Higher Quality playback of PAID 24/96 .flac Downloads

[sandyk]

I have been playing around with the 24/96 .flac files of "Claire Martin -Too Darn Hot" that I saved to my 'G" drive in July 2008,

which is well before playing around with PC sound and vibration deadening, using the self adhesive 3M 2552 anti vibration tape.

Initially, I tried reconverting them to.wav and saving them to my 8GB USB pen from PQI.

I only tried a few tracks, because it was taking around 2 hours to convert and save just one track to the PQI drive!

However, results seemed very promising when these files were then played back directly from this drive,so I ordered a rather expensive 32GB Corsair Voyager GT USB2.0. , which has now arrived.

This time however, the 13 tracks were converted to.wav and saved on the Corsair USB drive in approximately 13 minutes,

which is about 120 times faster than the 8GB PQI USB pen !!!

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that these original .flac files now sound far better than the previously converted files which were saved originally on the "G" drive. I can no longer tell that these files were derived from .flac files.

They have lost that annoying "veil" that I usually hate about .wav files of "lossless" origin, asnd sound very much more like high quality 24/96 tracks ripped from DVD-As such as "Fleetwood Mac-Rumours" and a few others in my possession.

It should be noted that my "G" drive has since been dampened with the 3M tape.

Furthermore, I also re-ripped the 24/96 DVD-A of "Fleetwood Mac-Rumours" to the Corsair USB drive a little while ago, and again,

I say with 100% certainty on my part, that this is the best that I have ever heard these great tracks.

If you have high resolution playback gear, why not try the same to a USB pen of your own, and see if you can hear the differences ?

I am now looking forward to trying the same with some 24/192 material.

As usual, YMMV,and will also depend on the software player that you use. I use Creative Media Source player in preference to Foobar, but I believe that equal (or better?) results should be achievable if played using XXHE from Peter St.

 

SandyK

 

P.S.

I posted this in the interest of experimentation for those who have high resolution PC playback gear, not to reignite a previous debate about how impossible it is for me to hear such differences.

Chris has already stated that with high resolution gear that he can hear differences between playback from a HDD and an SSD.

Peter St ,the lead developer of XXHE playback software , has also reported hearing differences. This was a brave achknowledgement by Peter, as it left him wide open to ridicule from his peers in CA.

In the majority of cases, it will cost nothing except your time to try this out.

As usual, YMMV.

 

[DSD_mastering]

Playing back from SSD drives is not new and yes, it does sound better. We've been doing this in our mastering studio for about a year now.

 

 

Regards,

 

[bottlerocket]

Just so I understand. This is basically the same as playing back from a solid state drive right? Is the Corsair also a flash drive?

 

[sandyk]

Bottlerocket

It has been suggested to me by another CA member (U.S.A.) that playing from a USB flash drive , or CF card etc. , may even sound slightly better than from an SSD.

SandyK

 

http://www.corsair.com/_datasheets/CMFUSB2.0-32GB.pdf