Best ripper? Best Player?

I use DBPoweramp - highly recommended.

Gary

You will get many different views, but I use:

dBpoweramp to rip (to FLAC in my case)
Squeezecentre to stream to...
..a Transporter in my main room and a Squeezebox Boom in another room.

As you mention ASIO drivers I am assuming you are looking for a PC player? Bear in mind that you will require a soundcard with SPDIF out to interface to the DAC.

tuex,

to each their own... There is no definitive best.

Your best source for information on this from experienced people is hydrogenaudio.com

If PC I personally would rip with EAC (to FLAC) and play with Foobar and ASIO4all.

If Mac, I would rip with XLD (to FLAC), and play with Songbird. But many are pleased with iTunes (to ALAC) and play with iTunes.

Keep in mind that if you want to rip to WAV, you dont have tagging support. If you insist on WAV i would use EAC, and set it up to give you VERY detailed file names. Then you must be VERY careful in your directory structure as to not make a mess of things.

Good luck and have a blast!

-Patrick

quote:

And then, which is the best MusicKernel?
Asio4All

huh ? Musickernel ?

I'm using EAC to rip CD's in FLAC. Works flawless. I'm using a Squeezebox Classic.
(hoping to add a DAC too in the near future)

regards,
Alco

quote:

I use DBPoweramp - highly recommended.

Very good tool.

The batch converter is awesome.

Yesterday I converted in one rush 978 files from wav to mp3 for car-music....

Top!!!!

Best player for me:

Foobar or Spider.

For me it is also
- EAC with AccurateRip fo ripping to FLAC normally
- Foobar for playback
- dBPowerAmp Batch converter if I want to change it to other formats

-
Aleg

I've moved this topic to the Distributed Audio Room, as appropriate for the topic at hand.

quote:

Originally posted by tuexoqu:
Which is the best ripper in your opinion?

Obviously: Naim HDX!

Regards,
Michel

EAC (with the "right" settings) is highly recommended when ripping CDs to WAV. I would not use FLAC as this degrades the sound quality a little bit and the Naim DAC is surely worth feeding it the very best possible way and hard disc space is cheap - OK, not really cheap with SSD
The second thing which is of great importance is the drive used for ripping: A PLEXTOR PREMIUM 2 (CD only burner) gives the best results and believe me, I tested more than five high quality CD drives. Those drives are still available on the world wide web.
Regarding the software for playing back the WAV files I can strongly recommend "Media Monkey": Free in the light version and great sound quality - this software is recommended by "Reference Recordings" since they feel that this is the only software sounding like the master - and those guys invented our beloved HDCD decoding for CD and they know what they are talking about. Again, I tried many different software players, some of them very expensive, and "Media Monkey" really is great! One should not underestimate the importance of the software - a bad sounding software makes a great sounding WAV file sounding like a poor MP3 file.

For the soundcard I have got no recommendation since we need to hear how jitter resistant the new Naim DAC is in reality. "RME" and "LYNX" are usually good choices here.

Just my two cents after long and costy trials...

John,

No offense, but I would not suggest Media Monkey if it was the last player in existence.

It completely bogs down at about 60K tracks. I doubt it could handle any more.

Foobar does everything it does, and better. And if you think there is a difference in sound between the two, you KNOW no one will have ears as sensitive as yours.

my 2 cents,
P

what about itunes to rip cd to wav?

iTunes doesn't handle WAV very well (IME). If using iTunes rip to AIFF or ALAC. Some people say lossless compression (such as FLAC or ALAC) looses quality on playback - more processor intensive - so stick with WAV or ALAC unless you have a specific need otherwise.

Eloise

Tx Eloise! i would use itunes only for ripping to NAS, not for playing music. My settings 24bit/48kHz wav.

quote:

Originally posted by T38.45:
Tx Eloise! i would use itunes only for ripping to NAS, not for playing music. My settings 24bit/48kHz wav.

...16bit....

quote:

Originally posted by Eloise:
iTunes doesn't handle WAV very well (IME). If using iTunes rip to AIFF or ALAC. Some people say lossless compression (such as FLAC or ALAC) looses quality on playback - more processor intensive - so stick with WAV or ALAC unless you have a specific need otherwise.

Eloise

You would have to be running critically short of resource for that to happen I would have thought. On both Mac (WAV v ALAC) and PC (FLAC v ALAC v WAV) I could hear no difference at all. Using 320 bit I could detect some loss (depending on material)
but surprisingly (to me) little overall, it has to be said. Using 192 - definite loss on all material.

To qualify that, it struck me that a well mastered track at 320 sounded better than a poorly mastered track in WAV/FLAC/ALAC - as ever, best to make sure you have the best mastering before getting anal over this stuff.

Joe

quote:

Originally posted by T38.45:
Tx Eloise! i would use itunes only for ripping to NAS, not for playing music. My settings 24bit/48kHz wav.

