High End Audio Bullshit!

[300Z]

Yes he does. He goes by WrineX over there. Pretty knowledgeable and helpful guy.

He's also on the FB group too.

[hudelson2]

Another item that seems like pure BS are expensive power cables. Never mind the electricity coming out of the wall socket is dirty with voltage sags, spikes, and hash, going through kilometers of indifferent quality of wire, and magically one meter or so of an exotic power cable should clean up the power and remove voltage sags, etc.

[malboro2]

OMG. I guess anyone can talk at a show.

I did look into this awhile ago. My wife was even willing to let me spring for the separate DAC(not a $2K model). But using my MBP, I didn’t want to connect it physically to the system. I wanted to be across the room, and bluetooth didn’t have the bandwidth I needed(at least when I looked at it). Other options were more than I wanted to pay, or too expensive to do for me, or too complicated. But the killer for me was the lack of serious mac software that would allow me to organize the 1000 cd’s of classical into something as good as my current CD collection. They are in paper cd sleeves in file boxes organized according to musical period, instrument, and style, and also organized by individual piece in Ninox Database(that allows me to instantly find the numbered cd with a pice I want to play.

Someone who did this said that transferring the CD’s to digital introduced a distortion called "digital stutter”, and the people he knew who did it wished they still had their CD’s. I couldn’t find anyone who ever heard of digital stutter, but then there aren’t that many people around who actually transferred and entire 1000 CD classical collection into a 3 TB drive.

[Ron_E]

I don't have any SS drives, so I know nothing about them.
Wolf

Think high capacity really fast flash drive that looks like a hard drive to your PC. They make SSD's using the SATA interface which has turned out to be a bottleneck for current SSD memory technology. I just rebuilt my computer and my wife's computer with NVMe M.2 SSD's (tiny printed circuit board that plugs into a slot on the MB). SATA drives have a maximum speed of 600 MB/s while my SSD benchmarks at 3300MB/s.

Most of what he said about digital audio was nonsense. The resources need to play back digital audio are trivial unless you're doing some form of signal processing. I'm currently playing a flac file and the media player is using 14MB of memory and is momentarily pulling data off the old mechanical HD at 130KB/s.

Ron

[Ron_E]

OMG.

Someone who did this said that transferring the CD’s to digital introduced a distortion called "digital stutter”, and the people he knew who did it wished they still had their CD’s. I couldn’t find anyone who ever heard of digital stutter, but then there aren’t that many people around who actually transferred and entire 1000 CD classical collection into a 3 TB drive.

I converted my 1500+ CD's to lossless Flac files and find them to be as good as the original unless there was trouble reading the CD.

Ron

[Dave Bullet]

Those that talk about noise in the digital domain need to back that up with a specific protocol that does not perform error detection and correction. Then we have a basis. With an appropriate protocol, there is no chance of the bits being wrong. Any "noise" introduced will simply reveal itself as gaps in playback when buffer underrun occurs on the receiving device. this will be clearly audible (or can be measured). It won't "sneak through" as any hiss, loss of detail, compression or some such.

[chad1376]

A few important tips for anyone that stores their music on a M.2 drive.

1) Always store the card with the contacts down, so air bubbles don't mix with the bits. Never shake the card. Install it in the computer with the contacts down for the same reason..

2) 3300MB/s is way too fast - your whole music library will play in a few seconds. Here, I've installed a 18k resistor to slow it down to the Redbook standard of 1,411,200 B/s, but it depends on the bit rate of your files. High-res requires a smaller resistor.

3) Compressed files will need a larger resistor, since the bits are compressed, they create pressure in the memory chip, and the bits will want to come out faster.

[malboro2]

I converted my 1500+ CD's to lossless Flac files and find them to be as good as the original unless there was trouble reading the CD.

Ron

What software did you use to access them?

[Ron_E]

What software did you use to access them?

I use VLC Media Player for playback. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html
I used Exact Audio Copy to rip the disks to Flac. http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Ron

[skatz]

I converted my 1500+ CD's to lossless Flac files and find them to be as good as the original unless there was trouble reading the CD.

Ron

Any idea how much time was involved? I have a similar sized library.

Steve

[Ron_E]

Any idea how much time was involved? I have a similar sized library.

Steve

Looking at the date stamps on the folders I was able to rip 734 CD's between 9-14 and 9-31. It looks like it was taking 5 to 10 minutes a CD. There were times when I'd use 2 machines that were networked so while one was ripping a disk I could be starting another disk.

Ron

[chad1376]

It probably goes without saying, but with libraries that big and time intensive, backup of the drives is critical. I'm running my stuff off of a NAS, Raid 1, for drive redundancy.

Sigh, I really need to back that up onto another drive, and then un-plug it and stash it someplace safe and off-line.

[Ron_E]

It probably goes without saying, but with libraries that big and time intensive, backup of the drives is critical. I'm running my stuff off of a NAS, Raid 1, for drive redundancy.

Sigh, I really need to back that up onto another drive, and then un-plug it and stash it someplace safe and off-line.

I have copies on 3 different machines.

Ron

[fpitas]

Those that talk about noise in the digital domain need to back that up with a specific protocol that does not perform error detection and correction. Then we have a basis. With an appropriate protocol, there is no chance of the bits being wrong. Any "noise" introduced will simply reveal itself as gaps in playback when buffer underrun occurs on the receiving device. this will be clearly audible (or can be measured). It won't "sneak through" as any hiss, loss of detail, compression or some such.

Snake Oil is protocol independent.

[malboro2]

I use VLC Media Player for playback. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html
I used Exact Audio Copy to rip the disks to Flac. http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Ron

No... I mean what software did you use to organize them? I mean if I had decided to put it on a drive I would need to be able to type in vivaldi and get all the choices, or type in clarinet and get all the clarinet or type in renaissance and get all those choices. It would have to be as goo as the software that I get from PRIMEPHONIC where I can instantly listen to all the recordings on the Toy piano, for instance.