I hate my Altecs

[gortnipper]

So that's what FLAC is. It's amazing how little infomation is out there when something's free!

How does this compare to Apple Lossless?

There is a guy here in Auckland who makes excellent music servers, and we have had a lot of discussion with him on the local boards about file formats, FLAC, compression, etc. He is very open and accessible, and shares his knowledge and helps people DIY their own servers, despite that it is a large part of his business. This is a quote from a recent post of his:

"The problem with lossless compression is that the rate of compression changes during the compression process as parts of the music file are found to be able to be compressed more than others. The different flac levels are about how much time it spends on the encoding, not about a certain compression rate. Therefore when streaming a compressed flac file the streaming rate of the flac file needs to slow down and speed up in an inverse relationship with the compression rate. By comparison the wav file can just be streamed at a constant rate since it is encoded at a constant rate. This is addressed by buffering of the streamed flac file at the point where it is unpacked. The effectiveness of the buffering determines how big a difference you will hear between a compressed lossless file and an uncompressed lossless file. So on one system you may find almost no discernable difference and on another find a very obvious difference - depending on the success of the buffering. To my hearing there is no such thing as buffering that eliminates jitter (or whatever you want to call distortion of a digital signal) other than storing the whole file before playing it back.

Three of us have just spent three days on and off doing various blind tests in the interests of music server design, and on one of those days did blind tests of different file formats. The first two days were a revelation with some shocks in terms of what sounded best, but the third day - testing file formats - was also interesting. This was done with me changing the files being played and my 'subject' (who has very discerning hearing - even though I do not quite share his tastes in how music should sound) never knew which file was being played.

In the blind tests I always had my back to him and he had no view of what was being played or any visual clues from me - unless the back of my head is more expressive than I appreciate. At no time did he ever perceive a difference between the uncompressed flac file and the wav file. But he always reliably stated a preference for the less compressed lossless files over the more compressed ones in comparing any two files. We used wav, uncompressed flac, flac level 0, flac level 5 and flac level 8 mostly, with a dalliance with AIFF and ALAC. The more compressed files (ed: higher flac level number) always sounded closed down compared to the less compressed files. I found it remarkable that there was utter consistency in the results, and a testament to the hearing of my subject that day - confirming why I like to use him for this stuff...

"I am not surprised that [uncompressed] AIFF is better than compressed FLAC, but on most machines uncompressed FLAC has been a little better than AIFF to my ears. WAV sounds a little better than AIFF for me but I can't hear any difference between WAV and uncompressed FLAC. When I say sounds better, the difference with such comparisons is usually a greater sense of ease and flow - the reduced sense of a silent scream."

- - - Updated - - -

The good engineers make a product that carries well to almost any system, but the typical recording is intended for the car radio, a "box" home system or earbud listening, since that's the majority of the market.

A friend of mine was a guitarist for a fairly well known English 80s alternative band, who had some very good successes and sold a fair few records WW. He then went on to start a studio/label with one of his band members, and has has some good successes and won awards with that. We have had a few discussions on this topic, andhe basically uses his car as his litmus test. He would mix in the studio, take it home listen (on his Audiofile-Fi) and it would be great. Then, he would listen in his car, and it would be rubbish. So, he got rid of his HiFi, got a MidFi and then it and his car would be his benchmark, along with the studio kit. He managed to make recordings that sound good on my SET + 604s as well, so I think they are doing something right.

[Alien_Shore]

You hit the nail on the head there Bowtie, I spend the majority of my time looking for anomaly's instead of ingesting the performance as a whole. well that and continuously changing the settings to make everything sound good.

Someone linked the Michael Fremer article "Why we need audiophiles". In that, Fremer was being questioned about vinyl hiss and pops on his extravegantly-priced system:

Shouldn't a $350,000 stereo system be completely free of such impurities?
"It's like when you go to the symphony, and the old men are coughing?same thing," Fremer says. Necessary impurities. Reminders of being in the real world.

[Altec Best]

How does this compare to Apple Lossless?

I don't like Apple because they are so proprietary.Everything has to be done through iTunes.If you only have iPods and iPhones than your fine.You can't buy anything in itunes other than a 256 Kbps AAC file..But most songs or albums are only 128Kbps. That is very low quality IMO.

This was done with me changing the files being played and my 'subject' (who has very discerning hearing - even though I do not quite share his tastes in how music should sound) never knew which file was being played.

"I am not surprised that [uncompressed] AIFF is better than compressed FLAC, but on most machines uncompressed FLAC has been a little better than AIFF to my ears. WAV sounds a little better than AIFF for me but I can't hear any difference between WAV and uncompressed FLAC. When I say sounds better, the difference with such comparisons is usually a greater sense of ease and flow - the reduced sense of a silent scream."[/i]

Uncompressed files will always sound better than compressed at any level..Just for the reason that compressed files remove some of the music to reduce file size.

