B&W Driver
Well-known Member
As the posts were coming in at a fairly fast rate yesterday, I didn't get a good chance to really read this particular post. Once again, we're relatively new to ripping, recording and playback. In addition to the "nulling" I asked about in the last post (No. 80), I'd be more than happy to learn more about how to properly set up our Oppo 105D to take advantage of anything ripped from our physical media.AFAICT, he wants to compare the output levels of AC3 or DTS decoded directly off the disc , to the same track played from a ripped file. His initial impression was that the file playback level was lower than the direct.
There are quite a few variables involved that would have to be eliminated before a useful diagnosis could be made. He seems to have ripped the MLP version for starters, but is interested in the DTS. It's also (still!) unclear whether lossy decoding is being done by the Oppo or by a downstream AVR decoder (i.e., whether the Oppo output is set to 'raw' or 'PCM'). There will also be a setting in the Oppo to choose 'preferred' layer when loading a DVDA -- DVD or DVDA. We don't know what that is set to, though it seems perhaps to be 'DVD'? And of course there are likely channel level settings in the Oppo and AVR that could make some difference. Finally, I have no experience with hardware players + USB playback, so I can't speak to what settings might affect that, either.
As I mentioned earlier, it is not my intention to frustrate anyone or be "unclear," especially with those who are trying to help...but I wouldn't be here if I was "up" on all of these acronyms and software. In short, I thought that, by employing the same exact audio gear (and the same settings) to playback the exact same music, albeit from two different sources -- DVD-A disc and digital FLAC files -- it would make for a fairly decent A/B test.
Our long term goal in this regard is to rip all of our physical music media to FLAC. Thus far, we've figured out how to rip our redbook/stereo CD music to FLAC. The next step was stereo SACD to FLAC and, now, we're trying to learn what we can about how to rip our DVD-A discs to FLAC. In the case of the Little Feat Kickin' It At The Barn DVD-A, we preferred DTS multichannel over Dolby, so, naturally, we were trying to rip DTS to FLAC. As the sound level of the FLAC files continues to be lower -- and the "dts" symbol is still not displayed on the Oppo's front panel -- we're still wondering what we actually ended up with. At first, I thought that I may have been setting up DVDAE incorrectly and, obviously, there was more to the interface than I thought, so it's great that I learned more about that here. Anyway, there were questions about our goals, so I hope that I've clarified that herein.
As ever, I look forward to learning more about this subject and I thank all of you for your time.
EDIT: There seem to be a couple of specific questions about our Oppo 105D contained in the quote (above), so I slowly went through the Oppo's video interface and I determined that, under the "Player Setup" heading, the "DVD-Audio Mode" is set to "DVD-Audio." As for the "Oppo Output" settings, I couldn't find anything in these menus that gave me a choice of "Raw" or "PCM." I will include photos of the Oppo menus in the following post, but, if someone knows how to determine more about the nuances of the Oppo setup, I'd love to learn more about it.
Last edited: