Does a high end CD player provide better sound than a lossless rip?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by colby2415, May 10, 2017.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. POE_UK

    POE_UK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Somerset
    An ever better use for cd's are coasters.
     
    libertycaps likes this.
  2. libertycaps

    libertycaps Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    They are your CDs, mate. Do what you want with them. Lols.
     
    POE_UK and JimmyCool like this.
  3. brad1138

    brad1138 Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Rochester, WA
    (Sorry if this was already addressed - I didn't read every post)

    To me, that says more about the quality of the DAC in your CDP than it does the difference in FLAC vs CDs, unless you are running your CDP into the Bimby also. If you aren't, what kind of CDP do you use?
     
  4. Randoms

    Randoms Aerie Faerie Nonsense

    Location:
    UK
    Maybe I was a little harsh! :D

    I haven't bought a LP for a number of years, so I don't know in what condition the sleeve would arrive in the post. I've also had to re-glue a few sleeves, and my pet hate was horrible stickers on LP sleeves.

    I do still buy CDs, and The Move, Shazam, Deluxe set arrived with the spine crushed, which is sadly not untypical.

    I of course immediately ripped it for a bit perfect AccurateRip.

    Ignoring convenience preferences, the fact that I know every last frame is bit perfect, is why I believe a lossless FLAC file has the potential, to outperform any CD player.

    Even brand new CDs can have pressing errors.
     
    Robert C and JimmyCool like this.
  5. Chauphuong

    Chauphuong Member

    Location:
    Vietnam
    Different PCs provide different SQ.
     
    Grant likes this.
  6. ralf11

    ralf11 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Earth
    for a CD player, the power supply has to run both the spinning mechanism and the internal DAC

    they are closer together too so you might get some RFI

    I rip all my CDs but it's mainly for convenience & portability. I can always haul them out for that disc tray experience...
     
  7. NettleBed

    NettleBed Forum Transient

    Location:
    new york city
    LOL. Hard to believe that there once people who thought - swore! - that green rings and green pens improved sound.

    The human brain is such a fragile organ...
     
    wgriel and Grant like this.
  8. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Just shows you how different people are. Some people love messing with computers in their own time away from their computer jobs.

    Uh, you do realize that CDs are nothing but 1s and 0s, right?
     
  9. libertycaps

    libertycaps Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    Right you are mate. Holding a Compact Disc, jewel case, back sleeve and booklet in my hands is actually just a handful of 1s and 0s. I stand corrected.
     
    Last edited: May 15, 2018
    bruce2 and fogalu like this.
  10. Carl Swanson

    Carl Swanson Senior Member

    It wouldn't matter.
     
    nosliw likes this.
  11. The_Windmill

    The_Windmill Forum Resident

    Location:
    Italy
    In theory everything that reduced vibrations and required less job from the servo mechanisms could improve sound quality. That's why the same player put on the ground or with a solid weight above it could sound better. Now, whether those green things did the job or not it's a different question.
     
  12. TarnishedEars

    TarnishedEars Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Seattle area
    When I finally decided that it was past-time to start to ripping my entire CD collection, I went dumpster-diving for CD Drives one-day at work when I noticed an entire palate full of obsolete hardware that our IT department was throwing-away. I snagged every Plextor drive that I could easily find in the pile, as well as a handful of other brand-names that I recognized, hoping that I might have landed a few of the most highly sought-after rippers amongst the 30 or so drives that I grabbed. And I got lucky, because there were indeed a few of the most highly rated old Plextor drives in amongst the mix as well as lot of number of other unrated plextors, and some other name-brand drives which seemed like they might have potential to me.

    So I set-out to do a test-rip of one of my most badly scratched-up disks in my collection to find-out which of these drives I found could do the best job of error correcting a badly scratched disk. I used EAC of course, and I tried rips on between 10 and 15 different models of drive in both burst mode, and secure mode, depending upon the feature-set of a given drive. All rips were FLAC (with the default FLAC settings) and were subject to accurate-rip verification, of course. However the results that I achieved were not at all what I had expected.

    I expected to hear a difference in the ability of various drives to correct for errors. That I did indeed find. I also expected that the secure-mode rips would probably outperform burst mode rips. But that was one result which I did not find to be consistently true at all. I actually found that drives with superior error correction sounded just fine on badly ripped tracks in burst-mode, but that some other drives with C2 error features but less good error correction, when run in secure mode (as well as burst mode), sounded pretty bad (audible skipping, etc).

