High quality audio formats?

cranky said:
The best players are cPlay and XXHighEnd, but as of now they are very limited in playlist support and XX is not free. I personally am reasonably happy with Foobar. With over 50K sound files I need very good directory and tagging support, and don't mind the slight degradation in quality. It is still the best among mainstream audio software. Winamp interface doesn't float my boat, the resizing doesn't work very well and the playlist view is non-customisable.
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You ever tried Jriver's media jukebox ?

I notice you did not mention you wanted better browsing, personally i find the file explorer metaphor breaks down after several thousand files. There's only so much you can encode into directory+filename. Using Panes & metadata scales up to several hundred thousand files with ease.

Oh and the reason ppl can't really tell the difference between the vbr mp3 using the alt-presets & FLAC is because they're designed to be transparent ;) That's what you want to use instead of 320 cbr which wastes more space.
 
cranky said:
Pressed CDs are totally different from burned CDs. CDs that you buy from a store are mostly (though not always) pressed. Burning is a process mostly related to piracy.

In theory there is no difference between a professional burn and a pressing, though in practice with consumer devices and media errors are common. Since the playback process correct errors on the fly and hearing is very subjective, the perceived effect may be small. But it is there. On even a mid-range audio system a straight CD copy has been shown to be inferior to original CD. However if the track is copied to the disk in data mode (by using a soft writer and making an image on the disk, then mounting and ripping the disk) playback can be better from the ripped files (given the rest of the reproduction system is sufficiently capable) as it does not have the error and jitter of the playback process.

It helps to remember that a CD is a physical entity. It has its own issues and problems - often an Indian pressing of a recording will be vastly inferior to the original import CD. On Eric Clapton's 'Unplugged', for example the left and right channels are reversed in relationship to both the actual performance and the recording itself. This is an extreme boo-boo, but I have learned the hard way and am replacing my 200 or so Indian pressings (read:cheap) with imports over a period of time. The differences are not very subtle.

Anyway the point is that the creation and reading processes are not independent of the medium itself, that it is not an ideal medium with zero error at all times. Also that preventing all errors may be counterproductive in some cases (such as badly scratched CDs), and that the number of variables involved is pretty large.
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I knw its stupid but in my post by Recording Noise i meant all the external influences/variable/conditions to be assumed the same. Basically what i wanted to point out was that music when stored on a Disk is converted in to Binay Data. If this conversion is precise then where does the Question of Loss in Audio quality come?If the same sequence of 0 and 1 is written on a CD then we are just transferring the bits from a Original to Copy. Maybe i dont understand the intricacies of this process but i think the only Loss that can enter the Chain is while pressing from Studio Recording.
I mean most of the LP collectors are touchy about Pressings. PUrist believe in Orginal Pressing no matter what. Then there are mastered,remastered ,reissue etc. Heck even Identical Pressings have differences based on the various parameters.
/I can understand if my post comes across as bit stupid :ashamed: as this is a new territory for me
 
So, if I use foobar+wasapi/asio, it should be better than wmp even if I use digital out? And I do use itunes on mac, rythmbox on linux. Any info on that? :P
 
apex, nothing stupid in your post. You are confused between theory (which is pretty well known) and practice (which is not :) )

All music nowadays is recorded digitally, as in, in binary format so it is 1s and 0s before it even hits the disk - burning to CD does not actually convert it to binary, only to the right file container and block size.

Theoretically, the entire burning process is bit-perfect but in practice the actual spinning of a disk while recording and playback has no rewind button. If a single bit is skipped while recording or playing back, you can't go back and fix it.

Bear in mind I am talking about the actual optomechanical process, not what a CD writing software is showing you. There is a laser that is trying to imprint something on a thin layer of metal, or reading from it. The disc is moving in a horizontal direction as well as vertical (due to variation in thickness of the CD, slight bending of the media, and the rubber clamps on the transport).

Vertical motion is not insignificant when you take into account the micron lengths involved. The laser has to track the media well enough to be able to its job without error. In case of most media, error rates are well known on CDRLabs, ditto for writers. There's no mystery involved, and none of these mechanical means are actually perfect. Which is where error correction comes in.

A CD contains physical pits and lands (burnt CDs use shading to identify pits from lands) and is read in realtime while playing back. Basically, if the pickup detects no bit (which is akin to a skip on a turntable) as it is reading, you would get a hole in the sound. CD-Audio error correction predicts (or tries to) what the bit before and after it was, and auto-inserts an approximate value. Look up jitter on Wikipedia to see how this works, and why Data CDs do not suffer from this problem.

