Rambaud

Fortunately, I listened to the trial version of A+ 2.00 before reading all the posts on this forum. Things like file management, drag&drop, appearance are (again fortunately) of secondary importance to me compared to SQ. I found the SQ sufficiently improved (to my ears & in my system) for me to part with my hard earned cash to purchase version 2.02. Thank you Damien.

I liked the Sennheiser PX100s so much, I bought the PX100 -IIs a few months ago.

+ 2.

The PX-100 IIs arrived yesterday afternoon. Not had much opportunity to listen yet. But initial impressions are favourable.

I have been thinking about buying the PX-100 II headphones, as my 7 year old PX-100s are getting a bit long in the tooth. But they are very comfortable and can still give my AKG 702s a good fight. Finally pulled the trigger on the PX-100 IIs a few minutes ago, after on of my nags came in at 110/1.

In the UK, the price is £24.00 for the 24/88.2 version (FLAC or ALAC). This should equal US$38.40 @ £1 = $1.60. I have not downloaded it yet.

Although I have 3 or 4 enclosures for my external drives, I tend to use a docking station most of the time. It will accept "bare" drives (either 2.5" or 3.5") with USB 2.00, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. Therefore, it takes less than 10 seconds to swap drives. I use SuperDuper to clone my internal hard drives on a daily basis. Plus Time Machine to backup data on a hourly basis.

I was going to put a SSD in my MBP but bought a Mac Mini instead. For the MBP, I use a mixture of Time Machine and SuperDuper to an external Firewire drive. The former for hourly backups of data files and the latter for daily backups of all files. For the Mac Mini, I added a 256Gb SSD as an additional internal drive to the 500Gb drive already installed. The latter is nearly full so it will be replaced with a spare 750Gb Scorpio Black drive which I have. Backups are done by SuperDuper and ChronoSync.

My understanding is that ALAC is essentially a compressed (but lossless) AIFF? Any conversion between the two formats should be very quick, as no ripping is involved. I normally use iTunes to rip my cds, but recently I have used XLD. On my system, I cannot discern any difference in the resulting AIFF files. That could change, perhaps, with a "damaged" cd

Apologies if my method does not work with WAV files. I have not ripped to WAV in over 5 years - my memory seems to be fading even more with the advancing years.

In iTunes, I go to the relevant album and select all the tracks (shift key + mouse). Then right mouse click on the selected tracks, choose Get Info from the drop-down menu, click Yes which brings up the Multiple Item Information window. In the "Info" tab, double click on the Artwork square which will bring take you to the folder where the relevant image file resides. I use the My Albums folder which is located (on my machine) : \Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\My Albums.

For those albums where I have no cover art, I merely download the relevant image file as JPEG and add it to my iTunes library.

I could not think of any - my SSD is 250Gb - so I put my music files on an external Firewire 800 drive. Audirvana Plus is my player of choice. iTunes is used only for MP3 files to sync with my iPod.

The filter settings which I currently use are the ones given by Bob Stern in his post of 14/9/2012. I found they did improve the SQ (for me & in my system). Also, I have found that the SQ of my mp3 files are improved, most of the time, with upsampling. I discovered this accidentally when I played a radio commentary via my external DAC to my desktop speaker. The extra volume helped too. Now I play all my Red Book files with 4x oversampling.

I am not experiencing any metallic high frequencies with Integer Mode. I listen mainly to female & male vocals, which may have something to do with it My settings are : Steepness 8 Filter Max Length 2,000,000 Cut Off Freq. .83 Ani-aliasing 200.0 Pre-ringing 0.00 Upsampilng : Power of 2 only