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Audio and Video Talk
General Discussion
Audiophile sound quality off a hard drive
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<blockquote data-quote="AudioEngineer" data-source="post: 14231" data-attributes="member: 473"><p>Hi there,</p><p></p><p>I guess you are right - the prevailing perception out there is that audio served from a computer must be bad quality. However, that hasn't been the case for the past few years already, but alas, it certainly is not mainstream yet. Maybe in about 5 years from now the market might have woken up big time. What I meant by a well-designed USB DAC is that it should use the ASYNC mode of pulling data from the computer. The other method is synchrounous and may suffer from jitter problems. The Wavelength Audio USB DAC products run in this mode for example.</p><p></p><p>Regarding the lossless audio formats, no, Apple lossless is different from flac, as is wavpak and windows media lossless compression. It doesn't really matter what the lossless compression format is - choose the one supported by your favourite music player software. All of them will give exactly the same audio data back when they decompress the file. If you don't believe me, compress a wav file with flac, decompress it and you get the original back. Do the same with Apple lossless and the result will be exactly the same, as with any other lossless compression format. Remember that the data is only compressed to preserve disk space. When the file is played, the player software has to decompress the data first before sending it to the DAC, which means that you get the original audio data being played back.</p><p></p><p>Hope that helps...</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AudioEngineer, post: 14231, member: 473"] Hi there, I guess you are right - the prevailing perception out there is that audio served from a computer must be bad quality. However, that hasn't been the case for the past few years already, but alas, it certainly is not mainstream yet. Maybe in about 5 years from now the market might have woken up big time. What I meant by a well-designed USB DAC is that it should use the ASYNC mode of pulling data from the computer. The other method is synchrounous and may suffer from jitter problems. The Wavelength Audio USB DAC products run in this mode for example. Regarding the lossless audio formats, no, Apple lossless is different from flac, as is wavpak and windows media lossless compression. It doesn't really matter what the lossless compression format is - choose the one supported by your favourite music player software. All of them will give exactly the same audio data back when they decompress the file. If you don't believe me, compress a wav file with flac, decompress it and you get the original back. Do the same with Apple lossless and the result will be exactly the same, as with any other lossless compression format. Remember that the data is only compressed to preserve disk space. When the file is played, the player software has to decompress the data first before sending it to the DAC, which means that you get the original audio data being played back. Hope that helps... [/QUOTE]
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Audio and Video Talk
General Discussion
Audiophile sound quality off a hard drive
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