Best sound quality

[Mfaoro]

DBpoweramp newbie here but did search a little before posting this.

I am converting 24/96 WAV to FLAC on Mac.

I conducted a listening test between the same file converted in DBpoweramp and XLD. The only setting changed on both programs was setting FLAC compression to none.

Myself and a friend (on his system) both preferred the sound of the XLD file. The XLD file was more lifelike - real.

Are there any settings that I should make in DBpoweramp to maximize sound quality?

Thanks,
Michael

[Spoon]

Re: Best sound quality

All flac modes are lossless, that means the flac file decodes to exactly the same each time regardless of which program compressed it.

[garym]

Re: Best sound quality

Perhaps you are adding replaygain tags in one conversion but not the other. Tiny differences in volume can make audio quality perceptions differ.

[Mfaoro]

Re: Best sound quality

Perhaps you are adding replaygain tags in one conversion but not the other. Tiny differences in volume can make audio quality perceptions differ.

Good theory. Ill have to check this.

[ServerBaboon]

Re: Best sound quality

DBpoweramp newbie here but did search a little before posting this.

I am converting 24/96 WAV to FLAC on Mac.

I conducted a listening test between the same file converted in DBpoweramp and XLD. The only setting changed on both programs was setting FLAC compression to none.

Myself and a friend (on his system) both preferred the sound of the XLD file. The XLD file was more lifelike - real.

Are there any settings that I should make in DBpoweramp to maximize sound quality?

Thanks,
Michael

While all levels of compression in the Flac file should decompress to the same file there have been some who have pointed their fingers at the renderer and the cpu load used to decompress the file and how this affects the rest of system with electrical noise and psu load.

The same has also been said about the size of artwork in the files with smaller images having less of an affect.

These days storage is cheap and if your ears are golden enough use 0 level compression to get the transportable metadata and try different sizes of embedded images , 400x400 600x600 800x800 1000x1000 see if you can tell any difference.

As i said since storage is cheap I use 0 just in case...

[Mfaoro]

Re: Best sound quality

While all levels of compression in the Flac file should decompress to the same file there have been some who have pointed their fingers at the renderer and the cpu load used to decompress the file and how this affects the rest of system with electrical noise and psu load.

The same has also been said about the size of artwork in the files with smaller images having less of an affect.

These days storage is cheap and if your ears are golden enough use 0 level compression to get the transportable metadata and try different sizes of embedded images , 400x400 600x600 800x800 1000x1000 see if you can tell any difference.

As i said since storage is cheap I use 0 just in case...

Yes, I used zero compression but I did not think about artwork. Will have to do some experiments!

[mville]

Re: Best sound quality

While all levels of compression in the Flac file should decompress to the same file there have been some who have pointed their fingers at the renderer and the cpu load used to decompress the file and how this affects the rest of system with electrical noise and psu load.

The same has also been said about the size of artwork in the files with smaller images having less of an affect.

Just to confirm, are you saying that the above has an affect on decoding a flac file and therefore the integrity of the decoded flac OR the sound quality on playback of the decoded flac OR something else?

[mville]

Re: Best sound quality

I am converting 24/96 WAV to FLAC on Mac.

I conducted a listening test between the same file converted in DBpoweramp and XLD. The only setting changed on both programs was setting FLAC compression to none.

Myself and a friend (on his system) both preferred the sound of the XLD file. The XLD file was more lifelike - real.

The resulting flac produced by dBpoweramp and XLD should be identical, so this is not possible.

By the way, what playback software/hardware are you using?

[Dat Ei]

Re: Best sound quality

Hey ServerBaboon,

I can't imagine how the album art and its size can have an influence on the sound quality. IMO there are four possible ways how a album art can be encoded into a sound file.

1.) in the header of the file

2.) in the footer of the file

3.) somewhere in the middle of the file

4.) distributed all over the file

In case of 1.) or 2.) the size can't have any effect on the sound quality as the data will be read and ignored at the beginning of a file before the playback begins or the data will be read and ignored at the end of a file after the playback has stopped.

