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eatapc

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  1. Yes. My streaming along with import & download quality have all been set to 24/96. The quality changes to CD quality as soon as I play or download anything. High-res just doesn't seem to work -- at least in the pre-launch app for the United States.
  2. I'm still confused. I've tried downloading 24/96 content at the native resolution, but the "import" comes in at CD quality. I've yet to get anything above CD quality, whether streaming or playing back from my downloads.
  3. Any Willie & Leon fans? This is an alert about bad files on the new high-res release, which I bought from HD Tracks. Track 16 actually is blank for most of it. HDT refunded my money promptly, informing me that it may take some time to get the record company to fix the issue, so a refund was the only solution. I note, however, that the album still seems to be for sale on HD Tracks (also on Pono).
  4. This was happening on my Mac Mini (Mid 2011, 8GBs ram, Lynx Hilo Dac, Pure Music w/iTunes). I had inserted an AudioQuest Jitterbug in the USB port for the DAC and was happy with the apparent sonic improvement, but at some point a month or two later (and after changing my Pure Music settings to always upsample) I started getting glitches (dropouts and digital noise for about two seconds) very sporadically. I noticed that the Jitterbug was pretty hot, so I unplugged it and used the system without it. So far no more dropouts or glitches. But on general principles, anytime there is bad behavior on a Mac, check your Activity Monitor to see if there is a process hogging resources.
  5. Anyone having issues with the Jitterbug? I thought it made a nice sonic improvement, but over time I started having intermittent glitching (dropout and digital noise lasting for about 2 seconds), usually after my system had warmed up and played for awhile. I have a Mac Mini with a Lynx Hilo; I upsample with Pure Music, so the USB is sending "high res" to the DAC at all times. I noticed that the Jitterbug gets quite hot, so I went back to using the Hilo straight into the Mac Mini without going through the Jitterbug. The glitching stopped. As an experiment, I plugged my backup USB hard drive into the Jitterbug. After a few days of regular backups, I got a failure. I'm thinking the Jitterbug overheats with heavy, sustained data transfers and can cause an intermittent USB connection. Any thoughts?
  6. Just bought the HD release today. Dowd's recordings are not audiophile calibre, but this is an excellent remastering. Good frequency balance, improved dynamics, better transparency and excellent stage width -- outside the edges of my speakers, in fact. The outtakes and Ludlow Garage tracks make this well worth the money.
  7. Thank you for saying what audiophiles don't want to hear: We can't trust our ears.
  8. Best article I've read here. Thank you for saying what audiophiles don't want to hear: We can't trust our ears.
  9. Downloaded the remix from HD Tracks. This has been a reference recording for me for over 20 years. Because of the QSound digital processing, it has been an invaluable setup tool. If the surround sound from my two speakers isn't mind blowing, I know I have to work on speaker placement and room acoustics. Verdict: Love the HAL voice in "Perfect Sense," but I like the overall sound quality of the old CD a little better. The CD has a touch more bass and warmth, is more subjectively dynamic in a few important spots, and the QSound effects are sometimes (not always) more focused. In general, I hear the surround effects more clearly in the old mix. Right off the bat, first track ("Bill Hubbard"), the crickets, dog barking and big-cat growling are more dramatically audible (maybe just louder) in the old mix. So the new HD mix is interesting but a mixed bag. I would have thought that a remix from the source tapes for this album would be a huge, killer improvement, but perhaps the limitations of the 1992 material put a lid on how much better the sound can get.
  10. I have not been able to get Korg AudioGate to do a conversion from DSD to PCM without seeing some clipping. Tried it with three different albums, played with the settings, gave up. Pure Music does a good PCM conversion on the fly by creating small proxy files. The level comes out a few dB too low/conservative, but the sound quality is excellent. I posted a demo in another thread, but it seems relevant in this one also. Apologies if you've already seen it.
  11. Just saw this thread. I've been using Pure Music in Mavericks for over two months, and now on a brand new, maxed out Retina MacBook Pro. It works great. If in doubt about Pure Music working with Mavericks, I posted thread about DSD playback in Mavericks earlier this week. A demo video I made is here: Last night I brought the laptop over to a friend's house to show him how you can optimize subwoofer crossovers with Pure Music. We also fooled around with EQ plugins. I recently downloaded and tried Audirvana+ as a trial, but I'm not a fan. I was happy to learn that Audirvana somehow plays my existing Pure Music Bookmarks and proxy files for DSD tracks, but the iTunes integration was sluggish compared to Pure Music, and I just don't like the player interface. (The slowness was odd, since I have 16 GBs RAM and a 1TB SSD hard drive.) Hopefully Rob will give Pure Music some new features and an improved interface soon, but the old one works well and sounds great.
  12. Hi Barry. As always, I agree with you in theory. And I agree even in practice, as almost all my serious audio is formatted as AIFF, even if downloaded as FLAC. Drive space is cheap, so why not archive it as uncompressed? But I want to challenge you on this. Although I have tremendous respect for your experience, your ears and your studio equipment, I don't see -- or hear -- any drawback to playing a lossless file. Even an uncompressed file requires processing, and when I look at the Mac's Activity Monitor, I see no significant CPU difference between ALAC and AIFF. Once the files start playing, there's maybe a tenth or two of one percent (of one core) increase in iTunes and Core Audio with ALAC versus AIFF. On my MacBook Pro (with the latest quad Core i7), I just played the same track as ALAC and AIFF. The CU percentages: with ALAC, I see 1.9% iTunes, 5.9% CoreAudio; with AIFF, I see 1.7% iTunes, 5.8% CoreAudio. Because of the quad cores (and multithreading?), when the CPU load is maxed out, it's at 800%. So the difference is beyond trivial. There is essentially no "additional processing" involved in playing an Apple Lossless file versus an AIFF. I can't speak to FLAC on a PC. Take care -- Mark
  13. The HD Tracks Downloader History does clearly imply that the files start out as FLAC. I had no idea. However, a few months ago the downloads (for me at least) began taking much, much longer than previously. I had set my preference to AIFF months earlier, and was surprised to note that the (presumably) larger files were downloading very quickly. That would jibe with your assumption that FLAC files were being downloaded, then converted to my preferred format. The AIFF downloads seemed just as fast as the older FLAC downloads. Then, one day last fall, they weren't so fast, and my downloads have been slow ever since. Is it possible that HD Tracks has been switching over to providing the native WAV files for download? Just wondering. Server drive space is not the problem it used to be, nor is bandwidth in many cases. In theory, the downloader could do a quick bandwidth test, then use either FLAC or WAV depending on the user preference and the speed of the connection. My FIOS consistently measures about 85 MB down. Again, just speculating. The bug-fixes noted in the History are over a year old. Anyway, as you said, they are all bit-perfect interchangeable. Someone could convert AIFF to ALAC and back a hundred times, then do a null test with the first AIFF file and the last. Unless some major file corruption happened along the way, they would null, I assume.
  14. A friend sent me this link today: Free High-Res | H i F i D U I N O Looks like a pretty comprehensive list of download sites, with notes about freebies. -- Mark Block
  15. That's hilarious. Go figure. When Mountain Lion came out I read that versions 11 and 12 of Filemaker Pro produced the warning; Filemaker posted the workaround for its users who were reinstalling on 10.8. Is that still true with the current version?!!!
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