Bristol Show Demo and Ripping

I'm not in any position to put forward an opinion but I am occasionally puzzled by the absolutism of our rational chums.

I had a question about Accurate Rip and why it had any special importance to judging a rip that had been made with error checking necessarily engaged.

(To repeat - rip a CD without Accurate Rip on EAC and get the result - 'successfully ripped with 0 errors'. What can Accurate Rip do - other than agree?)

A sort of "To be sure, to be sure."

Here - I recall being introduced to EAC many years ago. It was bewildering and the first reaction was to use it as supplied. Later some bloke or blokes determined a set of settings that were supposed to guarantee the best results.

People then recommended that new users go to this site and use the information to configure EAC.

Who were these blokes (I've just found that Linn provide EAC settings recommendations) and what criteria were used to determine the best settings?

Are those settings the same as the ones Linn recommends.

Are the best settings hardware dependant? That is - do you need to move from these recommendations to accommodate certain hardware choices?

How much to you have to bugger around with the settings to get a different result? Or - how robust is the ripping process?

WHY are there so many possible settings in EAC when simpler ripping routes offer none and should produce perfectly good rips - given that error checking occurs during the process?

In the Bristol event did Naim show the actual ripping or did the audience have to believe that both samples were ripped from the same CD? And does the US perhaps do some "polishing" on the ripped CDs?

I've been ripping my CD collection for years now, without much headache about "bit perfect" rips. I use Accurate RIP if available for the CD but if not it's OK for me too. If there is an accidental bit flip, it would affect high significant bits in a sample just as likely as low significant bits. Since I've not heard a loud click in my music so far, I assume there is no high bit flip and thus no low bit flip either.

Hi,

the first thirteen posts in this thread (plus subsequent others) haven't a single comma in the text.

Do you realize how fatiguing it is to read long sentences with no breathing or structure?

Please, do not forget who is not a native English speaking.

Thanks,

Max

Adam, this is great.  I don't use EAC (I'm all Mac at home), but can imagine a menu:  "If you want exact rips, check this box.  These other boxes and settings let you introduce various and sundry forms of errors.  If you have trouble choosing which errors you want, read our on-line manual."

When DON'T I want an accurate rip (??).  I suspect this is more to do with the fact that we have seventeen software programs to play with that can rip and analyze and then analyze the analysis and then go online to check the analysis of the analysis.  All fun, but not calculated to do much as a practical matter other than keep overweight, Pink Floyd-listening blokes, entertained. 

I have no 'dog in the hunt' over this stuff and everyone knows I own and use a UnitiServe, but do not believe it "polishes" anything (to quote from the post immediately above me) -- not even my ego.  The discussion IS entertaining, and there are nuggets of knowledge one can learn along the way.

In the dem, the files were preloaded on the usb stick. I was fine with that as I trust Naim to be truthful in their dems; (semi colon for Max) and I'm sure there is no "polishing" going on or they would have said. 

My problem was that they were comparing 2 things at once - US rip versus computer rip, and WAV versus AIFF, thus making the dem basically pointless and a waste of time. I only get to a Naim dem once a year at Bristol, and there were many more interesting and valid things that could be done with that precious hour. 

Adam

Many people have moved on from EAC. That program was many moons ago.

Many now use DBPoweramp. Setting instructions come from the manufacturer in the tin.

Gregg

At least SOME people are on the case - https://forums.naimaudio.com/di...nt/23952477845131604

I'm not sure that invalidates my questions.

Why use DBPoweramp - when all other ripping methods should produce bit perfection from readable discs?

My questions tend to be general - rather than specific. Hence, I'm looking for general answers.

Why use Uniti Serve - when all other ripping methods should produce bit perfection from readable discs?

beg the question

1(of a fact or action) raise a point that has not been dealt with; invite an obvious question:

Which might be - do they?

If not - what factors affect this?

If so - why are there so many ripping variables: available to the user in the hideously outmoded EAC and hidden (made for you) in Dbpowerthing?

How imperfect does a rip need to be in order to be detrimental to replay quality?

This might be a useful question to consider. I suspect, but am very far from knowing, that replay hardware and software might have an influence here. But how much influence, and is it anything worth worrying about? Again, possibly a useful question to address.

Peter

As usual, with our annual outing to Ripville, we are missing the point. iTunes, EAC, Unitiserve, dbpoweramp, unless there is faulty hardware, damaged disc or incompetent user, all produce identical sample data in the rips.

The choices are down to user preference on the ripping process, how to recover from damaged or edge/out of tolerance discs and file formats created. This is where the solutions differ.. Some like EAC are very (arguably excessively) configurable, Dbpoweramp less configurable and Unitiserve not very configurable at all.. You pays your money and takes your choice.

Have I configured my current ripper? One time only, the very first time i used it. I allowed it to auto configure  to allow it to best recover a bad disc. A thousand CDs later it hasnt been re configured since.

Simon

Cheers - a very astute analysis.

I have never used a Uniti Serve however one issue has always concerned me.  I use DBPoweramp for ripping and ALWAYS go over (and usually change) the metadata which is presented (prior to the actual rip).  I like for everything to be capitalized, I usually change the genre, I like the date to be only year and not month and year etc.  If the Uniti Serve is fully automated does that mean there is no way to edit the metadata prior to the rip?

Gregg

Gregg, it's been a while since I used the Unitiserve, but it does allow you to adjust the metadata using the desktop software, albeit you have only certain attributes available. With the Naim approach all metadata is held sepereately to the ripped file, and so edits are direct to its database... which has some advantages as changes are instantaneously available.

Simon

Hello, 

this thread is a little bit mixed up with different points. So i only want to say something about ripping an Audio CD with different solutions and whether the rips produce identical data. In this point i completely agree with Simon:

"As usual, with our annual outing to Ripville, we are missing the point. iTunes, EAC, Unitiserve, dbpoweramp, unless there is faulty hardware, damaged disc or incompetent user, all produce identical sample data in the rips."

I ripped all my 200 CDs two times (sometimes three times).

The first rip was done with a windows laptop and an external cd/dvd reader with dBpoweramp.
The second rip was done with a Macbook and another external bluray reader with xld.
(sometimes i made a third rip with my macbook and the internal cd/dvd reader with xld).

I ripped them all to wav without metadata.
After this i compared these files (Mac Terminal "diff file1 file2").
I never had any differences!

Except:
- 2 CDs which i can't rip at all. Neither with computer a nor b. One CD has a copy protection. The other CD has defect.
- Some tracks differ. In all (!) cases either the first or the last track of the cd differ. It never occurred that tracks between the first and the last showed a difference. In these cases i always analyzed them using a hex dump. (hexdump -v foo1.wav > hex1; hexdump -v foo2.wav > hex2; diff --suppress-common-lines -y hex1 hex2.) The first track always shows the differences at the beginning of the track and the last track always showed the differences at the end of the tracks. The difference was always that the one rip shows samples not equal to 0 and the other one only 0. These are all down to the offset you have to compensate with the accurate rip engines.

I even tried the following:
I bought "Ted Sirota's Rebel Souls - Seize The Time" Track 10 from Naim as a wav. I aligned my rip and Naims file with Audacity and both files are the same (i.e. load both files into one project, Effect->Invert one track and then combine the two tracks. The result is flat line at 0). With this method i could calculate the offset between my bluray reader and Naims files. Read the CD again with XLD and the calculated offset - both files are again the same.

Thus in the end it is no fancy hocus pocus. You can prove with simple tools (diff, hexdump, audacity) that if the CD has no defect than it is no problem to read a Audio CD without a problem.

The only reason for me to use XLD and DBpoweramp is to detect whether i have a defect CD or not!

The rest of the time the burst mode ("Fastest ripping, no error recovery") is sufficient. In this mode there are no difficult settings (concrete there are none)

The whole thing with all these setting for example in dBpoweramp is to recover from errors if a CD has (!) errors.

jerry

... and know to confuse everybody But i proved for my self with the above findings that the statement is very strange:

I had a conversation with Naim in 2010 regarding there offered downloads. They told me the following:

"... The 16bit WAV version is not actually the master 16bit WAV. We have found our 16bit WAV bit-for-bit rips from CD via our HDX comprehensive ripping engine to be sonically far superior than the 16bit dithered bounces from the studio. We cannot pin down the exact difference, but we are very passionate and particular about the sound as it is, creatively. ..."

jerry

nacht und nebl

Slippery stuff this fog.

ATB from George

Jerry .. You know when I was doing the detailed analysis a couple of years ago I did notice a single rogue 0 valued byte in the Naim  RIFF file header (of the WAV file). This mystical 0 value byte seemed to serve no purpose other than be an artefact of a software bug, but I wonder if it contained some extra dimensional data that is not detectable or identifable that mystically manipulates the sample data to make it sound better than original. It wouldn't be 'bit perfect' of course but it would be be better.

Fascinating stuff..

BTW the bit about the rogue 0 byte in the naim header is / was true.

Simon

Hi PureReader, no one has answered.. So I'll go I guess the first thing to say is that CD drive technology has moved on considerably over the last 10 years or so, and earlier drives were more costly to a accurately read the data (who remembers CD caddies?). However quality accurate drives are more affordable now. There are still some poor cheap CD drive examples around in cheap laptops and some consumer audio equipment which refuse to read certain discs etc. However the typical quality CD drive (which in my expierience is becoming the norm) will more successfully read damaged or out of tolerance discs. 

I suspect if the CD555 was being designed from scratch today, it might be a little different.....

Simon

Just to add - with ripping the computer CD drive can have multiple attempts at re-reading 'bad' data, whereas the CD player has to read and process the data off the disc in real time.

 I got the impression that CD drives were almost unavailable - the market being filled with DVD/BluRay drives which can read CD.

In addition - I believe Naim would have been VERY happy to have been able to use the drive from the CDS in all their subsequent CD players.

They were extraordinarily good drives for audio use.

Yep multi format optical disc drives appear to be prevalent now. I guess one example of how the technology has evolved. It would appear that the cost of the transport these days seems to depend on its durability. Looking at some interesting web pages on vintage CD drives, much of the original quality was on the quality of the laser and servo mechanism and signal shaping so as to produce a clean low jitter signal. I guess new technology can recover a reliable stable signal through more cost effective means now.

Simon