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rtrautner

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  1. I wonder if Chris or anyone else who has experience with both DAC's can comment on the comparison between the Berkeley Reference DAC and the Luxman DA-06. Thank you.
  2. Looks good generally. Must say I miss the section that listed the most recent forum postings.
  3. RIP Levon-one of the absolute all-time greats. Rock of Ages is my go-to for all around best Band recordings. It still seems a kind of miracle that all that happened. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/arts/music/levon-helm-drummer-and-singer-dies-at-71.html
  4. and the Debussy for a few hours and was expecting to hear a significant difference, but I didn't. In fact I was hard pressed to hear any improvement offered by the Debussy. It may of course be due to the limits of my ears and the processor in between them. I haven't heard the Berkeley.
  5. A clear cut above the QB-9, which I owned previously. For less than the cost of a dCS Debussy you can also have a state-of-the-art multidisc A/V player. It's a truly awesome unit that has been so far underappreciated in these and other audiophile quarters-perhaps due to some people looking down their noses at anything multi-channel. Check it out-you might be surprised.
  6. Yes, the problem is only with 24/192 files but not all of them and not consistently. I have a MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM. I haven't figured out how to maximize the amount of RAM available to Amarra-any ideas? Thanks
  7. I have noticed random clicks in at least two recent Hi Res downloads, Ella Fitzgerald's Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie and The Art of John Coltrane, both from HD Tracks. When I repeat the track, the clicks are not in the same place. The clicks are not present in any ripped CD track. FLAC files converted to AIFF using XLD; playback is iTunes/Amarra 2.3. Any ideas what the problem might be and how to address it? Thanks
  8. Such is the subtitle of an article from the latest issue of TAS (#220, p. 34-39), the third installment of a 4-part series on Computer Music Audio Quality. In the article, they describe detailed tests of FLAC files in which they found that all FLAC files degrade the sound of WAV files and the more times the FLAC file is converted to WAV and back again, the greater the sound deterioration. Although counter-intuitive, given that no one seems to refute that FLAC is lossless, it seemed to be present in every rip and playback software that was tested. Interestingly, there were significant differences between the programs tested. I wonder what our thoughtful readers make of those findings? What are the implications for Hi-Res downloads, which are almost exclusively in FLAC format?
  9. My all-time favorite: O Come All Ye Faithful by King's College Choir. Any of several Christmas recordings by Chanticleer, the all-male San Francisco a capella group. A bit off the beaten track: Black Christmas-Spirituals in the African-American Tradition. And something new in a refreshingly spare production, A Very She and Him Christmas.
  10. I was intrigued to read this article about the negative effects of vibrations on hard drives. At least some of the big boys and girls at Sun Microsystems think it's significant. If true, it would seem that in an application like ours, even small perturbations in HD performance due to vibrations might result in audible deterioration in sound quality. The music being played could be a source of such vibrations, not to mention other potential sources. Normally, I'm skeptical about problems with vibrations affecting components like amplifiers and computers, but perhaps there's something to it after all. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/04/BUJP1M76OF.DTL
  11. You might check in iTunes to see what resolution your AIFF's are in order to confirm that your FLAC to AIFF conversion is happening correctly. I learned the hard way after using Max to convert many Hi Res downloads that it was defaulting to 16-bit. A kind reader here turned me on to XLD (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23430/x-lossless-decoder). XLD converts automatically in native resolution and is fairly user friendly.
  12. The only problem is that I have to manually drag the album folder into the artist folder in the iTunes library. That I can live with. Otherwise, it looks like my problems are all solved. The best news is that all my HD files will now be bit perfect in native resolution! Thanks again so much for your extraordinary help and patience!! Best,
  13. Thanks again for taking all the time you are taking with this. May you be the beneficiary of a similar good samaritan some day. It may be a few days before I have the time to sort through this, but I will. Best,
  14. First, I want to echo and amplify Chris's thanks-you have clearly gone beyond the call of duty and it is much appreciated. I had my CD collection ripped to my Drobo by a service called Ready to Play (www.readytoplay.com). They did a great job. One of their primary benefits is detailed labeling with genre, grouping, etc. In order to preserve this more detailed organization, they recommend that I do not check the box "keep media folder organized", as that will override all this custom labeling. Curiously, until I switched from Max to XLD this was not a problem, which leads me to think it is an issue of preferences or protocol. When converting FLAC to AIFF I use your suggestion "open folder as a disc". When I do this I get a window such as the one I attached. I then seem to have only the option to "extract", with the aforementioned result. I have figured out some manual workarounds, but it would be preferable to have this process automated. One more question: In the bottom left hand corner of this screen shot it says "AccurateRip: NO". Any idea what that means? If it indicates that there is some kind of error checking option that I have turned off, I assume I should turn it on, but I can't figure out how. Thanks again for all your help.
  15. I started with a Mac Mini and then switched to a MBP. First, with the mini you have to deal with the hassle of not having a built-in screen. Presuming you have a monitor, the mini is still inferior in other ways. Screen sharing did not work well-it was unresponsive, slow and appeared distorted on the sharing computer. The music quality on playback on the MBP is also notably better. For me, that may have been in part b/c I have a SSD on the MBP and run off battery when possible, neither of which are possible on the mini. I also went to an external HD for the music library when I switched to the MBP and increased RAM, which undoubtedly also helped with the sonics. The mini is cheaper but my experience with the MBP has been overall significantly superior.
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