Copying MD to computer hard drive

[lukpac]

14 minutes ago, sfbp said:

That may be, but in practice it doesn't seem to work that well. How else do you explain Sony providing in SS different qualities of ripping?

In practice it generally works perfectly. I've ripped hundreds of CDs, and a very small percentage have any issues, and those are generally due to damage or a particular problem with the disc. AccurateRip makes it extremely easy to verify rips are correct:

http://www.accuraterip.com/

I don't know what you're referring to regarding "different qualities of ripping" in SonicStage, but that doesn't change the above regarding ripping CDs.

9 minutes ago, sfbp said:

Atrac3+ is actually a much better codec. The fact that "original SP" seems to give a cleaner sound than an "original CD" is due to some clever tweaks in the design of ATRAC, which actually alters the supposedly 16 bit data off the disk by playing with oversampling just like good CD players do. A combination of upsampling and oversampling, followed by re-coding into ATRAC's logarithmic format. There's little difference (minor transformation) between ATRAC and ATRAC3+ in terms of that - both are 24-bit formats.

Neither ATRAC1 nor ATRAC3plus give a "cleaner sound" than a CD, as both are lossy codecs that necessarily throw away data.

Regardless, whether ATRAC1 or ATRAC3plus sounds better isn't the issue. Nothing is ever gained by lossy encoding; on the contrary, things are always lost. So while:

source -> ATRAC3plus

Will likely sound better than :

source ->ATRAC1

This will not:

source -> ATRAC1 -> ATRAC3plus

That's two levels of lossy encoding, which is necessarily worse than one level. That is to say, it is preferable to get the ATRAC1 files from discs rather than ATRAC1 to ATRAC3plus transcodes.

[sfbp]

Your left-brain assertions are well-heeded. And I unfortunately disagree with them.

However, data on a CD frequently doesn't sound as good as the same thing ripped to ATRAC. Go figure.

[lukpac]

6 minutes ago, sfbp said:

Your left-brain assertions are well-heeded. And I unfortunately disagree with them.

However, data on a CD frequently doesn't sound as good as the same thing ripped to ATRAC. Go figure.

Whether you prefer the sound or not, ATRAC encoding necessarily changes and degrades the signal.