Originally posted by ttocs
Insult? Not sure how you read that as insult as it was the furthest thing from it. Calm doan, stop taking this personal I am not attacking you we are debating SQ which like the taste in food is subj to the listener/eater. Not sure how my comment about how most people don't care about the sound output of the ipod compaired to the fashon statement it makes contradicts anything.
I think mr black is forgetting that most of here are not rocking an old sony explode 6 x 9s off of a Jensen deck.... The idea of getting a high end DAC t0 make my ipod sound better is just as funny as $200 headphones on them.
I think this is what I took as insulting.. it appeared that you were alluding to me being part of that Sony and Jensen group because of my stance on the topic at hand as well as the listed Sony head in my sig. I assure you my tastes in SQ are worlds above what most would consider normal, I fret over the tiniest of details in every situation. It also appeared that you were saying that I or anyone who would do something similar was wasting their time and money on using a digital media player as a jukebox for their system, which I found closed minded.
If you are happy with your system then great go play it and enjoy it but to say you can take a compressed format and by simply putting it through a different DAC and have it as good as the original, good for you. I am not sure how anyone can take something away in one process, and by simple changing the way it is formatted back to the way we listen too it somehow it regains everything that was lost, even though nothing was lost in a lossless format that just compresses the sound. To say you take a compressed format, take it out of the mp3 format and then convert it into optical, then again format it back to a amplifiable signal and never loose anything or ever gain any noise then you are dealing with some alien technology. I think even the staunchest audiophile will say that the more conversions/connections you have in the signal the more likely you are too get noise/artifacts.
You're right about some things in this paragraph. You cannot take a digital audio track and encode it to MP3 and then ever expect to get it back to 100% of its original quality. It is physically impossible to do this and any person or advertisement claiming to do so is just trying to mislead or sell something to you. However, it is possible to rip a digital track from a cd and maintain its bit perfect copy in a form other than CD audio. FLAC and M4A encoding make it possible to shrink the file size by about 50% and upon decoding the original 16bit, 44khz stereo audio track is streamed to the DAC in the exact form that it would have been had it been taken directly off of the disc, given you have the proper connection to your system to access the DAC directly.
I appreciate you sharing your experience in car audio. I too got my start in the early 90's first selling the gear and then working my way back to the install bay to continue my education.. I like have 1000s of songs at my fingertips when I am away from my car/home for the convenience but both my home/car gear was good enough that I could hear the difference. Call me part of the 1% I guess I will wear it with pride but to keep telling us/me that I can't/I won't/its impossible after all that we have discussed just isn't right. With everything we have discussed there are just more possibilities of noise getting into an mp3 signal so I will keep it simple, keep it clean and stick with my cd's when I can.
Sadly, I feel I will never be able to convince you that it's all in your head. You really might be right about being part of the 1% that won't do a proper analysis and actually give what I am saying a chance. I have a very particular ear myself, as should be evident by the equipment list in my sig. I have long strove for the best of the best when it comes to audio quality, I know what things make a big difference when it comes to car audio, and I also know what types of things make little to no difference. A properly encoded and played back MP3 would fall under the category of the latter.
Sony ES CDX-C90, XDP-4000X, XM-2000R, Phoenix Gold M44, MS2250, Infinity Beta 8-5-1
