First step forward in awhile.

[Worf101]

We all remember when we "made the move" from one technology to the next. Those of us old enough to remember can place the date they or their family went from:

Mono to Stereo

Black and White to Color

8 Track to Cassette

Vinyl to CD

VHS to DVD.

Well, while it might not be as earth shattering as those transitions listed above, I did do something for the first time ever last night. I'd been busily ripping my CD collection to my 3TB hard drive on my home computer in the man-cave. Last night I accessed my music on my compters HD via ethernet from my Onkyo 905 downstairs. The idea of having playlists of 500 songs at my finger tips was mind boggling. The thought of never having to get up to change a CD again is sweet. BUT if I'm running WAV files from my harddrive am losing ANY fidelity over putting the CD in my Yammie CD player?

Are there any other hints or tips more experienced folks can give me? Thanks in advance.

Worf

[Hyfi]

a wav file is as close to the original without loss but it is larger than a flac file. Not sure about your yammie, but my Integra has extra circuitry to enhance MP3 files when played vie network or USB stick.

Oddly enough, I have only rented and played a handful of BluRay disks on my 2 OPPO players and have used all the streaming capabilities more for movies, music, youtube, and Pandora.

[StevenSurprenant]

My thoughts on this is that what you record onto your hard drive should be bit for bit identical to what's on the CD assuming you didn't convert the files to a lousy format like mp3.

Communication from your computer through the network should yield a perfect copy to your receiver. After that, it's a matter of the quality of the DAC in the receiver.

I imagine that differences could/might be heard between connecting your CD player via coax versus analog versus network, but the only thing you can do is listen and decide for yourself.

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

We all remember when we "made the move" from one technology to the next. Those of us old enough to remember can place the date they or their family went from:

Mono to Stereo

Black and White to Color

8 Track to Cassette

Vinyl to CD

VHS to DVD.

Well, while it might not be as earth shattering as those transitions listed above, I did do something for the first time ever last night. I'd been busily ripping my CD collection to my 3TB hard drive on my home computer in the man-cave. Last night I accessed my music on my compters HD via ethernet from my Onkyo 905 downstairs. The idea of having playlists of 500 songs at my finger tips was mind boggling. The thought of never having to get up to change a CD again is sweet. BUT if I'm running WAV files from my harddrive am losing ANY fidelity over putting the CD in my Yammie CD player?

Are there any other hints or tips more experienced folks can give me? Thanks in advance.

Worf

Well(in my usual Latin snippyness) it is about time you caught up with the rest of us ye ole fossil. LOL!

I doubt you will have any loss of fidelity as long as all of the bits arrive to the receiver as they are supposed to. Jitter could be an issue, but it is not very likely you will hear it unless you are directly comparing the CD player with the streaming output. Enjoy the convience, and don't worry - be happy(Hey that is a song!.....oh shoot somebody has wrote that song already)

[Feanor]

We all remember when we "made the move" from one technology to the next. Those of us old enough to remember can place the date they or their family went from:

Mono to Stereo

Black and White to Color

8 Track to Cassette

Vinyl to CD

VHS to DVD.

Well, while it might not be as earth shattering as those transitions listed above, I did do something for the first time ever last night. I'd been busily ripping my CD collection to my 3TB hard drive on my home computer in the man-cave. Last night I accessed my music on my compters HD via ethernet from my Onkyo 905 downstairs. The idea of having playlists of 500 songs at my finger tips was mind boggling. The thought of never having to get up to change a CD again is sweet. BUT if I'm running WAV files from my harddrive am losing ANY fidelity over putting the CD in my Yammie CD player?

Are there any other hints or tips more experienced folks can give me? Thanks in advance.

Worf

Nice goin'. There are many variables in computer playback but there is ultimately no reason why it can't sound as good as CDP playback -- in my case it's better because my stand-alone DAC is better than my old CD/SACD player.

Does your Onkyo play FLAC files? If you had just as well, (IMO), encode to FLAC rather than WAV and save a lot of space. Also you have complete tagging, (metadata), capability in this format.

What did you use to rip your CDs? There a bazzilion programs that will do this: make sure you use one that has error detection and can look up tag data from Internet databases. Personally I use dBpoweramp CD Ripper.

[Worf101]

I'm currently ripping with Windows Media Player, but I'm willing to pay for a better more fideleous one if it's available. My Onkyo doesn't do FLAC unfortunately. Still if I fill 3 TB with music I've got bigger problems than format. LOL! Every once in a while the play back stops but it does sound quite close to the CD but I run composite out of my CD player to use it's DAC which is supposed to be quite godd. Thanks for the love and information.

Worf.

PS You Sir T the Terrible can... well everyone needs a gadfly I suppose! Thanks for the warm linguistic welcome.

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

PS You Sir T the Terrible can... well everyone needs a gadfly I suppose! Thanks for the warm linguistic welcome.

I hope those three dots means kiss my grits...LOLOLOL

[E-Stat]

The idea of having playlists of 500 songs at my finger tips was mind boggling. The thought of never having to get up to change a CD again is sweet.

I enjoy not only playlists, but the ability for random play. Since I got my first Squeezebox Touch, I have rediscovered a lot of music that for one reason or another just didn't must airplay. I no longer spin shiny plastic.

BUT if I'm running WAV files from my harddrive am losing ANY fidelity over putting the CD in my Yammie CD player?

I shared that concern until recently when I replaced a fairly expensive CDP with another Touch in the main system using an Audio Research DAC. I am now convinced that computers can offer equivalent performance as a transport.

The only bummer about using native WAV files is the lack of tagging. I converted all of mine to FLAC for that very reason. Tagging is a beautiful thing. I use EAC (exact audio copy) which also compares the CD content with online lists and automatically creates the tags for you. Most commercial CDs translate perfectly. Saving a bit of disk space is also good. The only concern with FLAC is that it decompresses in real time so you need a reasonably powerful PC.

Enjoy!

[Feanor]

...
The only bummer about using native WAV files is the lack of tagging. I converted all of mine to FLAC for that very reason. Tagging is a beautiful thing. I use EAC (exact audio copy) which also compares the CD content with online lists and automatically creates the tags for you. Most commercial CDs translate perfectly. Saving a bit of disk space is also good. The only concern with FLAC is that it decompresses in real time so you need a reasonably powerful PC.

Enjoy!

I concur here. All my stuff is FLAC or ALAC (Apple Lossless which used when ripping with iTunes). I can't hear any difference from WAV and there is no reason you should hear a difference with a decent computer setup. My computer isn't particularly powerful but I run it without anti-virus and with many Window services disabled. This is practical because my music computer is dedicated to that purpose.

Tags are indispensable to a classical listener like me and generally refine and expand on what the Internet databases provide. For that purpose I use Tag&Rename, though there is a decent freeware program, MP3Tag (which also tags FLAC files, etc.).