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The sound quality of the original CD and both prior LP pressings is also superb. Credit goes first to the engineer (Brian Paulson) and also to the fact that, unusually for a little-known indie band, they had access to a big commercial studio which gives that big sound (one of the band members had worked there and got the time cheap). They recorded it in a weekend and almost everything is live. And they were into prewar blues albums and hence sought a very sparse, unprocessed sound. You can hear a very similar sound on Paulson's recording of Seam's Are You Driving Me Crazy? (cd/lp), Polvo's This Eclipse (CD only) and also great sound in his production of Idyll Swords II (cd only), which is mostly instrumental raga-influenced indie rock. In the same vein as Slint, but heavier/more rockin' is Albini's band Shellac, whose debut At Action Park and most recent release, Excellent Italian Greyhound have a similar clear, crisp, unprocessed sound. The latter is available as 24/44 download.

Hi, I've been away a while but I have a practical question. I need to stream toslink or possibly galvanically isolated coaxial from my desktop W7 computer, and $200 is my upper limit. Options are a)internal soundcard, b)install a firewire port and use a firewire interface with toslink out, c)usb interface (preferably with asynchronous transfer), d)wireless streamer (which could then have coax out), e)network streamer (would need toslink), f)any old usb interface, followed by a coax to toslink converter. Requirements are a)no electrical connection to the sound system, b)24/96, c)under $200 Desires are a)sound quality, b)not having to mess with drivers, c)transferability (i.e. a soundcard is at a disadvantage). What seems to come up is ESI Juli@ internal soundcard, Musical Fidelity V-Link, and M2Tech HiFace. I'm interested in a) operational notes and caveats about any of the above b) relevant sonic comparisons c) other options which meet my criteria Thank you.

If I'm not mistaken, Kent Poon, the engineer for a hi-rez label, tested the bitstream off his soundcard using itunes and found alac playback was, in fact, identical to what itunes produced from the corresponding wav files. A bug such as you suggest would in any case be easily verifiable by any audio professional and it's unlikely it would not yet have come to light.

/Even without considering sample rate, just 16/44 vs. 24/44, so the filtering isn't the big factor, I have yet to hear the room or any instrumental harmonics from the former presented as it sounds from the position of the mic array. (I guess that is the nth +1 time I've said this, yes? ;-})/ Well this is irrelevant to fidelity. Fidelity could only be assessed in comparison to the live mic feed.

I'm rather floored at 24 bit being trumpeted as a key to improved sound quality. It makes no sense. Nothing, or almost nothing in the recording and playback chain has that much dynamic range. Mic preamps, mics, mixing consoles, storage media (considering most hi-rez out there is sourced from analog tape), DACs, amps, and, especially speakers--then add the 40 dB of background noise in even a quiet suburban setting, and it's clear that 65-75 dB is sufficient to capture the actual dynamic range, including "reverb tails" and whatever else, contained on nearly all recordings ever made. As backup, remember that vinyl enthusiasts trumpet the same increase in "resolution" as hi-rez folks, and they are only playing with 70 dB of signal to noise on a good day. This is not about have 48 dB of extra "resolution". 24 bit does not decrease error--bits are six dB steps whether 16 or 24 bit media is used. It is useful to have headroom when recording an mixing, but for the consumer 24 bit might as well be padded 16 bit. If 24 bit sounds better than 16 bit to anyone, it is because of some other factor. Then to talk about 24 bit in a car! With 65 to 85 dB background noise? Sorry, that's useless. Spend your money on soundproofing the car, quieter tires, or a quieter car altogether and you will hear much more improvement. With the car moving I doubt you could reliably pick 128 kbs aac from 24/192 flac, were you crazy enough to try. Maybe in a Rolls Royce on fresh asphalt.

But do we hear continuous waves? You assume we do. But that's not how I understand it.

If you stream from itunes to atv, itunes converts to lossless before streaming. Furthermore, if you have the 2nd generation atv, it resamples to 48 kHz sampling rate. Either would theoretically destroy any theoretical differences between AIFF and ALAC.