Do you really mean 48kHz? If you are ripping CDs which have a 44.1kHz sample rate and converting to 48kHz WAV the rate conversion process will be really messing things up if it's an accurate rip you are after.

hi DaveBK,
thought it would be better to have 48, but you're right...a CD has only 44khz....but what do you think, is itunes rip for wav ok?

There are real good websites specialized in PC audio and they are well worth spending a few evenings reading them before you spent hours ripping your CDs the "wrong" way.

quote:

Originally posted by T38.45:
hi DaveBK,
thought it would be better to have 48, but you're right...a CD has only 44khz....but what do you think, is itunes rip for wav ok?

The problem with changing the sample frequency is that the ripper has to perform calculations on the original samples and add new ones that are just guesses of what might have been there. This process just adds noise and distortion. You can't put back something that's not there in the first place so it's best to leave the sample rate the same as the original source. As John R says, there are loads of good web sites that explain this stuff.

tx! so i will change the itunes rip settings to 16/44 back!

Hi,
I also recommend a plextor premium drive. It comes with a bundle of utilities, including an audio extractor one. With several damage CD I got better results with the plextools than with EAC.
For playback, I use JRiver, again I can't find no sound difference with MediaMonkey or Foobar. I have tested them and I prefer JRiver just because of its Home Theatre view, which is superb for navigating through my music library at my Plasma screen. Other advantage of Jriver is it uses some kind of native ASIO driver so you don't have to mess with external ASIOs.
According to my experience, it is very important to have your PC very "tidy", specially keep the Hard Disk defragmented and leave the memory resources as free as possible.
Finally, the key point IMO is the audio device, although with the Naim DAC we don't know yet if that is really true. Some have reported that HDX or CDX2-2 feeding the Naim DAC sounded better than a MAC via its toslink streaming to the DAC. So we can suspect the transport still matters beyond the DAC zero-jitter and I think it is worht trying different audio devices. Lynx and RME alternatives are not cheap and use the AES/EBU format, so you may need an AES/EBU to SPDIF convertor.
I would try first a less expensive audio device such as the M-audio transit. Naim recommends it in its white paper. I would use it for benchmarking against better audio devices.
Asus Xonar range is specially made using "audiophile" components.
Finally there are some usb to spdif links such as (in ascending price) those from Trends, Bel Canto and the Empirical Audio Off-Ramp. I think all these USB streamers are limited to 24/96 res. If you want to use higher resolution you may need an internal PCI audio card.
Cheers,

Jose

quote:

Originally posted by goldfinch:
Finally, the key point IMO is the audio device, although with the Naim DAC we don't know yet if that is really true. Some have reported that HDX or CDX2-2 feeding the Naim DAC sounded better than a MAC via its toslink streaming to the DAC. So we can suspect the transport still matters beyond the DAC zero-jitter and I think it is worht trying different audio devices. Lynx and RME alternatives are not cheap and use the AES/EBU format, so you may need an AES/EBU to SPDIF convertor.
I would try first a less expensive audio device such as the M-audio transit. Naim recommends it in its white paper. I would use it for benchmarking against better audio devices.
Asus Xonar range is specially made using "audiophile" components.
Finally there are some usb to spdif links such as (in ascending price) those from Trends, Bel Canto and the Empirical Audio Off-Ramp. I think all these USB streamers are limited to 24/96 res. If you want to use higher resolution you may need an internal PCI audio card.
Cheers,

Jose

Just a couple of comments on this...

Some of the RME cards do support SPDIF as well as balanced AES/EBU format. You need to check the details. AES3 is easily converted into an unbalanced format suitable for SPDIF connections.

The Asus Xonar cards don't (last time I checked) support 24/88.2 or 24/176.4 - everything has to be resampled to 24/96 or 24/192. Asus are reported to be working on getting this sorted and it may now be sorted, but if you use these formats then the Asus cards are not suitable currently.

An alternative to USB and PCI(e) which does support upto 24/192 are FireWire devices. Some which support 24/192 (in asscending price order) are M-Audio ProFire 610, RME FireFace 400, TC Konnect x32 and Weiss AFI1.

Eloise

quote:

Originally posted by John R.:
The second thing which is of great importance is the drive used for ripping: A PLEXTOR PREMIUM 2 (CD only burner) gives the best results and believe me, I tested more than five high quality CD drives. Those drives are still available on the world wide web.
R.

John,

Thanks - I have been looking everywhere for a good drive for ripping. As I use a laptop I will have to use the external version of this but can only imagine that it will be tons better than the lousy external drive I have been using. Anyway thanks for the reccomedation.

quote:

Originally posted by DaveBk:
converting to 48kHz WAV the rate conversion process will be really messing things up if it's an accurate rip you are after.

If the person was seeking a "proper" rip, they wouldn't use iTunes in the first place.

-p