Cases 3.) and 4.) wouldn't be handy and clever for use cases like deleting, changing or (pre)viewing an album art. So from my programming experience it is very unlikely that the album art is encoded like that. But even if it were the case - in times of harddisks and SSDs reading several hundred MB per second, some hundred KB of an album art don't mean any load at all for the CPUs of nowadays.

Reading compressed data isn't a big job for a modern CPU. Even in the nineties we have seen compressing and decompressing in (real) time by operating systems like DR DOS and later on even in MS DOS. The reading and decompression of compressed data resulted in a higher bandwidth than the reading of uncompressed data.

I can't imagine that any mediaplayer works without a buffer. So even if the reading and decompressing leads to an varying bandwidth, the buffer will equalize it and ensure the right timing.


Dat Ei

[ServerBaboon]

Re: Best sound quality

Just to confirm, are you saying that the above has an affect on decoding a flac file and therefore the integrity of the decoded flac OR the sound quality on playback of the decoded flac OR something else?

Not in anyway suggesting that dbpoweramp , which i have used to rip some 800+ cds is producing bad files.

I read a two part article in which the authors were suggesting that the work done by the renderer decoding the file had an affect system, nothing to do with file integrity.

I use a raspberry pi player and people spend a lot of time tuning the kernal to improve the quality of the playback, they never suggest that they are improving the accuracy of the decoding but the effect on jitter, psu load and electrical noise etc.

Other than replay tags what should be different between the two files, I dont know for sure but I have assumed that flac encoding is a mathematical process which is repeatable so any two rips metadata aside will be the same.

Its a simple test the OP can perform with little pain , if he can can tell a difference then he has great ears, or a great system or is deluded but, which ever, is happy.

If no difference has been detected then ok he has lost an hour playing music and no fluffy kittens have died in the process.

I will see if I can find the article again.

[mville]

Re: Best sound quality

Not in anyway suggesting that dbpoweramp , which i have used to rip some 800+ cds is producing bad files.

No, and neither was I suggesting that you were.

The OP stated that a flac produced by dBpoweramp and then produced by XLD, which IMO, should be identical, sounded different on, I assume, the same playback system.

dBpoweramp and XLD are not encoding the flac file. This is performed by the flac libraries, contained within the software. It is very likely that dBpoweramp and XLD are using exactly the same flac libraries and so the files, in terms of audio content will be identical.

So, on playback, the resulting digital audio passed to the DACs should always be the same. If not OR if users can hear a difference when identical decoded flac files are passed to DACs, then I suggest you consider changing the playback software and hardware.

... and also applies if end users can here a difference between identical flac files with different metadata content, including artwork.

[Souljatag]

Re: Best sound quality

This might be true cause even converting flac from nch software
sounded somewhat better than the one converted from dbpoweramp
the sound quality from dbpoweramp could used a improvement!

[garym]

Re: Best sound quality

This might be true cause even converting flac from nch software
sounded somewhat better than the one converted from dbpoweramp
the sound quality from dbpoweramp could used a improvement!

I hope you understand that what you suggest is impossible. Any FLAC file can be decoded back to the source data for playback. It is trivial to test whether the any two FLAC files are bitperfect replicas of each other. The only "sound quality" possibility I can think of is that one FLAC file has ReplayGain tags and one doesn't. And if your player uses these RG tags, it could be automatically reducing volume. And tests have shown that listeners will ascribe even an almost inaudible reduction in volume as a reduction in "sound quality".

[Souljatag]

Re: Best sound quality

There was no replaygain tags on the flac files and i test both of the flac files
and knew which one that was converted from nch software vs dbpoweramp and i did hear quite a difference from both of them
me and mfaoro obviously think xld and nch software is making the flac sound more pleasing but we all have different ears. lol

[mville]

Re: Best sound quality

There was no replaygain tags on the flac files and i test both of the flac files
and knew which one that was converted from nch software vs dbpoweramp and i did hear quite a difference from both of them
me and mfaoro obviously think xld and nch software is making the flac sound more pleasing but we all have different ears. lol

Please can you run the Calculate Audio CRC utility codec (with CRC32 and MD5 Hash ticked) on both flac files and post the results here?