Is it my speakers? I think I'm done with CD's. Are paid-for downloadable files any better? (...and, "Can it reach 60", a quality test for CDs)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Flac is all that you need, covert everything and play on your PC. Great for vinyl too!
!

Agreed... As lossless audio formats go, flac is not disappearing anytime soon (it's already over twenty years old). Also it's hardware playback support is increasing year on year...

All that being said... I recently discovered that my ASUS Zenfone supports lossless 'multi-channel' audio formats including Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA and even good old flac

 

[himey]

and even good old flac

Multichannel flac?

 

[par4ken]

Multichannel flac?

Yes!

 

[Sonik Wiz]

Yes!

Isn't that well known?

 

[Rango]

Hey guys, it wasn't my intention to start a row.

Healthy argumentation is good when people strive together in a sense of true enquiry towards an objectively reachable logical conclusion (and removed, as much as is possible, from emotional investment)...but, because of emotional attachment etc. things are seldom that simple.

There's no point in arguing matters of taste as it's subjective and for some people different formats will have different emotional values but it's also objectively true that generally speaking, in terms of the sound they produce, better quality formats are, generally speaking...better quality in terms of the sound they produce. They might not give you the 'warm feeling' that vinyl can, but that's a different thing.

I was on a minibus once, quite a few years ago now, on a youth development program, with a group of other "yoof's" and we had an old tape deck; not very expensive, but it had a three-band equaliser and put out pretty good sound for what it was. A Prodigy track came on, to (mostly) everyone's delight, at which point I reached over and EQ'd it so that the various parts separated out and sounded distinct...and it totally killed the mood. After a few moments, one of the other guys reached over and flattened it all out again and everyone was happy once more: they didn't want to hear the composition; they wanted it to sound like noise, because, for them, what was what Techno was...something you listened to on a crappy tape deck or cheap radio, or heard blasted at 100 decibels in a warehouse where the vibration of the corrugated metal walling augmented the sound.

I don't have a thousand-strong vinyl collection; in fact, relative to some of the people here, I barely have what could be called a collection at all: I have a handful of albums that make me feel good when I listen to them. If people ask me if I'm an audiophile I'd say "not really" but I do appreciate high quality audio. If they ask me if I'm a music lover, I'd probably say "not really":

It's like my physical media movie collection: I have about 250 films that it's taken me years (and if aggregated, probably solid weeks of searching) to find, wherever possible on Blu-ray & 3D Blu-ray, but if someone asked me if I like "film"...?...in the sense of Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain...?...Tarkovsky...?...the Kieślowski three colours trilogy...?...I'd have to say "not really"...

...I have Wes Andersons' The French Dispatch and The Grand Budapest Hotel; I love Kogonada's After Yang, and if you twisted my arm for my favourite 'cinema as art' type film it would probably be Tarsem Singh's 2006 film The Fall; but I prefer Soderbergh's Solaris to Tarkovsky's by an absolute country mile and if you forced me to sit down and watch a Godfather movie...?...it'd be The Godfather Part III.

The reality is, I'm happier sitting down to watch Dodgeball, Fired Up, Hellbaby, Balls of Fury or a James Gunn production (I'm an Ash Vs Evil Dead, Peacemaker, McGruber kind of guy)...

...but yeah, I have about 250 physical media format films, mostly comedy, many of which I've had to import, and I enjoy owning them. physical media is how I grew up; it's part of who I am; my collection is a reflection of that...

...for some people, that's vinyl.

Where music's concerned, high resolution audio I think has spoiled me; now that I've experienced how good it can be, it's hard to go back to the low-res stuff; impossible in fact, at least as far as loudness war CD's are concerned; I can't listen to them.

For me music is about how it makes me feel; the music itself specifically and not the sense of ownership or the format; not like it is for me with movies. My limited edition media books and box set boxes are all packed up and in storage, the DVD-A's and BluRay-A discs transferred to a disc wallet that sits alongside my regular surround discs...

...moving forward I hope that bands, music producers and/or music companies, produce high-res discs or put out high-res files for download; for me, vinyl is not a step forward from CD's, it's a step sideways at best and, for me, it's only the terrible quality of modern CD production that stops vinyl being a step backwards...

...I find it hard to believe that if the entire music industry made a big push for music preservation and transferred everything to high res-formats that people wouldn't want to migrate to that format (or maybe that should be "I find it unbelievable"; although in light of what I've written above, maybe not so).