Look at this from another angle. If all media and drives were identical, why would studios still pay thousands of dollars for a studio-quality writer and 2 dollars per Pro disc? It's obviously not as simple as one would tend to think. A high-end CD player can cost in excess of 10L. What does this have that your computer doesn't? Why do burns fail on some media and not on others? The theory is all good, but manufacturing CDs is not really as easy as it seems.

@haraakiri: Yes, ASIO or exclusive mode should work better if the rest of your playback chain is capable of revealing the differences and you are able to perceive them. There's no harm in trying, and if you don't find a big difference you can always go back to what you're more comfortable with.

The player software and the transport are totally independent of each other. The software sends the file to the operating system, and if it's WMP, it will be a processed stream and not bit-perfect (unless you pay a DD or DTS file/stream). The OS decides (unless using ASIO) what to do with the file after it receives it. If it already has been altered, it can't be reincarnated.

@blr_p: I don't mean Windows Explorer, I mean browsing in playlist view of the media player. It's impossible to use Windows Explorer for large and deeply nested directory structures. Foobar allows me to use conventions for tagging and handling files, using metadata. I don't do it in WEXP.
 
^When I read a data cd, there aren't many errors, I believe. And most often there aren't any. If reading and writing are mostly error free for data, why not the same apply to audio cd. After all it's data too. Or are you just talking about playback from a cd? I think, I didn't get what you are saying. :ashamed:
 
A CD contains physical pits and lands (burnt CDs use shading to identify pits from lands) and is read in realtime while playing back. Basically, if the pickup detects no bit (which is akin to a skip on a turntable) as it is reading, you would get a hole in the sound. CD-Audio error correction predicts (or tries to) what the bit before and after it was, and auto-inserts an approximate value.Look up jitter on Wikipedia to see how this works, and why Data CDs do not suffer from this problem.
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10 characters
 
cranky said:
@blr_p: I don't mean Windows Explorer, I mean browsing in playlist view of the media player. It's impossible to use Windows Explorer for large and deeply nested directory structures. Foobar allows me to use conventions for tagging and handling files, using metadata. I don't do it in WEXP.
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JRMJ can do all that so it may not provide any incentive per se to switch over except maybe more ease in achieving the same compared to FB2K, but then i think you've already invested a significant amount of time getting FB2K just the way you want it by now.
 
cranky said:
apex, nothing stupid in your post. You are confused between theory (which is pretty well known) and practice (which is not :) )

All music nowadays is recorded digitally, as in, in binary format so it is 1s and 0s before it even hits the disk - burning to CD does not actually convert it to binary, only to the right file container and block size.

Theoretically, the entire burning process is bit-perfect but in practice the actual spinning of a disk while recording and playback has no rewind button. If a single bit is skipped while recording or playing back, you can't go back and fix it.

Bear in mind I am talking about the actual optomechanical process, not what a CD writing software is showing you. There is a laser that is trying to imprint something on a thin layer of metal, or reading from it. The disc is moving in a horizontal direction as well as vertical (due to variation in thickness of the CD, slight bending of the media, and the rubber clamps on the transport).

Vertical motion is not insignificant when you take into account the micron lengths involved. The laser has to track the media well enough to be able to its job without error. In case of most media, error rates are well known on CDRLabs, ditto for writers. There's no mystery involved, and none of these mechanical means are actually perfect. Which is where error correction comes in.

A CD contains physical pits and lands (burnt CDs use shading to identify pits from lands) and is read in realtime while playing back. Basically, if the pickup detects no bit (which is akin to a skip on a turntable) as it is reading, you would get a hole in the sound. CD-Audio error correction predicts (or tries to) what the bit before and after it was, and auto-inserts an approximate value. Look up jitter on Wikipedia to see how this works, and why Data CDs do not suffer from this problem.

Look at this from another angle. If all media and drives were identical, why would studios still pay thousands of dollars for a studio-quality writer and 2 dollars per Pro disc? It's obviously not as simple as one would tend to think. A high-end CD player can cost in excess of 10L. What does this have that your computer doesn't? Why do burns fail on some media and not on others? The theory is all good, but manufacturing CDs is not really as easy as it seems.
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Thanks a lot Cranky for that very educative short writeup. You are correct i never thought of the implementation details of the Burning/Pressing. I am reading up on the entire process now.
titana said:
CD: Jitter, Errors & Magic

A nice article from stereophile on the subject.
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Awesome Article i must say. The Author has presented various facets of CD recording/burning/reading in a very concise and simplified manner.

