Optical Output Or Pc?

[lical]

Hi!

I am quite new to this technology and have a question. I have a CD player with optical output and a NH700 Hi-MD unit.

I wanted to know your opinion wether it would make any noticeable difference of quality using optical input instead of the PC and software included or not.

Thanks!

[ROMBUSTERS]

thats a tough one, SS3.0 is usually regarded as surpassing the hardwares encoding abilities and thus without having to worry about recording volumes, etc. I would probably go with SS on this one.

[ozpeter]

Ripping from a PC or recording from a player's optical out are both digital transfers so there should be no difference. It's not impossible that a CD player might process audio in some way before it reaches the optical out connector so if anything I'd lean towards the PC transfer route - which of course is somewhat faster too. If really worried I guess you could rip using "EAC (Exact Audio Copy)" freeware, then using SonicStage for the transfer, but the chances of any significant difference via that route would IMHO be zero.

[dex Otaku]

The last time I checked [which was long ago, with SS v2.2] SS's encoders were still not quite as good as the hardware encoder on the units themselves.

Since then, a few users have retested this and found that, at the least, the lower-bitrate modes encoded with SS 2.3 and 3.0 are significantly better than they were in previous versions.

One test, on hydrogenaudio I think [though the tester did not specify what their recording chain was, making the results at least slightly questionable], came up with the result that the SS 2.3 codec was in fact slightly better with HiSP than the hardware LSI was.

In other words, no one really knows, it's all a matter of opinion, and considering the marginal [at best] difference, you're better off using Simple Burner or SS to do your conversions and save the time you'd otherwise be using waiting for realtime transfers to finish.

[Guest tony wong]

u should try it urself

record some tracks with optical input and some with SS

and play in "ur normal situation of playing the music"

some will listen them during his driving

some will listen in a silent place

some will listen in a beach

well, I can tell u, anyway

the difference will be minimal

but, the quality of sound is quite a subjective thing

u'll have to try it yourself and make the best selection of urs

and yes, u did forget one important thing

with SS u don't have to do it real time

but for optical in u will have to wait for an hour for an hour long cd recording

for SS it will takes only 10-20 to import them into SS

another few minutes to upload them to the Hi-MD unit

(in case u don't use linear PCM format, it will take much longer time to upload to Hi-MD unit with linear PCM)

[dex Otaku]

for SS it will takes only 10-20 to import them into SS

another few minutes to upload them to the Hi-MD unit

What kind of PC are you using? On my athlon 2500+ it takes about 4-5 mins to rip and encode a 74-minute CD.

[ozpeter]

I perhaps wrongly assumed the question related to a wave format capture/rip - indeed, if atrac is involved, it could be another whole story.

Incidentally, I've just been testing atrac3plus/256 vs mp3Pro/256, inverting each against a wave rip of a CD track. In this test, the atrac version had an average difference of -52.85dB and the mp3 version a greater difference of -48.03dB. Peak difference was -24.21dB and -20.3dB respectively. Listening to the difference files generated by each encoder, with the mp3Pro file you could clearly "hear the music", which is not good IMHO because what you are hearing is what has been 'thrown away' by the encoding. With atrac the difference was more "mushy", more of a pulsing white noise effect. Frequency analysis showed bigger differences in mp3pro above 16kHz, while the atrac difference file had a reasonably flat profile with a curious 6dB difference between left and right in the higher frequencies.

I guess I could similarly test the difference between the Hi-SP encoding in the MD recorder and the Hi-SP encoding in SS3 - would that be useful or is this ground well covered?

[dex Otaku]

Independent testing is always useful, though I would note:

Sync'ing the output of lossly codecs is suspect at best. Because there is a conversion to/from a completely different domain, timing is difficult to maintain at best.

i.e. Maintaining sample accuracy between the original and the encoded/decoded signal is next to impossible, which can account for the differences between the mp3plus* and atrac/3/plus files as much as the differences in the codecs themselves can.

Using a more complex signal [such as the actual beginning of a music track] is highly inaccurate, by my experience.

The most accurate way I've ever found to maintain the sync of the preface the test track with a burst of a single tone [i.e. -6dBfs 880Hz for 3 secs] and to use to last sample of the burst as the reference point for aligning all further samples.

Because of how lossy compression works, the simple tone should still maintain close enough to sample accuracy to be a usable reference.

* MP3plus - to my knowledge, MP3plus only takes effect at sub-112kbps bitrates; "plus" is a non-conformant [i.e. non MPEG] extension to the MP3 spec which allows added info about the high end to be included in subcode that non-MP3plus decoders will ignore. Hence, there should be no such thing as MP3plus 256kbps.

[ozpeter]

Good points - sync does not seem to be a problem with material processed just with SS3 - there was no drift in the tests I just did with music files (I'm a dab hand at aligning them though I say so myself!) - but indeed, comparing SS3 with the MD hardware could be a different kettle of fish - though even that point would be interesting (ie amount of sync difference). I'll try it later if only for the academic interest.

And yes, you've caught me out over mp3Pro - "mp3Pro VBR at 100Kbps averages about 130Kbps and is the highest quality sounding mp3Pro available" it says, now that I look harder at the encoder settings. So my test was using the mp3Pro encoder in non-mp3Pro mode. Still leaves atrac looking good. I have to say that comparing either format with the original CD using HD580 cans, I'm too deaf to hear the differences which my tests indicate do exist. But the whole point of these encoding schemes is to trick the ear, of course.