    Not surprisingly the Plextors were among the best performers. But here is the part which was so bizarre: The tracks without any errors, which consistently reported as being accurately ripped by all of the drives, did not sound the same between many of the different models of drives! Nor did any of these rips sound identical to this exact same CD when it was played directly inside of my Oppo transport (being fed to my PS-Audio Direct Stream DAC), and A/Bed with the FLAC files.

    I expected that if I had accurate rip results, that all of the accurate rips should sound absolutely identical. But this was simply not the case at all. And I have no explanation for this result because it continues to make zero sense to me. But I asked both of my daughters (both of whom play piano) to listen to one of the accurately ripped tracks (at his point I was comparing only accurately ripped tracks as I investigated this anomaly) and to tell me which file's pianos sounded the most realistic to their ears. Both identified the Oppo as sounding the most realist, and the various rips only went downhill from there. The best were fairly close, but the piano sounded anywhere from slightly-off to shockingly-different on the various accurate-rips of the exact same track from the different models of drives!

    So I now know for a fact that not only does it matters what drive you rip with, but that it is very difficult to achieve rips which are as good as the output from a good transport. But I do no understand this result at all. And were I not to have experienced this for myself, I doubt that I would have believed anybody who was making this claim either. YMMV.
     
  13. saturdayboy

    saturdayboy Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    A CD player is a transport, and a rip is a file/medium, so it’s kind of an apples and oranges situation.
     
    shaboo likes this.
  14. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    Good - I kind of feel off the hook now.
     
  15. TarnishedEars

    TarnishedEars Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Seattle area
    I've occasionally considered the idea of posting all of the rips I made from this one CD from all of these different CD-Rom drives somewhere so that people such as yourself could hear for themselves just how different all of these so-called "accurate rip" results can sound from different drives. But since I don't know of a means to do this legally, I've never started a thread on this subject, despite my temptation to do so. So I guess that you have reason to be glad again.
     
    libertycaps likes this.
  16. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    I don't think there are any legal concerns from posting say, 30 second clips on Dropbox. It seems I see things like that fairly often for comparisons like this.
     
  17. ukrules

    ukrules Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kentucky
    Yeah...don't ruin my placebo effect! :targettiphat:
     
  18. ukrules

    ukrules Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kentucky
    True. My boy got an Xbox since this thread was resurrected. So I've been sucked into being the "Local IT Support" for that, as well. Yuck.
     
  19. What program do you use to do your CD rips? I use dBpoweramp and I set the FLAC encoder to "Uncompressed" which is the raw data extracted from the CD without any tampering, inside a FLAC container with the benefits it provides like standard tagging and data check. If you rip one track to Wav and the same track to "Uncompressed" FLAC you'll notice both files are exactely the same size. Why don't you try to rip some of your CD's with uncompressed FLAC and compared them to your CD's? It would be very interesting if Uncompressed FLAC can fool your daughter's hearing.
     
  20. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    But, you don't enjoy it. I'm talking about people who do.
     
  21. TarnishedEars

    TarnishedEars Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Seattle area
    In my post I stated that I used EAC for this entire process. And the FLAC rips from different makes of drives all sound different from each other. But rips from the same model of drive (I had a few duplicate model# drives in the mix) were/are indistinguishable from each other. This should rule-out FLAC as the source of this anomaly.
     
    Kiko1974 likes this.
  22. TarnishedEars

    TarnishedEars Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Seattle area
    That is probably true. But if I went that route, then people would still never believe their ears since they would not be able to independently verify that all of the tracks which sounded different reported that they were indeed reported as "accurately ripped" by accurate rip. So I would simply be accused of digitally altering the files, either intentionally or unintentionally, by anyone who heard a difference.
     
    Last edited: May 15, 2018
  23. Carl Swanson

    Carl Swanson Senior Member

    You would also have to be able to show that the transport (drive) was the ONLY difference, i.e., that all other components, setting, cables, etc in the chain were unchanged.
     
  24. Ghostworld

    Ghostworld Senior Member

    Location:
    US
    I never believe it. I bought Stop Light pen and realized it didn't do a damn thing.
     
  25. TarnishedEars

    TarnishedEars Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Seattle area
    It was ALL 100% identical. I used the exact-same USB to IDE interface adapter on the same PC and the same USB port, and the same HD and the same copy of EAC to perform all of the rips. But nobody will ever believe my result no matter what I say, unless they hear them for themselves. And even then, I'm sure that many will still discount the differences being theoretically impossible and will therefore rationalize that it must have been due to some other factor which I did not account for.
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine