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It was mastered from a higher quality source? There could also be errors in the CD mastering, like setting the gain too high and chopping off the top of the so
by jandrese 6y ago
It was mastered from a higher quality source? There could also be errors in the CD mastering, like setting the gain too high and chopping off the top of the song just to make the whole thing "louder". The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore.
- TacticalCoder 6y ago> The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore. All my music collection is FLAC files, bit-perfectly ripped from my CD collection. So, sure, they're digital files, compressed, but lossless. It is, for all practical purposes, just as good as a CD (as long as my external DAC is as good as the CD players' built-in DAC). The original CD may have been badly engineered but that's another topic. 3 000 CDs fits in more or less 1 TB in lossless (but compressed) CD quality (just to give an idea of how tiny it is using modern storage standards). Some people only use FLAC as archives but these files are so tiny in this day and age that I don't bother converting the FLAC to mp3s: I sent directly the bitperfectly ripped FLAC files to my DAC / stereo setup.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoFLACs are better than CD quality. CDs in a player always have errors. The errors are covered up by a couple of stages of error correction. One is a transparent CRC, the other drops the effective bit depth down to 12 or so bits. The Block Error Rate (BLER) on CDs can be surprisingly high. So a CD in a player is always slightly compromised. When you rip a CD with a good ripper the drive does multiple passes over problem areas until the results are consistent. The final file is bit perfect, except on very damaged CDs.
- dehrmann 6y ago> One is a transparent CRC You must mean CIRC. CRC in the context of errors is something completely different. CIRC offers pretty good error recovery, so except for bad scratches, CDs and FLAC (assuming it's also 16 bit, 44000 Hz) are identical.
- cosmotic 6y agoThe two issues you referenced are also applicable to minidisc.
- bayindirh 6y agoMiniDisc doesn't brick-wall-compress the sound. Instead, it uses automatic gain to prevent clipping while recording from line-in. ATRAC encoding is also devoid of any compression. MD players generally have VU meters, and you can observe your music, since they generally have recording functionality and used in studio and/or interviews, getting sound as transparent as possible is the aim. Fun fact: Portable MD players are generally called "Portable MD Deck" by Sony to signal it's not a mere player but an audio equipment. Most MD decks contain indexing and primary tools for chopping a record to tracks and tagging them.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoATRAC is not devoid of compression. It's a lossy format which uses a crude form of spectral encoding - a bit like an MP3, but the model is less sophisticated. There is a rare variant called ATRAC Advanced Lossless but it was never available on many devices.
- bayindirh 6y agoOh, I think I failed to tell what I'm trying to tell. ATRAC is of course lossy and compresses the audio. The compression I mentioned was loudness maximizing/homogenizing compression which is used in mastering process, or in audio pipelines in general. So we can say that, ATRAC is devoid of any compressor stage which makes the resulting audio more loud by default. That loudness maximizer/equalizer also called compressor so it's easy to misrepresent or write misinforming things when talking about both at the same time. Sorry, my bad.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]