My brain is exploding

[admin_exported]

Hi folks im new to this great forum

im tyring to ditch my cd player, like most people

My new set up

1. apple macbook pro

2. PC in another room

3.Cambridge dacmagic

4. mac > dac via usb connector

5. Monitor audio rs8

6. Cryus powers

7 Cryus connectors

8. A library of a few thousand songs, including a few of my cd collection on i tunes

9. A CD collection

So im so excited sat in the lounge today, connected the macbook, and whoops, most of the stuff sounded aweful, some of the stuff the bass was rubbish and the CDs sounded average, so what i have is a mish mash of stuff from the years thrown onto i tunes.

What im aiming for, is all the songs to sound great, and my CD collection to sound breath taking. I listen to all types of music, dance, classical, rock and pop. Is there magic software out there, to tidy all the files up on i tunes, bring them upto good quality. Will i need to rip all my CD collection and load into flac, will i tunes play flac format. Do i really want to be stuck with i tunes, could i put all my sounds onto a external harddrive, and use that as my reference / library - keeper

thanks in advance experts

Karl

 

[Anonymous]

Rip to Apple lossless, and don't download.

Oh, and get better speakers.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that quick reply Tarquinh

Do you mean rip the whole of itunes to lossless, or just the cd collection and then keep it it the i tunes library format, how could i tidy up the existing poor sounding collection

and Yikes

i was thinking the same about the speakers, there seem to be a wall of sound, im looking for detail, sound staging ect, i should have gone for monitors and stand £1000 ish, the speakers were ebay £450 anyway, hopefully wont lose much

cheers

Karl

 

[davejberry]

Before you change any hardware, re-rip all your CDs to a lossless format, I have done all mine as flac (level 5) using dBpoweramp and I use winamp to play the files locally or stream them to a WDTVLive.

For your files in i-tunes, if they are low bit rate lossy, transcoding them to lossless wont make them sound any better. If you don't like the sound quality, delete them and buy the music on CD

I find that my flac files are very close to the CD original through my AV set up.