Scott Dolan

And that last line is really the meat and potatoes of discussions like these, right? Most folks finally reach a point where they have to say enough is enough. How many more and/or "better" ways does one wish to hear the same album over and over again? Three issues and $50 later, I'm usually throwing in the towel...

You should see how awesome the phone calls are now that my iPhone has finally broken in. Had to leave it on re-dial for the first 100 hours, but it was worth it!

I'd say that given the fact that most of the music discussed here tends to be several decades old, it only stands to reason that conversation about them would eventually dry up. How much can one say about Kind Of Blue, for example? So I have to disagree with my friend J.A.W., I didn't see this as a negative comment. Just a reasonable observation.

Excellent! It's funny how electronics can seemingly have a mind of their own. Sometimes the simple act of just leaving them be, or unplugging and plugging them back in cures all that ails them. I had a similarly weird problem happen to me just this past week. I had been listening to my headphones, but decided I wanted to crank up the speakers instead. Well, with the cold dry air we are blessed with this time of the year, and my humidifier acting up, when I walked over to turn my headphone amp off it shocked the living shit out of me because of the static electricity that had built up in me. It was such a violent jolt that my subwoofer actually popped. So when I start playing something I note that the sub isn't firing. I try to do everything I can think of. Finally I shut the entire system down and fire it back up. Only now I can't get anything to play! Not even the mains. It was a true asshole puckering moment. So, I turn it off and walk away for a little while. Came back in and turned everything on, and it worked perfectly as though nothing had happened. Whew! I was getting really worried for a moment there.

Not really a surprising statistic when you think about it, though. I mean, as you say it is a portable computer as well as a phone and a music player. I'd say even sitting at home, the phone would be the least used of those items. I'd even have to think tthat it's not even used 18% of the time by most people. Then again, I rarely talk on the phone. So my opinion may be skewed a little.

Wow! It's about time. Guy should have been in at least a decade ago.

Interesting. I'd be interested in hearing your review of something you have on CD compared with a download from iTunes, and the format Amadeus provides you. Or even just something you have on CD converted in Amadeus to AAC to see if you can hear a difference.

Sounds good. Does it give you the ability to choose your own bitrate? I'm only asking because I'm completely unfamiliar with ADTS. To be perfectly honest, I'd never even heard of it before your post.

AAC isn't proprietary to Apple, so I'd have to think there are many programs out there that will allow you to convert to it. I wish I could give you a more substantial answer, but I'm locked into the Apple ecosystem and am not familiar with other ripper/encoding programs.

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly, but you can indeed rip/convert anything to 256 AAC in iTunes. I'm not at my iMac right now, but I think you can also do either AAC or mp3 as high as 320 in iTunes. Allegedly, 190 is the cutoff point as far as noticing a difference, but I can't say since I don't have anything at that bitrate. But, with the current advancement in audio codecs I wouldn't be shocked if it were true. All I can say is with my equipment and ears, 256 VBR and .wav is a draw. And although I get that you were kidding, I wasn't looking to win anything. Just posting my own personal results. YMMV. I need to download foobar2000 and do an honest to goodness ABX test.

A little off-topic here, but do the inserts/booklets say who mastered these SHM discs? Couldn't find it in the other thread. Erwbol is right, Universal Japan are often using older masterings for their impulse! CDs, which they keep reissuing over and over again. And that really irritates the hell out of me.

As far as I know all SHM Blue Notes have been remastered. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Not anymore, sold most of them a long time ago. The Blue Notes may be, but erwbol was saying yesterday that some of the Coltrane Impulse! dates were pressed using previous masters. Sorry for the confusion. I shouldn't have lumped them in with this conversation.

I've been pretty harsh on RVG's in the past, but like I said, some of them are actually quite good. So, I can understand where you're coming from since I think it's safe to assume you have a hell of a lot more of them than I do. At this point I refuse to get any of the SMH issues, but mostly because I'm content with the issues I already have. Not to mention the seeming land mine you have to wade through to figure out which ones are remastered as opposed to simple re-issues of previous masters on "higher" quality material. The obvious problem being that the material they are printed on changes nothing about the ones and zeroes involved. Unfortunately, with digital material there are no "constants and variables" involved. They remain constant no matter how "clear" plastic coating, or how "reflective" the surface. And no matter how contentious I seemed on the Coltrane thread, I'm always intrigued by actual remastered material from him. My son's middle name isn't Coltrane for nothing.

I've always found RVG's to be a mixed bag. On one end you have excellent stuff like Rollins' Vanguard date and Dolphy's OTL, on the other you have Hill's Point Of Departure which is incredibly thin and brittle, IMO. That said, since I never had the pleasure of hearing the original analog LP's I would have to concur that the RVG's are the best of the bunch. The McMasters stuff was less than impressive.

They don't "break in". They run as they were engineered to, and then they break. They don't break in, improve, degrade, and then die. They work as designed until they can't anymore. In other words, you're not going to see improvements in performance after running them for 100 hours. That's not how electronics work. That's not how electricity works. It starts and then it stops. Think about light bulbs. They don't get brighter after a certain "break in" period. And they don't gradually dim away to darkness. They work as engineered until the filament has reached its breaking point, and then they break.

I ran my own little test with my phony equipment a few weeks ago using Take Five as my demo track. I used four versions. A direct .wav rip from the CD, an ALAC, a 256kbps VBR AAC, and a 128 kbps mp3. The mp3 was noticeable, and without even really listening that closely. Of course, I already knew this because I've been able to pick out old 128k rips that I did many moons ago while doing stuff in the kitchen and the stereo playing in the living room. Next came the hard part. I went back and forth over and over again, on both my speakers and my headphones. Speakers run through my Emotiva DAC, pre-amp, and amp. Headphones had my Headroom Micro amp added to that chain. I actively tried to convince myself that I was hearing a difference in the AAC. But after switching back and forth trying desperately to convince myself the difference was there I simply burned out and exclaimed, "honest to fucking God, who fucking GIVES a shit?!" Honestly, I'm still not unconvinced that the bass response isn't a bit lighter on the AAC file. But by "bit", I mean so absurdly small that it simply doesn't matter except to those with a serious and somewhat disturbing (IMO) obsession. And I like my low end to be full and sound natural. I've heard systems that sounded better than mine, but none that could touch mine in deep, tight, fast bass. Yet, the difference I couldn't completely convince myself was there simply became a moot point. I'm going to try to take the time to take the Philips Golden Ear challenge this weekend to see how I score, just for shits and giggles.

iTunes currently offers their standard downloads at 256kbps VBR AAC. And I hope to one day have a "real system" to test them out on. *rolls eyes*

The Wire - HAIM Still have it playing in my head.

Well, the first thing to dispense of is headphone amps don't "burn in". Wires and transistors do not break in, only moving parts do, i.e. speakers. Next, I had a similar problem recently when I bought my new headphones and hooked my amp up to my old HK receiver pre-outs (was still waiting for my Emotiva amp and pre-amp to arrive). They sounded incredibly tin-y and very harsh. Freaked me out for a second, too. But then I decided to run my headphone amp straight out of my DAC instead, and all was more than right with the world again. Conclusion, something was horribly amiss with the pre-out on the HK. Now, the receiver was nearly 15 years old, and I had never used that particular output before, so I don't know if it had alway been shit, or what. I have no idea if that helps you, or not. But, I'd try running a different output from a different piece of equipment to check and see if you still get the same results. If so, then you have at least narrowed it down to either the amp of the cans. I'd be willing to bet you've got a bum pre-out on the CD player. What type of interconnects are you using? RCA?

Pretty much my thoughts exactly. Only exception being I haven't bought a cd in years. I would be inclined to buy a really nice box set, but other than that the higher resolution AAC's now offered by iTunes are all but indistinguishable from CD these days.

Just to clarify that last statement, it's obvious that since your car system works just fine with the Nano, that it isn't the problem. Sounds like something went kaflooey in the Classic that's making it not play nice with the car system.

Neal, have you tried restoring the Classic? I'd back it up, and restore it just to see if that's the problem. Worst that could happen is nothing.

You know, to be perfectly honest I don't even think the format itself is the problem. I think the biggest problem is what passes for production "value" these days. So much music these days is plagued by WAY too much loudness and the digital clipping that follows. You know when I think things first turned the corner? When Metallica released their Death Magnetic album, and even their own fans were rather angry about how loud and distorted it sounded. Hey, when even Metallica fans can't take it anymore, that's a good sign!

And I'm not one to completely disagree with that, but I really think a corner has been turned in that regard. And let's also be perfectly honest in that portable music has never been ideal. I saw a recent study, though for the life of me cannot find it online, where younger people were starting to prefer better sound quality. I think it was done in Japan. And of course now you have the "mastered for iTunes" section in the iTunes store that remasters everything in 24bit sound. And more and more you hear people say they're ripping their CD's to ALAC/FLAC rather than the bigger space saving MP3. That actually has me kinda hopeful that sound quality bottomed out with the 96kbps MP3, and is now on a sustained upward trend. I think people were initially blown away by the convenience of the digital file format, but now codec's are becoming more advanced, and sound quality is finally on the rise. Which I feel will continue. Now, maybe I'm completely full of shit. But, it's a trend I'm at least appreciating as it's happening.

Wow. Thanks for referring to me as troll-like. All posts removed, and I respectfully exit this conversation.