As a relative newbie in digital world, I recently elected to rip my cd collection to have access to everything without going through hundreds of cd's. Using dB I started ripping at first in the flac default 5 compression. Playing back through my Magnum Dynalab MD 807T, I must admit that it sounded pretty good (at the time I did no A/B tests) After ripping many and coming to see that I did not need the extra compression due to using a external 4 drive enclosure for storing files, I deleted everything and re-ripped in flac uncompressed.
Having access to everything is a pleasure, but accessing through the computer seemed to be occasionally problematic. Errors popped up here and there (maybe once for every four hours of streaming). It presented itself as what I would describe as dropped bits, momentary silence etc. I then elected to move everything to a NAS and take the computer out of the loop for anything but operation control through JRiver. So I access the library through desktop/laptop or tablet and these momentary errors have evaporated.
Always one to read, experiment and verify, I am going to rip some cd's that are already in flac uncompressed format and sound exactly like the original material into WAV and playback using the same method above and see if there is any difference that I can detect in my system. If not, I will consider myself lucky and continue using flac uncompressed and just get larger drives, if needed down the road.
As a side note, I have been experimenting with changing playback parameters in the PS DirectStream, since it was recently added, to find optimum setting, there also there is going to be a learning curve but that's what a hobby is all about
Having access to everything is a pleasure, but accessing through the computer seemed to be occasionally problematic. Errors popped up here and there (maybe once for every four hours of streaming). It presented itself as what I would describe as dropped bits, momentary silence etc. I then elected to move everything to a NAS and take the computer out of the loop for anything but operation control through JRiver. So I access the library through desktop/laptop or tablet and these momentary errors have evaporated.
Always one to read, experiment and verify, I am going to rip some cd's that are already in flac uncompressed format and sound exactly like the original material into WAV and playback using the same method above and see if there is any difference that I can detect in my system. If not, I will consider myself lucky and continue using flac uncompressed and just get larger drives, if needed down the road.
As a side note, I have been experimenting with changing playback parameters in the PS DirectStream, since it was recently added, to find optimum setting, there also there is going to be a learning curve but that's what a hobby is all about