jump around from song to song.

I don't like to create playlists, so I don't.

I don't like to have the computer randomly picking out different songs from different digital albums, that I have ripped from CD's.

But, I find that sometimes I don't want to listen to an album. I do like to have random musical selections playing, like on a radio. But I enjoy listening to the selections where the music has a commonality. For this reason my subscription Pandora that I have had since 2011, fills the bill quite nicely, which is why it is my preferred method of listening daily.

 

I am considering going the same way. Can you share your experience and give a "tutorial" on a proper setup? Like, what DACs, cables, are worth using (at different price points) etc.

 

Can you teach me how to set up this NAS thing?

 

Likes like new things are coming out everyday. Can you tell me more about it?

 

I do both and love both...I own it and rip it... the best of both worlds...always have the master tucked away just in case. : )

 

I like the physical album whenever possible, but I own over 100 of them on FLAC files; no physical counterparts, because they are unobtanium to me in physical form. They sound just as good as a CD; little wonder considering they go through the same DAC. I could not bother ripping my 700 CDs to Flac; no way.

 

Hello Ham, do you use a specific lossless format to rip your CDs?

 

I use FLAC because I'm on Windows and FLAC is well supported by the applications and devices I use.

 

I finished ripping all of my CDs lossless last year. I am currently ripping all of my SACDs. I have a room where my CD library is on display with a Mac workstation where I manage metadata, databases, cataloging, etc.. I engage with my CD/SACD library all the time, but I rarely play the actual CD (Although I am playing a CD right now, hehe) and have four dedicated CD players with their own DAC flavors because...why not? I play my files via Roon through an Oppo UDP-205 and it sounds absolutely amazing to me.

I don’t have any current plans on getting rid of them, but I understand why people do.

Touching a CD or LP does not make me feel more connected to the music, but I find a quality DAC, good source, and full range speakers ABSOLUTELY make me feel more connected to the music. YMMV.

 

I make a lossless copy of all my new CDs...

 

This is why I don’t backup movies, but I like to rip the audio from music/concert Blu-rays and DVDs. Takes up a lot less space.

 

I'll be honest. I had built up a music collection on record, cassette, minidisc and CD and, after considering going purely lossless, I figured I already had decent sources for lots of music, I just had to improve my playback chain.

This has been an enjoyable journey and, for me, probably cheaper than going fully digital. What's more, I have variety of choice. I still sometimes feel like playing a cassette, for instance - along with most vintage LPs, it helps me feel more analogue. Although, having CD playback also has enabled me to dip into the benefits of dearly digital.

I have ALAC rips of most of my CDs and use a couple of DAPs - certainly convenient.

I am glad I have this hybrid way of existing - even if the other half thinks I'm simply outdated and cluttering up the place.

Improving the equipment I used to play back CDs really helped me overcome any longing for exclusively going to lossless. Like others on this thread, I rarely shuffle tracks, and try to appreciate albums as they were created as they place me in the time of the creation and that stage of the artist's career.

Being physical, as others have pointed out, scanning my shelves at the spines brings back memories of stages of my own life - even my rather sad musical tastes at certain times.

What matters, overall, is finding a balance that suits - music for me is s private and personal passion and no one else will really understand why this dinosaur hangs on to his bits and pieces.

I'm also a bit of a tight ar%^. I hate to waste money.

 

I’ve rediscovered CDs after finding out that my CD transport sounds noticeably better than my streamer with the same DAC. Now trying to find a streamer that will sound at least as good as my CD transport.

 

For me finding the cd and putting it in the player is faster than finding the computer/phone, opening the app, searching for the music and playing it.

 

I use all digital and the cds in the basement. For me the physical experience is with vinyl although I miss cds, I simply don’t have the room.

 

I have tried ripping and it does work well. However I still think the CD sounds better.

There are probably a dozen reasons to explain why. I run USB from my Mac to DAC, whilst I run Coaxial from my CD player to DAC.

I do have a strong preference for physical media, mainly because I want to own the media and not be reliant on a subscription model of any kind.

Eventually producers will realise this is a problem and figure out ways to prevent people accessing their physical media (I predict in the long run a hardware license controlled remotely via broadband - i.e. you must pay or the hardware will not play the media).

 

From the very beginning CDs could be authored gapless. Tons of albums need this feature, especially old-school prog rock or 1980s Depeche Mode stuff like Music for the Masses. This is even worse with classical. Doing gapless with MP3s is usually not perfect. Not sure how well gapless works with FLAC, still I presume you need your player to support it. Spotify presently supports gapless and crossfade, still it is not as seamless as on the original factory-made CD (or a cassette for that matter).

So, for classical and prog rock I prefer CDs. For everything else - file or streaming, whichever I can get quicker and/or cheaper.

P.S. Recently I bought a DAP that supposedly can do gapless. This was the reason I bought it. Haven't tried it yet. ;-)

 

gapless behavior is a function of playback software not filetype.

 

File type as well. AFAIK, MP3 format does not (did not?) specify where exactly music ends. The file is made of a bunch of blocks, so if the music ends before the last block ends, there is empty space at the end. MP3 format does not (or did not, in the early versions) provide any information where exactly the music ended, so the apps or hardware players doing gapless MP3 need to store the last block or maybe several of them, analyze them, and make a guess where the amplitude drops to the level that can be considered the end of actual signal. Often this works, sometimes it does not work completely seamlessly. Also, it requires storage space and additional processing power, which is why the maker of my 2002 DAP, despite being very responsive to customer reports and requests, could not provide updated firmware with gapless playback for MP3 — the device simply did not have enough storage and processing power.

 

Yeah, definitely did NOT mean that every file type stores music the same way!
it's still up to the playback software to handle gapless playback of mp3s (or any file type) correctly given how the file stores audio, as you illustrated with your example of the firmware update.

 

I like reading the liner notes. And on Japanese imports, I enjoy reading the translated lyrics too.

 

From what I understand, MP3 is not gapless by design. What I've done to get around this issue is to rip an entire album as a single MP3 file to get it gapless. Some players might be able to get gapless playback out of MP3 files.

 

If you enable gapless encoding in LAME, it does not require any special tricks in playback. What it does is fill in the gap at the end of the last frame of each file by filling it in with the first few milliseconds of audio from the following track. (Each frame in an MP3 file is 0.026 seconds, so the gap to be filled in could be as large as about 25 milliseconds.)

Then when the files are played back in order, the result will be totally gapless. The consequence is that the track boundaries will be shifted slightly from where they were on the CD, but you usually won't notice the difference.

 

Went with lossless files back in 2008-9 or so, when Linn released their DS players. Way ahead of the curve they were! Haven't looked back. I have a CD player but its a cheap Cambridge Audio unit from the mid 2000s and doesn't compare. I still buy CDs every now and then, but rip them and put them away.