Audio formats, sounds cards...

[Zipster]

Hi, was wondering if anyone could give me some advice. I've recently copied my entire CD collection to my hard drive. As space was no issue I wanted to use a lossless format - WMA9 seemed appropriate as it was so easy to do. Bear in mind I'm a complete newbie to all of this, read Spoons guide which was great and merrily went about my business.

When it comes to playback I'm not overly impressed and wonder if I am expecting too much? Should I notice any difference in playback? When I play certain tracks back and compare to the original CD, the bass is not as pronounced and there is generally a difference in dynamics. Am I expecting too much for them to sound the same? Is my choice of sound card and / or connections a factor? Also my CD player always stutters when playing CDs, though will allow me to copy them to disk no problem and play from there.

Thanks, Ben

XP pro
Athlon XP 2.13GHz
1Gb DDR
80Gb SATA drive
Audigy LS soundcard
connected by single RCA digital to Sony decoder

[RossRoy]

Re: Audio formats, sounds cards...

It's probably because of the way on-the-fly decoding is handled. The audio data inside the WMA9 lossless file is intact, but I am guessing the decoder might not be decoding the whole of the data during playback. From what I understand, and bear in mind I could be totally wrong, the way lossless works is it approximates the the audio data using some complex mathematical formulas, and just appends the discrepancies between the original data and the approximated one. So, on playback, it just plays back the approximated data, but on decompression to wav, it actually recreates the whole file using the correction samples or something like that.

Anyways, I personally hear a difference between the playback of a Flac file and of a Monkey Audio file (both are lossless), but funny enough, if I them change both files to wav, then I hear no difference at all. So I'm guessing the playback decoder is at fault here.

[Spoon]

Re: Audio formats, sounds cards...

It might be because the Sound blaster cards resample to 48KHz, and it is not the best resample.