My Sting: Ten Summoner's Tales CD has been through Hell and back, the play surface is practically cloudy. got the 0.9pb5 of EAC, and I must say, if you take the time to learn it's features, it will give you the best rip, hands down. View image: /infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif So in summary, get a good DAEing drive and Bob's your Aunty's live-in lover. It's damn fast, and I mean damn fast, and the listening quality is truly excellent.
Then I listen usually with windows media player 6.4 through my vortex 2 and my videologic siroccos (the badass 2.1 originals - probably the second best PC speakers for music, second only to the sirocco pros). Sometimes I feel guilty how quickly I can rip a CD ("hey housemate can I borrow that new CD you bought to listen to?" Five minutes later "here it is back, thanks").
Using the nero MP3 plugin (Fraunhoffer) I encode at 256kbps full stereo and my PIII 800E system keeps up with 16x no probs. Apparently Yamaha did some work on DAE for this series of drives and it seems to have paid off. I (fortunately) get perfect reproduction even at 16x. You rip the track as PCM (.wav) and look at it in the nero audio wave examiner. It has two audio tracks on it, both have a saw tooth wave through one channel and are silent in the other. There's a test you can run using the nero CD. I use Nero and rip with my Yamaha SCSI 8x4x24 at 16x speed (yes 16X DAE!). I've read very good things about exact audio copy, but haven't tried it myself. Not only will these sound terrible, but they use up encoding bandwidth (similar to noise in broadcast TV - bad signal, bad quality output). Before you encode you need to rip successfully (no pops, etc). it takes the sound quaility through hell and back.Įncoding is only half the story. PS - NEVER use winamp to turn mp3 into WAV. I guess I will have to be ignorant now, and pretend I can't hear the difference in mp3 128.
who could not leave any niche of the software market alone. I can't convert everything to WMA 128, and it would not make sense, becuase i would not gain any sound quality because I am coming from mp3.ĭoes anyone else here use WMA on a regular basis, it is a better format, but lacks widespread support on the net. I hate having all different types of bitrates and formats in my collection. but mp3 is allready become the STANDARD audio format. Also just about all music found on the internet falls in at 128kbps mp3 format. OK, this is all well and good, but I have about 8 gigs of music in mp3 128k/sec.
they all were about the same as the original WAV to me. The file size is 1/3 less too! So, WMA at 128kbps is as good as mp3 in both 160 and 192. To me, WMA at 96kbps sounds as good, or maybe a bit better than mp3 at 128kbps. I hate to admit it, but WMA gives you much better sound quality per kilobyte of file size. All encoded with Musicmatch jukebox, and judged through Klipsch Promedias. OK, last night I did some sound sampling from a ripped CD, comparing various mp3 and WMA bitrates to straight up wav files.