 

[mandrix]

Well anytime you discuss music or playback systems, formats, etc with this crowd you're going to get opinions. lol.
I'm happy with my pc as music machine, as I've stated many times.
I do not rip to flac, however, I prefer to preserve discs in .iso format (when possible).
It's easy to bitstream .iso files from the pc (e.g. with VLC or PowerDVD) and preserve the original format. Just an HDMI cable from the motherboard or GPU to the AVR and you're good to go.
Some exceptions exist, primarily DVDA and SACD, which the image files can be loaded into e.g. Foobar and played as pcm, since Foobar as yet will not bitstream, unfortunately.

 

[MidiMagic]

Flac is all that you need, covert everything and play on your PC. Great for vinyl too!
!

I fell for something like that 30 years ago. It was a music storage format for a PC. I put a lot of music on it.

It disappeared with MS-DOS.

I will never trust any long-term storage of anything on a computer. I have been burned by upgrades too many times. The only format I have been able to carry forward is .txt.

Of the over 4000 computer programs I have written in my life, less than 900 still work. About 400 of those are web pages. The rest are gone because there is nothing left that will run them. And I have rewritten the same two programs 7 times so I could keep using them.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

Multichannel flac?

Yes...

I'm using VLC player to access and play the lossless multi-channel audio files from my NAS. Naturally my phone down-mixes the multi-channel audio to 2-channels. My previous OnePlus X Android phone would lock-up when presented with lossless 'multi-channel' audio formats.

At work I've been experimenting with USB-C to analogue stereo DAC's for our touring gear. But now, for my personal interest, I'd like to know if there are such things as USB-C to analogue 'multi-channel' DAC's. Or even USB-C devices that can bit-stream digital audio...

 

[barfle]

I don’t trust streaming sites that require monthly payment, and I don’t like streaming sites that interrupt me with commercials. I’m fine with having files on site, but, like many of the geezers here, I’ve been collecting records since my age was single-digits, so that’s only going to stop when my heart does, too.

I’ve noted that my vinyl (and bakelite) collection isn’t about fidelity, although some of it sounds more “familiar” than a newer, higher-fi format might. It’s more about the process and the memories, even though the memories are fading faster than the grooves are wearing out.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

Some exceptions exist, primarily DVDA and SACD, which the image files can be loaded into e.g. Foobar and played as pcm, since Foobar as yet will not bitstream, unfortunately.

It's a great shame MakeMKV doesn't offer the ability to decrypt and back-up DVD-Audio discs and save the contents to .iso (like it can with regular DVD video discs)...

 

[par4ken]

for me, vinyl is not a step forward from CD's, it's a step sideways at best and, for me, it's only the terrible quality of modern CD production that stops vinyl being a step backwards...

I agree! In the beginning CD was a step forward, thunderous bass and no clicks and pops. Once the "digital sound" (unnatural sounding high end) of the early players was eliminated CD's seemed to be the future, for sure. I looked forward to the discrete quad CD's that were supposed to come out but sadly that never materialised. Initially I had planned to supplement my collection with new CD releases, not to replace my vinyl. Eventually I started to purchase CD's of material that I already owned on vinyl. Still I kept almost all of my vinyl regardless of it being on CD. A CD jewel box with inserts is no substitute for an LP album cover!

Much vinyl was never and likely will never be released on CD so I now find myself purchasing vintage vinyl almost exclusively.

Eventually I found that new CD's just didn't sound right. Turns out that they were horribly brickwalled. So purchasing CDs is now a bit of a crapshoot. I suggested that DR value be added to Discogs entries but that was shot down!

 

[himey]

I do not rip to flac, however, I prefer to preserve discs in .iso format

In the end, it will be pcm, ripping to flac or iso. There is no sound quality advantages to either method. The advantage flac has, is tagging, which helps organizing a collection. Once you begin to have a truly organized collection, there is no looking back.

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

In the end, it will be pcm, ripping to flac or iso. There is no sound quality advantages to either method. The advantage flac has, is tagging, which helps organizing a collection. Once you begin to have a truly organized collection, there is no looking back.

For preservational purposes, ISOs help. What is you need that one music video or the menus on a DVD-A?

Personally I do FLAC for all PCM content (except Atmos), WavPack for all DSD content, and MKA for all Atmos content.

That's the perfect balance between keeping the original format, saving space, and tagging. Everything is tagged and organized, compressed to the limit, and the original "stream" per se.

 

[himey]

Where music's concerned, high resolution audio I think has spoiled me

So you still don't realize that it isn't the format, it is how well it is mastered, and how great the original production was?

