Best way to RIP CDs

so I'm sitting at James Herod's desk James is one of our ever hard-working customer service guys we got Jeremy and James excuse me and these guys man they are on the phone's constantly someone you call PS audio this is areas right here here's James he picks it up and they spend hours on the phone helping people out with their their questions and their stuff and he has Sims could check this out yours anything like this do this little you push this thing this is an electric flyswatter and it puts a high voltage charge on this screen and if there's a big fly going around here though BAM you're this BAM and this fly just explodes what any also has that this is a good one you ever seen one of these sorry for the for those oops now you gotta be careful this thing will shock you I should keep this around in case I say something wrong oh okay David in rimmer Sussex England Oh far away so David asks Paul what's the best file codec to use when ripping CDs good question I have opened a CD file directory with my iMac and they're stored it AIFF and they are stored at 1644 one is it better to rip them as 2496 from the CD which is the maximum my DAC will play and if so what is the best AIFF or a lakh so well a iff let's talk about that first a iff is apple's version of wave WAV which is what the acronyms are forum ones the audio interchange anyway and those are uncompressed straight off files from however you rip your your media so AIFF and WAV are essentially the same thing a iff is a little better because AIFF allows in it's what we call its header the the place where the information the metadata is stored so AIFF you can put in Oh things like cover art and oh the the artists name and all that kind of good stuff in in a WAV file you really can't do that WAV files do have headers but generally most programs don't pay attention to them so when you see WAV files it's usually one two three and then maybe it'll have a little bit of the artist name in there but it doesn't have the same metadata capabilities as AIFF a lack is I believe that stands for apple lossless audio codec and that's the same as flack which is the free lossless audio codec so you've probably heard the two a lakh and flak now those are lossless compressed files both a lakh and flat they'll take a file and they'll compress it down to about half and they'll do so without loss and that's a pretty cool trick so when you encode in a lakh or Flack then you get about twice as many tracks on the same level of storage when you play it back it has to decode that back into essentially a WAV file or an AIFF and one quick note about that there are a number of people who believe that a a lakh or a FLAC encoded lossless file does not sound as good as an uncompressed lossless or WAV file or AIFF and there's some merit to that now what's interesting about that is we can show very clearly that the bits are identical so when when they say it's a lossless file it really is a lossless file there are no bits lost so how could they sound different well depending on your hardware what happens is the process that your computer or your server or whatever is your music player is going through you have a lot more computational activity going on whereas you decode that flack or that a Lac file and depending on your hardware and how they've configured it that can start jittering the power supply and you'll actually get different sound quality on a really revealing system but as far as sound quality based on the veracity the honesty of the bits no they the bits bits are bits are absolutely the same okay so what was the other oh yeah all right key should he record it in what was what did he want to do 24 96 from the CD which is the maximum his DAC will play well that's called up sampling and CDs have 16 bits and they are sampled at forty four one forty four thousand times a second actually divided by two because we've got stereo oh no I know that's actually accurate you know it's it's the Nyquist so it's double the Nyquist basically says whatever the maximum that you want to get out of something you have to at least double the sample rate from the highest notes that you want to play so 20 kilohertz has to be 44 so in order to make the filters work they set it at 22 kilohertz and then 21 all that great anyway when a yeah 22 so 44.1 is is how they arrived at that because you have to sample it twice the the bitrate that you want to actually play back in order to get fidelity out of the thing without any kind of aliasing which are artifact stuff you don't want right so by up sampling you can get 24 96 96 being twice the sample rate of 48 kilohertz which is what most recording studios of that era they recorded everything at 48 then they down sampled it to 44 for the CD as well as that little bit of a mix that's what 96 kilohertz is and the 24 bits so bits has to do with dynamic range the greater the number of bits the greater the dynamic range but there's only 16 bits originally recorded so if you add 8 more bits to get 24 there is no more information the only thing you can do is what's called dithering and you can add some dither to it some random noise which can help in some of the lower resolution bits but not recommended you're not going to get anything more out of it higher sample rates years ago I might have said that it was better because it uses a different filter but in general no I I would not up sample it it takes more bandwidth I can't see any advantage to it so I'd keep them at 40 for one last thing if you're gonna play this stuff back and you have some 4401 and you have some higher resolution things get a program called bit perfect I think it's ten dollars and you put that on to your Mac and now whatever sample rate is native to the music will be what's played back and you obviate an entire bunch of crap inside of the Mac that makes things sound bad it runs it through an automatic up sampler and if you want to avoid all of that so for 10 bucks it's a great tweak and you'll have much better sound than you would if you hadn't put that in sorry for it being so long thanks for the question [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Paul McGowan, PS Audio

Views: 294,724

Keywords: Ask Paul 9, Ask Paul 1

Id: ejE1XDxawMY

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2018