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> 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 file
by 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.