You do realize that a CD can sound better than a high resolution release if it is more dynamic, and that the industry also limits the dynamics of high resolution releases?

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

For preservational purposes, ISOs help. What is you need that one music video or the menus on a DVD-A?

Personally I do FLAC for all PCM content (except Atmos), WavPack for all DSD content, and MKA for all Atmos content.

Agreed... I've backed-up all my multi-channel audio discs to .iso files and have them safely stored on HDD's in a case. Occasionally I might go back to them to create new encodes to other audio formats.

Generally I convert multi-channel PCM (from DVD-A's and BRD-A's) to flac, DSD audio (from SACD's) to flac at 88.1kHz/24-bit.

I tend to keep other 'bit-stream' audio formats such as (Dolby TrueHD) Atmos, DTS-HD MA, regular DTS and regular Dolby Digital as a native bit-stream placed within the .mka container...

Cheers

Edit: Spelling

 

[mandrix]

It's a great shame MakeMKV doesn't offer the ability to decrypt and back-up DVD-Audio discs and save the contents to .iso (like it can with regular DVD video discs)...

I agree, for sure! Recent DVDA's I've bought - such as from Djabe e.g. have not been encrypted, and one method is to have ImgBurn read the disc and make an .iso file and another is to just copy the folders from the disc and have ImgBurn make an .iso. About the same really.

Otherwise I depend on tools such as DVDFab to decrypt. But of course it's a paid solution and not free.
I was lucky in that a friend bought a 5 license copy and gifted me one of them.

 

[mandrix]

In the end, it will be pcm, ripping to flac or iso. There is no sound quality advantages to either method. The advantage flac has, is tagging, which helps organizing a collection. Once you begin to have a truly organized collection, there is no looking back.

@himey The reason for .iso is to preserve, in toto, the contents of the disc. So it's less about choice of formats really.

I've had discs succumb to "disc rot" or other problems and once it's gone it's gone. I recently found a disc that was unplayable and unrecoverable. (Styx - The Grand Illusion & Pieces of 8)
Fortunately I had the .iso stored.
So e.g. I want to watch a concert BD, it's preserved in it's entirety and I can do whatever I want with it from there.
`
.iso format as I stated, in most cases is easily playable on the pc these days. I don't have a need to rip anything beyond .iso, it's just more space taken up on a HDD.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

EDIT: I don't give a rat's patootie about organizing and tagging everything. Never have except in rare circumstances. Just like I don't need Kodi and apps like it.

 

[MidiMagic]

So you still don't realize that it isn't the format, it is how well it is mastered, and how great the original production was?

You do realize that a CD can sound better than a high resolution release if it is more dynamic, and that the industry also limits the dynamics of high resolution releases?

Here are the things I do not care about, want, need, or want to pay for:
- Lossless format
- Discreteness (actually worse due to cogging)
- Analog vs digital
- High resolution
- "The latest thing"

Here is what I do want:
- As few different formats as possible
- A two-channel recording format (with matrix surround)
- I prefer RM (QS and DS), but will accept any matrix system
- Format longevity
- A format that has a changer for playing multiple recordings
- At least one format I can play in a car

 

[MidiMagic]

I don’t trust streaming sites that require monthly payment, and I don’t like streaming sites that interrupt me with commercials. I’m fine with having files on site, but, like many of the geezers here, I’ve been collecting records since my age was single-digits, so that’s only going to stop when my heart does, too.

I’ve noted that my vinyl (and bakelite) collection isn’t about fidelity, although some of it sounds more “familiar” than a newer, higher-fi format might. It’s more about the process and the memories, even though the memories are fading faster than the grooves are wearing out.

Bakelite? You have Edison Diamond Discs? I have a few.
Most 78 (and pre-78s) are made of shellac.

78 rpm was a 1928 NAB compromise of Victor 76 and Columbia 80 for a uniform speed standard the broadcasters wanted. They were sick of having to adjust speed for each record. Early records varied by company from 70 rpm to 120 rpm. They also standardized on lateral recording, eccentric trip groove, outside start, record thickness, hole size, 250Hz bass turnover, and clockwise rotation.

 

[himey]

I don't give a rat's patootie about organizing and tagging everything.

Thankfully I learned early on that tags are indeed important to an organized collection of music. Tags are universal, so they make every player better, including Foobar2000, jRiver, Kodi, ect. I may be an old dog, but thankfully I learned the tagging trick a couple decades ago. I did the iso thing a couple years before that.