Naimfan
Oct 1, 2007, 07:09 PM
I've always been a huge fan of music--probably inevitable when your grandfather teaches piano and your grandmother is one of the original Rockettes. (Yes, really.) Since I can't play, I've always loved listening to music, and have liked hifi gear, getting into what most people would probably call insanity--having a record player that would now retail for $10K, etc. So iTunes et al have been enormously interesting to me.
I just got an Airport Express so I can stream radio stations from my iMac to my hifi, and have experimented with the sound quality coming from a variety of sources--my CD player (a Linn Mimik), playing CDs in my iMac, and a couple of different bit rates in iTunes; with the latter two being streamed to the Airport Express and then to the hifi rig.
Short form: The CD player directly into the preamplifier is the best sounding, and it is my sad duty to say it is by a sizable margin. As in, anyone could hear it. (It is actually second best--my turntable kills it, but that's another thread!) Second, surprisingly to me, was the iMac playing the CD directly--it is better than playing the identical track from the hard drive (encoded with Apple lossless). Third was playing music from the hard drive after it was ripped using Apple lossless (which is the best sounding encoder I've tried).
I'm surprised because one of the biggest bugaboos with digital sound is jitter, which playing from the hard drive should eliminate. Granted, the Mimik is designed in part to minimize jitter, but still......
I think the biggest reason is that the D/A conversion in the iMac is nowhere near as good as that of the Mimik, and then streaming it doesn't help, nor does running it through a cheap mini to twin RCA cable (although substituting RCA cables shows them to not be a huge factor). So perhaps I should get a better D/A converter to plug the streamed music into, and let that handle D/A duties as opposed to the iMac.
Briefly, the Mimik is much more authoritative--bass goes deeper and with more power and control, the music is much more "in-tune", much clearer, and easier to follow. As you move to the iMac playing the CD directly, the music compresses--you can hear the dynamic range being squashed, the image and soundstage collapse, and it's much harder to follow the "tune." Music also loses a great deal of it's color and dynamics.
Anyway, I've always wondered if anyone else here has done anything similar, and if there are any other audiophiles here. Now, back to converting my 5000 LPs....... :eek:
I just got an Airport Express so I can stream radio stations from my iMac to my hifi, and have experimented with the sound quality coming from a variety of sources--my CD player (a Linn Mimik), playing CDs in my iMac, and a couple of different bit rates in iTunes; with the latter two being streamed to the Airport Express and then to the hifi rig.
Short form: The CD player directly into the preamplifier is the best sounding, and it is my sad duty to say it is by a sizable margin. As in, anyone could hear it. (It is actually second best--my turntable kills it, but that's another thread!) Second, surprisingly to me, was the iMac playing the CD directly--it is better than playing the identical track from the hard drive (encoded with Apple lossless). Third was playing music from the hard drive after it was ripped using Apple lossless (which is the best sounding encoder I've tried).
I'm surprised because one of the biggest bugaboos with digital sound is jitter, which playing from the hard drive should eliminate. Granted, the Mimik is designed in part to minimize jitter, but still......
I think the biggest reason is that the D/A conversion in the iMac is nowhere near as good as that of the Mimik, and then streaming it doesn't help, nor does running it through a cheap mini to twin RCA cable (although substituting RCA cables shows them to not be a huge factor). So perhaps I should get a better D/A converter to plug the streamed music into, and let that handle D/A duties as opposed to the iMac.
Briefly, the Mimik is much more authoritative--bass goes deeper and with more power and control, the music is much more "in-tune", much clearer, and easier to follow. As you move to the iMac playing the CD directly, the music compresses--you can hear the dynamic range being squashed, the image and soundstage collapse, and it's much harder to follow the "tune." Music also loses a great deal of it's color and dynamics.
Anyway, I've always wondered if anyone else here has done anything similar, and if there are any other audiophiles here. Now, back to converting my 5000 LPs....... :eek:
