MAC, iTunes + DACMagic :-(

[Audio_ELF]

Have you considered second hand for your DAC?

 

If you like the Musical Fidelity A3 CD player, maybe look for a Musical Fidelity A3 24 DAC. Basically the same thing without the transport. Optical and Coax input with auto switching between them IIRC.

 

A quick search on eBay and other sites hasn't revealed any today - but I think they are often sold for around £300 - think thats what I got for mine a few years ago anyway.

 

Eloise

 

[bsn]

If you are going to make the significant investment in your time to re-rip all of your CDs, then I would suggest that you purchase an external Hard Drive for this purpose and make bit perfect copies. On the Mac I would suggest using XLD as the ripping software with the CD Paranoia mode turned. The XLD software with CD Paranoia should give you bit perfect copies of your CDs, with the final results being compared and verified against the AccurateRip on-line database. XLD also provides a logs for each track to show the quality of the Rip.

 

I would strongly suggest that you save your ripped files to the external hard drive as AIFF files. That way you only have to re-rip your music collection once to get a true bit perfect master archive copy of your files. From there, you can use XLD or other software to transcode the master AIFF files into whatever format you want to use on a daily basis such as Apple Lossless or AAC. Transcoding can be performed as a batch job in XLD and its fairly quick my Mac Pro transcodes 4 files at a time at a speed of 69X for each file. So even a laptop should be able to transcode the AIFF files in your master library in a few hours. With the Master Archive of bit perfect AIFF files you are all set if in the future some other file format becomes the new standard, you just transcode from AIFF into the new format and your done.

 

XLD is available here: http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html Make sure to get the GUI version not the command line version.

 

For the DAC, keep in mind that Burr Brown is to the best of my knowledge now called "TI" for Texas Instruments. That being the case, then you want to look for new DACs that have a TI chip. Coincidentally Music Fidelity's V-DAC is 24-bit and has the TI PCM1796 chip in it. That might give you a fairly close match to the sound of your A3 CD player.

 

 

 

[bsn]

I almost forgot, XLD can be a little confusing at first. There is a fairly decent how to located here. http://jungle.sk/XLD_Tutorial/

 

 

[kutner]

Eloise,

 

Hey many thanks for the suggestion - this could be exactly what I am after.

 

Darren

 

[kutner]

Wow - thank you so much for sharing your knowledge!

Hugely appreciated... and this would bring me to question recommendations for HDDs and this would then depend on the amount of space required, which leads me to ask why use FLAC when you could use WAV or AIFF for a master drive...

 

[bsn]

Personally, I use AIFF files on my Macbook pro as my music server. My philosophy is disk space is cheap and getting cheaper, so why not listen to uncompressed music files.

 

What I have setup is two separate accounts to login to. One account has the iTunes Library full of uncompressed AIFF files that I use as my music server for my 2-channel rig, the other login account has it's own itunes library with compressed Apple Lossless files that I can synch to my iPod. This allows me to fit most of my collection onto the iPod. It's probably overkill for most people, but it works for me and affords me the best of both worlds.

 

I don't have extensive experience with different hard disks on the market, so I cannot make a specific recommendation. I made sure my disk is Firewire, so I would not be using the same USB bus as my DAC. If your going to use a locally attached disk, then the noise level created by the disk is of primary concern. If you are going to use a NAS disk that can be located away from your listening area, then I would look for features like RAID, capacity, expandability, etc.

 

 

 

[kutner]

I have recently upgraded from Mac OS-X 10.4 to 10.6 by a clean install - took a while mind you as I had to back everything up manually etc.

 

Having done this I have to say that the end result is well worth it as I now have clean system and a distortion free iTunes!

 

Next I need to decide how I should re-rip all my music to an external HDD as well as investing in a new DAC and selling my CD Player and existing DAC... how exciting!!!

 

I may start a fresh thread with regard to ripping as I think many would benefit from this discussion. But first I'll check what's already been written in the forum.

 

Thank you all once again for your time and efforts in replying to this thread.

 

[Cynic]

The cause of the poor sound you have been hearing is simple. Your entire collection (9000 tracks) on the Mac is AAC. It won't matter what output setting you use in iTunes to play the files back; the source data remains at AAC quality even if you convert it to AIFF afterwards. That is why the CD player sounds better: it is your only source right now that plays uncompressed files. You need to ditch the AAC files in your iTunes library and re-rip from scratch to lossless or raw. The better your system, the more obvious the recording's limitations are, and that is what you have been hearing.

 

[kutner]

Hi thanks for the reply but the main issue was with my old OS.

 

This I have now sorted.

 

I also realise that the source files need to be at least lossless or raw.

 

I will most likely go lossless as that way I can use a 500GB 2.5" external HDD connected by USB/Firewire to my mac and then optically to a new DAC.

 

I intend to buy a musical fidelity DAC as this is the sound that matches my CD Player.

 

Have you noticed any difference when listening to compare lossless against raw from your HDD?

 

 

 

[Cynic]

No, I have never heard any difference, and technically there isn't supposed to be any. To me, the biggest determinant of sound, after making sure you play music you actually like, is the quality of the original recording. A good 44.1 kHz recording (such as those made by Chesky Records) can sound much better than a poor 192 kHz one. Once you are beyond the really lossy formats, the format matters less. Then the problem is finding music you like that was recorded well to start with.