There will be absolutely no discernible difference in sound quality nor in the data itself. However, if your ATV is connected wirelessly (and possibly wired as well), then your computer actually transmits files to it in ALAC, so it's a real head scratcher why AIFF would make things any different. I would look in to other possible sources of the problem and consider a call to Apple tech support--just mention the slow graphics and don't mention the file format unless they ask.

I bought an Acronova in late 2009--not the Nimbie but the one with a robot arm. It was basically a nightmare. The plus is integration with dbPowerAmp which gives much more accurate art and track info. But it was a bust. I'd load it up with 25 discs at night and in the morning find that it ripped 8 then spent all night trying to get the ninth in its grasp. Or it would rip all 25, but 4 would have errors and need to be reripped (including brand new disks). I bought it from guitar center and sent it back. The Nimbie looks like a much more reliable mechanism but given the problems I have with accurate rips (which is to say that a few disks per hundred on my computer come up with an error, almost all of which disappear on reripping, not to mention the Acronova which was blowing more like 10% of rips), I want the verification of Accurate Rip. So I just bit the bullet and ripped 4000 disks the old fashioned way, with dbpa.

I was bummed when Chord wouldn't let me hear My Bloody Valentine through their Blu series which was sounding quite divine on standard show material. This was five or six years ago at a Stereophile show. I waited until the end of the day and there was only one other person in the room, and still no Loveless.

I don't know what assumptions are made in the Nyquist theorem about the sampling accuracy, but the points raised above are potentially relevant. Just how much do the (very small) irregularities of the sampling frequency in conversion affect the conclusions of Nyquist? I don't know but I'd be interested in the answer of someone who has the chops to work through the math. My intuition (as someone who is not expert but not unfamiliar with serious math) is that small timing errors (aka jitter) might upset the applecart fairly substantially (and potentially by more than a factor of two in sample rate, since margins of error propagate at every stage). In that case, extra samples might have the effect of smoothing or averaging those timing errors to make Nyquist hold with real world clocking. That is spoken as someone who is frequently skeptical of some of the scientifically unorthodox claims of people in this forum. Or existing clocking might be totally sufficient.

Hi, I've bought an Airport Express for my parent-in-law solely to stream music from an HP netbook running XP SP3. Tried to set it up wirelessly via the netbook but got error message that settings were done correctly but Airport Utility cannot see the device. Then set it up wirelessly with my wife's Mac. Current situation: the Mac sees the Airport and can Airplay to it. So can the desktop running XP SP3. But my laptop and the intended target, my mother-in-law's netbook neither see the airport in airport utility nor show it as an option in itunes. My computer does stream successfully to an Airport Express in my own home, though. If I can't get the netbook to recognize the airport, Christmas is ruined. I will try Apple customer service if necessary, but past experience with similar issues leads me to expect multiple hour head-banging-wall situations followed by "not our problem" due to non-apple hardware.

Hallelujah. Of course each device must be taken on a case by case basis. Is a Squeezebox as well behaved? An internal soundcard in a pc? An EMU external soundcard? A Sonos? Sooloos? We don't know until we test those too. However, the ball now seems to be in the court of those who have the ability to measure this stuff to show that there is a definitive difference in the power supply to the clock based on codec in any device, or a difference in jitter.

Some people will always buy the more expensive thing or do the harder thing because they think it will or even might be better. That does not mean a thing. EAC is preferred in the online community because a)it gives a log of the rip that verifies (by essentially ripping twice) that the rip is perfect (when the settings are in order). This could be of use to Bobb-E. b)it consults the accuraterip database which gives near certainty of a perfect rip (not Bobb-E's concern when ripping from cd-r). Dbpower amp will do both and is easier and faster. Thus they are superior to itunes because of verifiablity, not accuracy. I too have had itunes rips of scratched cds come out with no error message and been flawed. It's not that itunes does a worse job getting the data, just that you might have an error and not know it until months later when you play the track.

You absolutely can rip in ALAC and at any point in the future reconstruct the EXACT .wav file that was on the original disk. That is the meaning of lossless. Don't worry about it.