Cyrus Vs Sonos

Pete Shields

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Did the Sonos upgrade on the cheap (Z90 and Itouches) this weekend and was very surprised and quite impressed by the quality.

I'm running it to my Cyrus amp via an old Audio Alchemy DAC and Chord Cobras/codac.

My children who are from the Ipod "can't tell the difference between our Ipods and that rubbish hifi of yours dad,,," generation think it's the cleverest bit of kit since their Itouches and the Xbox360....

The sound of a decent quality rip in my opinion is great, but not as good and open as my Cyrus CD.

I went for a bit of a blindfold test on the wife and kids

I ripped duffy's Warwick Avenue at 320Kbps and compared the rip to the original CD, flicking between each via the amp's remote. Very little difference in it in my opinion. But the wife and kids said they could not tell the difference at all, and one of the kids said they liked the Sonos best.

The only problem I have is as we now have the Sonos app on all of the children's Itouches, they love changing the current selection remotely from the other rooms in the house. It's driving me mad.....From Genesis/Pink Floyd to the Artic Monkeys and Bassrunner....

The Sonos in my opinion deserves the awards heaped upon it in what Hifi. If you do want to initially run it to your Hifi only and already have a Itouch/Iphone as well as a long network cable, it can be done on the cheap (it cost me £240) plus cables. Good value in my opinion.

The only upgrade I am considering for this is an upgrade to my good old Audio Alchemy DAC. Will it make much difference to this source? Any suggestions greatly appreciated
 
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Anonymous

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Rip losslessly.

And any sonic difference is down to your DAC.

You simply prefer the sound of the Cyrus CDP.

My advice would be to sell the Cyrus CD and amp, and put the money towards the new Cyrus 8 XP d.
 

Pete Shields

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Eddie

what do you use to rip your discs Losslessly?

I have been using Windows Media Player but it only rips to 320 Kbps

A big Owch on the advice though. I'm stuck (and pleased!) with my setup for the time being and so will have to rough it out!
 
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Anonymous

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WMA has a lossless option. Look for it!

I use iTunes.

Go with whichever interface you like the most.
 

mikeinbrum

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I'm not familiar with the DAC you're currently using- but I imagine that you will discern a much bigger difference by changing DAC than by swapping between lossless and 320kbs compression as to my ears, the 2 are very difficult to tell apart! I rip mine to .flac as a matter of course, and I think the application I use is called dbpoweramp. it's pretty handy- does all the hunting around for album & track names for you.
 

The_Lhc

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Oct 16, 2008
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Pete Shields: The sound of a decent quality rip in my opinion is great, but not as good and open as my Cyrus CD.

I ripped duffy's Warwick Avenue at 320Kbps

In the same way that many Texas Hold 'Em players will say that only a pair of Aces is a "big pair", many people would say that only loseless is a "decent quality rip".
 
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Anonymous

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A WMA lossless file is not compatible with Sonos. I have tried ripping WAV files with Windows MP, the Sonos attempts to play them but stutters to a halt.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate a freeware ripper that creates FLAC files (well, not one that works!)
 

Pete Shields

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Thanks Mike in Brum.

I had Mediamonkey recommended to me and installed that yesterday. Seems good, but only found half of the covers. I probably have about 500 CD's in my collection (most now taking up space in my garage). But on my pc I have about 25,000 tunes, mostly dodgy internet file sharing rips (some duplicates of CDs)..

I'm going to get around to converting my CD's to decent quality rips (maybe even lossless), dump some of the dodgy MP3's and produce a more concise library of stuff I may actually listen to. I'll probably keep my favourites on CD nearby (room for about 75 in my living room).

Does dbpoweramp allow you to manually import covers into Mp3's? I will probably want to keep the MP3 directory in place and keep my music in mp3 format.
 

mikeinbrum

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I'm not sure I'm afraid, I've never been too fussed about the album art so long as the album / artist / song names are correct which dbpoweramp does a good job of getting right. I think i'm right in saying that it compares 3 different databases to ensure that you get the correct details!
 

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