My dad is very skeptical of compression, not understanding the concept of lossless and thinking it reduces quality to compress it. Even if you explain it in terms of "so instead of writing 1111111 it writes 7x1, look how much less space that takes! But it's the same information in the end." Even NTFS compression is a checkbox he insisted I disable. So it's wav all the way.
Recently had hard drive issues and I copied all data to a new drive at painstaking speeds (the hdd was barely limping). I now have no idea which files might have glitches from broken bits or sectors in them.
I guess a checksummed filesystem or keeping hash sums somewhere (the standard utilities make it pretty easy to verify many files with one simple command) is the solution for him. For me... just use a normal format and save half the space and money. Heck, go one step further and use opus: a healthy young individual can't hear the difference at a good bitrate let alone my "audiophile" "listens to too loud music" old man.
Some of the older generation have been convinced there's a difference with lossless compression, usually by British salesmen using words like "jitter" and "PRAT". It's sad that by the time you're old enough to afford being an audiophile, you probably don't have high-end hearing anymore.
Actually, from my experience, hi-fi audio is more about the complete sound rather than details itself.
I've played in orchestras and have a respectable system at home, and the biggest differentiator is not the details, but how these details interact and create a bigger, more immersive soundstage. Yes, you can hear subtle sounds of a bow or a cymbal, but the exciting part is how sounds mesh and play with each other.
So, as I age, the excitement of listening the same or new songs with that system doesn't fade away. I still get the same joy, and shiver when I hear that soundstage.
Actually, jitter is really something about audio CDs burned in CD Writers. I still have a Yamaha CRW-F1 CD recorder, and it has a feature to abuse Red Book standard to record audio with bigger pits to ease the CD player's job of tracking the disc. It reduces a 80 minute disc to 66 minutes, but with a higher quality CD like TDK, the sound was noticeably different on the system I aforementioned in this comment.
Currently, that set is fed by a much better CD player, and I'm sure that its tracking is leaps and bounds ahead of the older player, but it was really made a difference back then. I'm not sure with today's electronics, it'd make such a difference anymore.
> more about the complete sound rather than details itself
Agreed. My sound system isn't by any stretch audiophile; and I have the hearing of a 65-year-old. I can't point to things I can hear on a FLAC that I can't hear on an MP3; I hear the same notes, and the same instruments, with much the same tonality. But the former has a presence and vibrancy that is lacking in the latter; when I listen to MP3s, my involvement in the music rapidly tails off.
I suspect that you don't have to be able to hear higher harmonics in isolation, for those higher harmonics to affect what you do hear. That is, even if my hearing range cuts off at 12KHz, I can still tell the difference between an unfiltered sound, and a sound that is low-pass-filtered at 15KHz. The difference seems to be clearest with voices.
There's a reason MP3 is obsolete, though. You probably can't pass an ABX test with high bitrate MP3, but you almost certainly can't with AAC or Opus without extremely critical listening.
No, I'm talking about tracking and digital signal generation for the DAC, not the DAC itself.
The two players have 20 years of development apart. First one was a lower cost Sony, and the latter one is an entry level, yet higher end one (Yamaha CD-S300).
On the tracking stability, first one skips if you knock it lightly, and Yamaha doesn't care if you bump into it accidentally. Also, newer electronics can switch much faster, and in turn, creating a clearer eye pattern for DAC to work on [0].
When you used CRW-F1's audio mode, it elongated the pits and lands, so the digital part had more time to switch properly. This created a clearer eye pattern.
A clearer eye pattern allows DAC to create more cleaner signal since it switches and understands the signal much better and allows it to create a more "correct" (or clearer if you pardon the term) analog signal, esp. on higher frequencies.
Digital data on a Red Book CD is encoded with CIRC error correction, which provides an extra parity byte for every 3 data bytes. In normal operation, the recovery of the digital data is 100%. The DAC receives a stream of 1s and 0s, there is no "clearer eye pattern" for it to "interpret". The data is read or it is not. If it is not, the error is corrected. If it is uncorrectable, for example if there is a particularly large scratch, then - and only then - an attempt will be made to "guess" the signal.
Unless the CD is scratched, a 20$ computer optical drive with digital SPDIF output will be completely indistinguishable to a DAC than a drive costing 100x as much.
The "tracking stability" you mention in the newer model is simply a larger buffer, so that it has time to recover the read.
Fair enough, I wasn't considering the actual mechanics of the signal generation.
That said I see no usage for a CD player anymore, really. I can rip a bit-perfect copy, store it in FLAC, and play it pretty much anywhere. The only place I still use CDs sometimes is my car, because it's more convenient than fiddling with my phone sometimes.
I also do my casual listening over FLACs or streaming services in daily life.
OTOH, Listening CDs and vinyls is more of a ritual for me. A good coffee, some good reading material (or nothing), an album I especially like and an hour for myself. That Hi-Fi set also has USB/iPod connectivity over the CD player (and its DAC is a treat for both MP3s and over the iOS streaming) and it has bluetooth connectivity for very lazy times.
So a vintage set with some modern connectivity, and some older formats for enjoying the music for the sake of music.
Opus and MP3 are lossy formats. You can’t transcode them to anything else without losing data.
With how cheap storage is these days there’s really no argument against FLAC because you can also transcode it to whatever. Players like Navidrome use ffmpeg to transcode on the fly.
If I put all this effort into ripping CDs and maintaining backups, it’s not going to be in a lossy format that I can’t convert to anything else.
My dad is very skeptical of compression, not understanding the concept of lossless and thinking it reduces quality to compress it. Even if you explain it in terms of "so instead of writing 1111111 it writes 7x1, look how much less space that takes! But it's the same information in the end." Even NTFS compression is a checkbox he insisted I disable. So it's wav all the way.
Recently had hard drive issues and I copied all data to a new drive at painstaking speeds (the hdd was barely limping). I now have no idea which files might have glitches from broken bits or sectors in them.
I guess a checksummed filesystem or keeping hash sums somewhere (the standard utilities make it pretty easy to verify many files with one simple command) is the solution for him. For me... just use a normal format and save half the space and money. Heck, go one step further and use opus: a healthy young individual can't hear the difference at a good bitrate let alone my "audiophile" "listens to too loud music" old man.