rips are just rips?

Posted by: French Rooster on 19 October 2018

On the Nd555 impressions thread, Dark Bear found that 3 different rips from the same album, by 3 different softwares, sound different for him.

I hope i make no mistake here in resuming his idea. Some members don’t agree with that, thinking or hearing no differences at all.

Dark Bear found that the rips made by the melco 100 ripper sound the best.

I am asking myself if the differences can be explained, if they really exist, by the quality of the cd drive mechanism. The one in the melco must be better made than the cheap one in a pc or mac (?).

Posted on: 24 October 2018 by Stevie Bart

I have found some difference in Flac files - not sound quality, but being able to play them.

My NDX 2 wont play files saved by "Wavepad", but is quite happy to play the same files saved by "Ocenaudio" using the same parameters

Posted on: 24 October 2018 by Guinnless

Stevie Bart posted:
I have found some difference in Flac files - not sound quality, but being able to play them.
My NDX 2 wont play files saved by "Wavepad", but is quite happy to play the same files saved by "Ocenaudio" using the same parameters

This could be down to the encoding of the MIME type part of the file. The actual PCM content could be indentical.

Posted on: 24 October 2018 by Simon-in-Suffolk

I suspect there is something in the Wavepad file that is not compliant with the Xiph.org FLAC specification. FLAC is quite a complicated file format (compared to the relatively straightforward WAVE file format) and is currently at version 1.3.2 (1/1/17). Of course if the file has not been compliantly encoded - there is no guarantee that the reconstructed PCM by a FLAC reader is accurate (remember the sample data in FLAC is non destructively compressed and is not PCM - unless it is forced as PCM - and can only be converted to and rendered as PCM by a FLAC reader).

And naturally there could also be a bug in the NDX2 FLAC reader - best see if other software readers can read the file - if multiple ones can - then I would flag to Naim support as a possible issue.

Posted on: 24 October 2018 by Stevie Bart

Interesting thoughts.

Not a problem for me as Ocenaudio is much better than Wavepad and it's free.

Perhaps the NDX 2 is more fussy - my NDX would play these files no problem

Posted on: 27 October 2018 by DL_Audio

I’m very interested in this topic as well. +1

[@mention:1566878603992423] please do us all the favour and send the files over to [@mention:1566878603876589] to whom we are all very thankful for the analysis

Highly appreciated!