160 gig ipod, so no need for lossy any more

[Lardyboy]

A 'real' snob would only use vinyl ;0)

Guilty as charged y'honour.

As for compression, couln't agree with you more Mr. P. Have you listened to digital radio recently? It may be convient but the sound quality is sh**e!

 

[dantheman]

A 'real' snob would only use vinyl ;0)

I despair about all these compressed music formats. Sound quality has been getting crappier for twenty years and no one cares :0(

thats what the sneaky "etc" was there for, but dont bother with vinyl too much hassle in setting up/ getting no scratches etc...

however, if you do use them, one tip i can give is that a very fine mist of water sprayed over the record before playing can reduce the harshness of scratches, and reduce edginess in the frequency extremes, worth trying, but dont saturate it, the needle will leave the grooves.

 

[dantheman]

I was wrong.

i hadnt checkeed, but assumed this, as most cd's are around 700mb of data.. that meaning that many of us would soon use up 160gb..


ipods are nice though, im stuck with 8gb on my phone...

 

[Mr Pig]

a very fine mist of water sprayed over the record before playing can reduce the harshness of scratches...

I remember many years ago some people advocating playing records wet. Once wet though the record had to be kept wet or the dust in the groves would become mud then dry to the surface leaving the record in a worse state than it was to begin with. I did try it, well you do these things if you're daft enough, but I couldn't see any merit in it.

Excessive surface noise and harshness is a deficiency or fault in the hardware. They shouldn't be intrusive on a well designed and well balanced system.

The only digital radio I've heard is a portable radio someone at work has, and it does sound appalling. What really makes me angry is that these things are heavily promoted under guise of better sound quality when the truth is that it's all about profit and flexibility for the government and the industry concerned.

 

[Cyclista]

Sony.

Nuff sed.

Latest Sonys still don't do FLAC, the build quality is going down the drain (I'm having to send my 4GB one back for the third time in under a year) they've done away with the ATRAC lossless that they used to support, and worst of all they are starting to look like the SonyErricson phones :?: I won't be buying another one when the NWZ that I am using at the moment dies.
I like the look of the Cowon Global one's though, mmm tiny

 

[Mr Pig]

Sony stuff used to be good quality. Now it looks like they buy crap from Taiwan and stick a Sony badge on it.

 

[Carwash]

But what file format would you use?

Ipods can't handle FLAC, and I'd be loathe to use a proprietary format and risk obsolescence.

That would be Apple Lossless. So yes, proprietary, though of course because it's lossless you can always switch to a different format at any point as long as you can decode it.

But you're better sticking with FLAC IMHO, if lossless is what you're after, and use a DMP that supports it. I tend to find that Vorbis on quality 4-5 is sufficient though.

 

[twowheelsgood]

I second what carwash said. The big effort is actually physically ripping a CD collection feeding them into the drive - I really don't want to do all 800 of mine again!!! So it's best to do it lossless and then convert to whatever format you require. I used FLAC and I have a nice little script that transcodes to aac using all free software; Perl, Nero AAC encoder and imagemagik. It even does the tags and embedded images and is multithreaded to use modern multicore CPUs.

Anyway there is no point whatsoever filling your ipod with lossless recordings.

1. The output of an ipod is notoriously poor compared to other portable players.
2. Even if you bought better headphones than Apple supply, the small in ear type still won't be good enough.
3. Listening on the move usually has too much background noise.