A very good point as mentioned by author was that we Engineers are always proponents of the "bit is bit" Theory. I never took Jitter into consideration as i never knew the playback mechanism of a Cd Player. Though the binary data can be same Bit by bit the Jitter can cause variations in the time axis which results in an incorrect playback of binary information recieved.

Also what this brings out is that Do anyone of you actually check the Cds you buy for the qualiity of the Recording? I mean of these Discs have to conform to the Philips "Red Book" specifications. We dont even know what quality recording media is used by different recording studios.

All i can say after reading all this is that Ignorance is Bliss. With all the variables involved in Recording to Mass production to burns by user its a miracle that we hear even 70% of the original Sound. Hats off to the Error correction/concealment techniques of Compact Disc.

Also can some point me to Simple Article explaining the EFM technique. I am unable to understand how the bit streams are formed and their corresponding Frequencies etc.
 
cranky's posts and titana's links have been really informative. I read these many times and still didn't get it completely. Hopefully a few more reads will do it. :P Anyway, thanks guys and if I get it, will bother you again. :)
 
titana said:
CD: Jitter, Errors & Magic

A nice article from stereophile on the subject.
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From the concluding remarks...

From my measurements, it is apparent that none of these CD tweaks have any effect on a player's error-correction ability or on the amount of jitter in the HF signal. However, it is beyond doubt that they increase the musicality of CDs. Just as in analog audio, there are things going on in digital audio that have not been identified, but influence sonic characteristics.
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So none of the tweaks displayed any improvement in terms of better jitter but at the same time improved the 'musicality' of the CD's.

How is that possible ?
 
Thats the point of this Article. He wants ppl to research why these phenomenon take place !
An interesting aspect of this CD tweaking, brought to my attention by Doug Sax, is that all of these optical-related tweaks improve the listening experience and none makes it worse. This implies that perhaps the CD format can be greatly improved by an understanding of these phenomena. If green paint around the edge of the disc, or Finyl on its surface, can improve musicality, imagine the results of intensive research by the CD's designers into why this occurs. Ironically, the engineers responsible for this marvel of technology are the least likely to believe sonic differences exist, and the most likely to dismiss such claims as rantings of the lunatic fringe.
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I have no reason not to believe what he says but the problem is there is no way to show that it is indeed real or at least the author has failed to do so. I'm inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt here as he seems to be competent in the subject as opposed to anybody in a forum or even a vendor claiming the same.
 
as opposed to anybody in a forum
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Author is clear there is no data but he feels there is a difference. The article is factually somewhat correct, but the results and conclusions are biased and subjective. You have to remember that Stereophile runs on advertising money, some of it from manufacturers of these tweaks, and that the article was based on several very specific products. Results only come from data, in which the author has failed to find any change by using tweaking products in this case.

One has to read through the article and make their own conclusions - if obviously, one is capable of doing so. In any other case, one has to take the author's word for it or disbelieve him. Nobody sent a rocket to the moon by using subjective terms, nor alleviated hunger (take your pick).

And by the way, some of the world's foremost electronic designers and engineers are forum members. Not this one, though. Try finding where they are and refer them to the article - you'll see what people who actually design and build these products think of that article. Do not tar a large swathe of people with the same brush, it reeks of insensitivity and arrogance.

Good Luck.
 
cranky said:
Author is clear there is no data but he feels there is a difference. The article is factually somewhat correct, but the results and conclusions are biased and subjective. You have to remember that Stereophile runs on advertising money, some of it from manufacturers of these tweaks, and that the article was based on several very specific products. Results only come from data, in which the author has failed to find any change by using tweaking products in this case.
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Right, so as i thought, do not believe in ghosts :)
apextwin said:
Thats the point of this Article. He wants ppl to research why these phenomenon take place !
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Perhaps but the more cynical see this as a way for the author to show he cannot find anything to substantiate the improvements but still he can hear them. The beauty of this of course is he covers his bases and at the same time schills for his advertisers ;)

The correct take from this is no evidence no cake.
 
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