FLAC - SACD (1 Viewer)

[Steve Tannehill]

I get most of my high-res music from HDTracks.com and play it through my Oppo. The Oppo is also my goto player for SACD and DVD-Audio. You can find lots of SACDs from Acoustic Sounds online. Sometimes you can find them on Amazon. You can also rip DVD-Audio and stream it, I did that for the high-res tracks (both 2-channel and 5.1) from my Talking Heads cube.If you're a pink Floyd fan, you can get great 5.1 mixes on SACD, and on the Immersion box sets for Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, really spectacular stuff.MFSL keeps releasing SACD, you can find them on Amazon. There is also a lot of SACD released in Japan, like at CDJapan.co.jp, but they are expensive.

 

[erew99]

Excellent information. I have a HTPC connected to my receiver, also apparently I can put the tracks onto a USB disk.

I normally prefer to have the disk, but with streaming, it's so easy now.

 

[erew99]

Also- what is MFSL?

 

[JohnRice]

Also- what is MFSL?

Mobile Fidelty Sound Lab - It's a music label that remasters existing music and releases them. Some are SACD.

 

[JohnRice]

Audio Fidelity is another label which does the same thing. Their SACD prices are lower than MFSL.

 

[erew99]

Oh- good to know. I'll check them out and see if anything interests me.

 

[JohnRice]

My two cents on SACD. I have quite a few SACDs (not as many as some people, but 100 or so) and a better than average SACD playback system. The big attraction for some people is that many of them have surround sound mixes along with 2 channel. I'm not interested in surround music, personally. I have a lot of remastered SACDs. like Bob Dylan, early Elton John, Yes, even some NiN and the entire Genesis studio collection. In the end, I find the greatest benefit (again, my SACD player can't even play surround, so this is 2 channel) is with newer recordings that were made originally in DSD, the SACD format. This is mainly recordings from Telarc, which are limited to Classical and Jazz. That doesn't mean the new SACD of Yes Close to the Edge doesn't sound fabulous, because it does. I'm just not sure the SACD sounds demonstrably better than the CD layer on the same disc if played back on the same system.

 

[erew99]

I'm going to check out the Metallica Black SACD vs my MP3. I want to hear the difference(s) back to back.

 

[jcroy]

But no...not dead.OV is primarily a device codec. Outside Samsung, not sure if anybody else supports it straight off a USB.Back before lossless, it mattered more. But...

For most of the 2000's decade, I use to encode all my audio cd rips in Ogg Vorbis. At the time, it was largely to save hard drive space.

These days with high capacity hard drives and flash drives, I don't bother anymore with lossy codecs for audio rips. (Not even flac).

Easier to just listen to the straight wav files from audio cds, or demuxed audio tracks from a concert dvd.

 

[erew99]

I do plan to rip the disks to a media server. Is FLAC a bad option? I don't want to encode it in a lesser quality than the disk.

 

[jcroy]

I do plan to rip the disks to a media server. Is FLAC a bad option? I don't want to encode it in a lesser quality than the disk.

I haven't looked at flac in a long time. IIRC, it was advertised as a lossless format.

When I did my own flac encodes from audio cd rips, it didn't really save much hard drive space. (At least not for heavy metal albums). So I didn't bother using it any further.

 

[erew99]

Oh I see. So basically you just keep the raw WAV, rather than encoding in another format.

I'll check that out when I rip.

 

[jcroy]

Oh I see. So basically you just keep the raw WAV, rather than encoding in another format.

I'll check that out when I rip.

These days, for the most part. Raw WAV all the way.

I just rip a copy of an audio cd into one huge wav file, and listen to that 30-60 minute file from start to finish (frequently on auto-replay).

If I'm only interested in one or two songs, I'll just rip those one or two songs.

 

[erew99]

The only issue I have with WAV is that you can't tag it. No title, artist, album, etc...

FLAC allows that. From what I am reading on a few other forums is that FLAC is lossless too, but with tagging.

 

[jcroy]

The only issue I have with WAV is that you can't tag it. No title, artist, album, etc...

FLAC allows that. From what I am reading on a few other forums is that FLAC is lossless too, but with tagging.

On my previous computer, I used the foobar2000 player to play wav (or ogg) albums.

I set up foobar2000 such that the cue files (from ripped cds) and other tagging information, were used in conjunction with the wav files of albums. At the time, it was good enough for my purposes.

These days, I don't bother anymore with *.cue files and tagging information. Easier to just click on a wav file (with the artist + album name as the file's name), and listen from start to finish.

 

[erew99]

I understand what you mean, but for me it won't work. I generally use the 'random' option. With thousands of mp3s already in my library, it gets confusing.

 

[jcroy]

Another thing I did briefly several years ago, was to put a wav file and its corresponding *.cue file into an *.mka container.

When the *.mka file was played on the computer (such as using the "media player classic" program), one could fast-forward to another song just like an ordinary cd player.

 

[jcroy]

I'm going to check out the Metallica Black SACD vs my MP3. I want to hear the difference(s) back to back.

On a tangent.

It would be great if Death Magnetic is ever re-released without the crappy "loud" mastering, on sacd, dvd-a or bluray-audio.

 

[Chuck King]

FLAC is totally lossless. However it only compresses on the order of 50% of the original file size.

 

[jcroy]

FLAC is totally lossless. However it only compresses on the order of 50% of the original file size.

I rarely ever got 50% file size reductions using flac.

On average, I was getting around a 20% to 30% reduction of the original file size (if that).

If I was able to consistently get 50% file size reductions, I certainly would have used flac as my codec of choice.