I like .wav files too but they are 10 times the size of .flac files.I would need 25-30 external hard drives to rip to .wav so for me it's a no brainer.Everyones tastes are different.So what may work for me may not work for you...You can rip .flacs at a higher uncompressed bit rate and they still will be a lot smaller file size than a .wav.. With this My recommendation is to experiment on it and choose what works best for your preference and storage options.

Another thing that will change the sound of files is the dynamic range compression...Most new CD's and remasters sound awful,but not all.For good reason, Loudness ! They try to introduce loudness (Engineers) at the cost of sound quality.This is a good read on Wiki. I have a lot of older CD's and Vinyl albums so I rip my own and use the .Flac file and Foobar2000 they are both FREE ! But nothing sounds better than my MFSL vinyl LP's on my turntable.. Files I use for convenience.But as they say, garbage in garbage out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

[zelgall]

You must have a shit load of music if you need 25 hard drives. I've got about 1000 cds in wave files on a single 1Tb drive with room to spare. A couple of drives and for most people there is plenty of space.
I burn LPs as well with a Tascam recorder and keep them on a separate drive. It's surprising how good they sound compared to prerecorded CDs.

[sanhanul]

I have spent lot portion of my life with audio and got 604 last year. It was painful to have 604 as a main playback system because it didn't sing beautiful by just connecting speaker cables to them. I can tell that I have learned a lot about audio through Altec and I had to refrellsh all the old knowledge that I thought I didn't need any more.
I feel Altec is a very special speaker. It is so sensitive to express every information which CD or LP has. It takes out all the defect of all the related audio and source. I found problem with pre and power amps and had to re setup analog system through Altec. They are like a trainer of audiophile. If you are not very well trained and not ready to put lots of effort to get them right, you might give up saying Altec is trash.

[alancohen]

You must have a shit load of music if you need 25 hard drives. I've got about 1000 cds in wave files on a single 1Tb drive with room to spare. A couple of drives and for most people there is plenty of space.
I burn LPs as well with a Tascam recorder and keep them on a separate drive. It's surprising how good they sound compared to prerecorded CDs.

Agreed. Memory is dirt cheap these days. I have a 2T G-Force that cost $99 and I don't think I couild fill it up in this lifetime. If we assume a .wav file is 25Mb then a 1TB drive would hold 40,000 songs.

It appears Apple Lossless (ALAC) and FLAC both compress about 2:1. I have enough storage that I'd prefer uncompressed files. Can I rip CD files to AIFF (WAV in Windows) in Mac and leave it completely uncompressed? Will iTunes play them? Man, I feel so old.

[juniper]

All those old Altec speakers come with a free pack of Kool-Aid included.

It not just Kool-aid.. I listened to a 80,000 jbl set up for about 6 hours yesterday, I was afraid I wouldn't want to listen to my Altecs ever again.... It didnt happen.....

[Altec Best]

You must have a shit load of music if you need 25 hard drives. I've got about 1000 cds in wave files on a single 1Tb drive with room to spare. A couple of drives and for most people there is plenty of space.
I burn LPs as well with a Tascam recorder and keep them on a separate drive. It's surprising how good they sound compared to prerecorded CDs.

Yeah i have a pretty lot of vinyl and a lot of CD's I need an entire room just to store it all.I guess it depends on the size of the Hard drives.250 GB,500,1TB,2TB,etc.... Obviously the larger the drives the less you will need.

Yes that's why i rip my own.. Most of the prerecorded CD's today are garbage.. IMHO.

[fpitas]

I have spent lot portion of my life with audio and got 604 last year. It was painful to have 604 as a main playback system because it didn't sing beautiful by just connecting speaker cables to them. I can tell that I have learned a lot about audio through Altec and I had to refrellsh all the old knowledge that I thought I didn't need any more.
I feel Altec is a very special speaker. It is so sensitive to express every information which CD or LP has. It takes out all the defect of all the related audio and source. I found problem with pre and power amps and had to re setup analog system through Altec. They are like a trainer of audiophile. If you are not very well trained and not ready to put lots of effort to get them right, you might give up saying Altec is trash.

Yes, I agree. Everything has to be just right, or it can be sort of disturbing.

[gortnipper]

Agreed. Memory is dirt cheap these days. I have a 2T G-Force that cost $99 and I don't think I couild fill it up in this lifetime. If we assume a .wav file is 25Mb then a 1TB drive would hold 40,000 songs.

It appears Apple Lossless (ALAC) and FLAC both compress about 2:1. I have enough storage that I'd prefer uncompressed files. Can I rip CD files to AIFF (WAV in Windows) in Mac and leave it completely uncompressed? Will iTunes play them? Man, I feel so old.

I prefer FLAC for a several reasons: 1) high sound quality; 2) it is non-proprietary; 3) it stores metadata that you cant get with WAV; 4) you can store it at Level 5 on a backup (if you do that) and then use a tool to convert to uncompressed for use on your music server, with no sonic degradation (remember, the degradation observed in FLAC "compression" comes at run-time, not encoding time).