Buying and Playing Lossless formats

Ted, taglie, Wigmaker,

Thanks for your comments/arguments.  I have enjoyed our exchanges and hopefully they have given food for thought. 

At least we have raised some dust in this quiet corner of cyberspace.  Let's hope none of it lands on our turntables!

Vic.

I found this comment on another forum this morning.   It might throw some light on the recent discussion of CD and DS.

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"Hmm - I think a good CD
transport will generally retrieve the audio file bits well enough,
but it has other problems to do with mechanical & electrical
stability, EM interference (from the motor, etc), and timing issues
causing the introduction of jitter in the output. Using the DS avoids
most of these problems with jitter as it can clock the signal itself."

So it seems that this, rather than the bit-rate itself, might be the reason why DS sounds better than CD using the same disc as source. 

Any thoughts?

Vic.

It's true that upsampling DS systems like those made by Linn re-clock the data and have extremely low measured jitter. It's also the case that over the years CD manufacturers have tried hard to reduce the jitter and many medium to high end CD players these days also tend to have extremely low measured jitter which they use as a key selling point.

However the question is whether this is audible. Jitter is a timing issue that effectively leads to very low level noise artefacts in the music. But even on the cheapest CD player the measured jitter should produce noise artefacts that are way below the level of the music and are even below the noise floor of the CD player. So you shouldn't be able to hear these artefacts at all on any CD player!

Of course in non-blind listening tests many people claim to be able to clearly hear the effect of lower jitter. But it's possible to do tests with playback through computer audio software that allows different amounts of jitter to be deliberately added as you listen. These confirm the point of view that CD jitter is completely inaudible by anyone.

The same is true for EM interference. This is not likely to be an issue in any reasonably engineered stand-alone CD player.

Finally I should emphasise in any CD or DS listening setup the limiting factor on the sound is the loudspeakers and the room acoustics, not the digital source. The loudspeaker is adding huge amounts of distortion and what you hear in the room will have a complicated and very non-flat frequency response. Simply moving your head a bit or changing where you are sitting will have a huge effect on what you hear, far more so than any of the differences we have been debating in this thread! 

Ted

Certainly agree re. loudspeakers and room acoustics. It's sobering to look at square wave responses out of speakers compared to those from amps, where any colouring at the amp stage shows as a very minor distortion, but even the best loudspeakers will show significant ringing and other defects. And that's in an anechoic chamber. Add room acoustics, and what's entering your ears will be far removed from what the amp sent out.

But surely source is the second weakest link in the chain? It seems to me that state-of-the-art recording has hardly improved in the past 40-odd years. Some of my vinyl Lyrita's sound as good as anything put out today. But below that top 5% there has been a quantum leap forward. Perhaps, come to think if it, that supports your argument. Quality of recording has far less to do with the technology at the engineer's disposal than the way he/she uses it. 

It seems to me, and I'm
sure to others, that there's an element of speculative negativity
being expressed here. There is a balance to be drawn between healthy
scepticism, and knee-jerk distrust and dismissal.

Surely no one doubts
that the digital recording, storing and delivery of music has come a
long way since the early days of CD, with its often harsh and
uninvolving sound. (And I for one am not
claiming its superiority over vinyl/analogue medium.) The advent of
digital streaming at very high bit rates, its capture (if that what
it does) with lossless codecs like FLAC, its distribution via the
internet, deserve fairer consideration than it seems to be getting
here.

In passing, one wonders
what the respected Gramophone audio reviewers have been doing over
the years when they reported on generation after generation of CD
players if they all sounded the same!

The growing number of
DS users are making a claim for the significant improvement in sound
quality that they detect with both ripped CDs and internet radio.
Like any innovation, mono to stereo, direct drive to belt-driven
turntables, source-first prioritising, AM to FM broadcasting, the
denigraters' first line of attack is to pour scorn.

Some initiatives fall
by the wayside; some develop and fuel the drive to better and better
sound quality. They stand or fall by a process of expert reviewing,
by audition in a highly competitive marketplace, by selection or
rejection by discerning prospective purchasers.

Thank goodness there
are those who can and do support progress and innovation in the
industry, even if it is the source of sour grapes for some. The
pursuit of excellence provides benefits throughout the whole range of
audio equipment. We all benefit. What we get from heavily
compressed mp3 on iPods is still wonderful compared to what most
hi-fi systems could do not so very long ago.

It takes modern
equipment to do justice to the truly excellent recordings of the
early stereo era. This “good old days” nostalgic negativity,
“supported” by dubiously selected “science”, and surveys that
tell us most people are gulls, denies what is obvious to anyone who
takes the trouble to experience what is now available, as opposed to
sticking their head in the sand and relying on theoretical
supposition. The recording and reproduction of music is better than
it has ever been – right across the range. To take an arbitrary
stand at a particular point in time and at a particular price point,
and to rubbish anything beyond it, is Luddite self delusion. It
does no service to music lovers desiring to learn about the best
equipment they can afford.

Again I say, what is
lost by giving something a hearing?

It's also worth pointing out that all the lossless formats are mathematically equivalent to the original CD in respect of archiving, as they encode the same bits. For many Lossless WMA will be more convenient as it is automatically handled by most PCs, and can be quickly downsampled for portable devices. FLAC support must be added by downloading other players, codecs and/or plugins.

Hyperion Records makes recordings available in MP3 and FLAC.

The French site Qobuz has a variety of lossless formats and a wide range of labels supported - including ECM, which can't be found on a number of other "major" sites. It's also not restricted by geoblocks as many sites are.

Hi Dubliner - I would agree that for most music there will be no discernible difference between MP3 320kbps and FLAC. (I guess most people would convert just FLAC to something lossy the Ipod supports anyway.) 

As mentioned above, if there are any slight differences in the mp3 it will be in the way it handles certain fast transient sounds, but this is unlikely to be a problem for most music, as the most highly rated mp3 encoders have been extensively developed over the years to try and handle as many strange examples as people could find. I would assume that DG have chosen carefully which mp3 encoder to use. So for general listening you would almost certainly never come across a problem. 

One issue which hasn't been mentioned so far in this thread though is the issue of perfectly gapless playback between tracks, which is not a problem with FLAC, but is an inherent problem of older mp3s. (I'm referring to very slight blips between tracks, not big 2 second gaps that can be optionally selected on your computer).  This can be very annoying in classical music that is continuous across tracks. More recent mp3 can contain extra information in the file that allow some software (e.g. Itunes) to play back perfectly without gaps. However a few years ago I bought a complete opera from Passionato and a choral work from the old DG webstore as separate mp3s for each track which very annoyingly did not properly support proper gapless playback. (Passionato did at least refunded my money.)

I'm not sure if the record companies have improved/revised the encoding of the mp3s they make available, but I am always a little wary about buying some works in this format.

Ted