machei

Actually, I'd love to hear a little of what was said regarding recording acoustic guitar well. I've been hobbying my way through multitrack recording for years, and getting a good sounding acoustic guitar on a budget is far more challenging than I ever thought it would be.<br /> <br /> Cheers,<br /> m.<br />

I assume that if I'm streaming using the AE, I attach the Toslink to the DAC, then out to the amp?<br /> <br /> Sorry, I know that's probably a stupid question, but I wanted to make sure I understood.<br /> <br /> m.<br />

Hey John, Thank you very much for that. That's the sort of feedback I was hoping for. I didn't have any route in mind, save the best quality I could get out my music again. I only used SACD as an example because I'd recently read about it. I decided for reasons of both quality and economy of space to go with a full digital setup. What I didn't appreciate was how much a good DAC can cost until I started looking. If I want to get something like the Bryston that folks are gushing about, it'll be some time before I can scrape together everything I need. However, if the Cambridge audio one sounds good, then I'd be happy to go that route. It's tough because I don't think there's any place around where I live I could actually hear what these sound like at all--I'd need to go into Toronto. Maybe a road trip. Yeah, I guess spending a few hours online with research about upsampling is advisable. We'll see what I can learn before I get into any real debates. Alas, my dad's turntable is long gone. After he passed away, everyone was all about CDs and so all that stuff went away, too. As I recall though, it wasn't all that hot in any case. Thanks again for your advice! m.

Thanks for your thoughts. And you know, I never thought of it that way. You certainly have a good point. In my understand though, it's still a little off. Forgive me if the following is picking nits or showing my still obvious ignorance of all things audiophile. I agree with you in that right now, we have ways to enjoy music that our parents never dreamed of, particularly in that we can select the level of quality we want to enjoy. I expect that comparatively, we now have the ability to capture sound at fidelity and quality that far surpasses anything they had before. So yes, you're absolutely right. There's a choice that people make when listening to stuff at a 128k MP3--one that few of the people on this site would make given what they know about the potential of sound (and for the record, I couldn't agree with you more--I can't imagine how pumping Brittney Spears up to 24/96 could possibly make her sound better). My argument, however, is that up to now, the standard is that we don't. At the end of the day, an analog signal is still more smooth than a digital one, particularly one that has been sampled down to 44Mhz. 44 thousand samples a second is probably a little like watching a desaturated television of the 70's compared to the 1080p high def we get nowadays, and I know that CDs are still the standard. So to use your own argument, our choice of what level we get to enjoy is limited before it even gets to us. I don't know enough about upsampleing and how it works to argue this point well, but it seems to me only logical that you can't create something from what isn't there. If you have a digital image, for instance, and you enlarge it in photoshop, it pixellates simply because the information isn't there to work with in the first place. If what we get on a standard CD and consequently rip to our iTunes libraries is only present on the disc at 16/44 then it won't matter at what level you save it... even a perfect AIFF copy will still only be at that level. If I'm wrong about that, then someone please correct me! So my argument would be that we need to USE the technology we have and start recording and delivering stuff at higher samples straight from the source and onto the delivery method. Then we will truly have the choice you allude to. Until then, any analog vinyl album will sound better when delivered over a good system than a CD does, and that makes my dad's music sound better than mine. Cheers, m.

Thank you for your feedback. I wondered about this. See, part of the reason I thought that going the iTunes/External DAC/Amp route is that at the end of the day, with digital music, the storage method is bits and bytes. Doesn't matter if it's CD, SACD, DVD, whatever. It comes more down to storage than medium, and a hard disk doesn't care what it's storing, it only cares about the space. However, if you can't GET the information to your hard disk, then you're limited to what you can store. There's nothing really one can do to improve upon the original source. A CD will always only be 16/44. So I suppose I'd have to figure a way to get a SACD player that'll plug into the DAC as an alternate source to enjoy the fidelity of these sources, at least for now. I guess that's the Achilles heel of this sort of setup. But, that isn't to say this ruins the whole thing for me--it does not. Regardless, it's still an extremely economical way to store and listen to all my music in the best sound it can be without all the clutter of jewel cases. In my particular situation, that means about 400+ of them. Organization and storage of that many CDs into the space of a terabyte drive is attractive indeed. Thank you for the feedback. I'll let everyone know what I go with when I do. Seems that the audio places in my town are only capable of blank looks when I mention external DACs. There's only one place, and he's pushing the Cambridge Audio one. I may well go for that. Cheers, m.

Hello all, First of all, I want to introduce myself as a new member here. I started out this little journey a while ago after having a discussion with a friend of mine wherein it dawned on me that our generation are the first, by and large, whose music actually sounds worse than our parent's music did. Digital giveth, and digital taketh away, it seems. Although I'm happy to see that it may finally be coming into its own. While admittedly still very much a newbie, I'v starting to get a very good idea about what sort of a set I will want to build for myself in the near future. Somewhere in the last decade or so I went from dropping a CD into the machine with the express purpose of *listening* to it, to having my music become the 128K MP3 disaster wallpaper that fills in the silence. I would like to change that. Anyway, hello. My question for the group of you is this: There's a lot of information about ripping CDs here. I already know I'll go with AIFF for my tunes, but even then, the CDs by and large are sampled in at 16/44. That's not, as I understand, anywhere near as good as it gets. So, for the sake of argument: If I were to go out and pick up a hybrid SACD copy of Dark Side Of The Moon for instance, how do I rip the SACD information so that I can stream that? And can iTunes even handle it? I assume that it can, but I don' think I've read anything about that yet. I haven't tried yet, so it could be that the point is moot, and that it's so easy the reason no one's said anything is that it's a given. Anyway, any thoughts? Cheers, everyone. m.