CDs ripped by different drives sound different...nearly fell for it.
Nearly found myself falling for this 'different rippers sound different' thing last night, and coincidentally it's kind of topical, given the recent thread by Staggerlee.
I've ripped knocking-on-the-door-of 450 CDs as Apple Lossless files using a cheap (£15) DVD R/W drive attached to my Mac Mini. Then last night I came across one CD that the drive wouldn't rip properly: Rolling Stones, 40 Licks, 2nd CD, last two tracks. So instead I ripped it with the drive in my iMac.
Then I did the inevitable, which was a bad idea. I listened to the two rips, using 'Sympathy for the Devil'.
I was mortified. While I didn't try AB-X, I was convinced the rip from the iMac sounded fuller and more energetic, with a more rhythmic bass. This was not a Good Thing, after I've ripped nearly 450 CDs with the other drive, plus it went against everything I've preached about and everything I thought I knew about digital audio.
Only one way to sort this. I fired-up Audacity. I loaded-up both rips as separate stereo tracks and aligned them absolutely perfectly with each other. Interestingly, lining them up was harder than I thought it would be because the rip from the external drive was about 100 samples longer at the start for some reason, so I had to zoom right in to sample-level to get them precisely aligned.
Then, I inverted the phase of one file using Effect > Invert, and with more nervousness than an expectant father, I hit play.
Silence. All 6:18 of it, or thereabouts. Audio ripped from CDs is nothing but 16-bit numbers, minus and positive, running past at 44,100 samples per second. Inverting the file makes all the positives negative and vice-versa. The inverted rip was cancelling-out the other file 100% absolutely, because they were perfect mathematical opposites. This in turn means before I inverted the file, they were completely identical (bar the extra samples at the start). No question. No 'might be'/ 'might not be'. No opportunity for subjectivity.
Phew. Sanity restored. The difference was all in my head. No need to re-rip 450 CDs.
Just shows how one can be fooled, eh?
As you were, everyone.
Did you do another compare after you'd checked in Audacity just to make sure you couldn't hear a difference any more?
You get the exact same process with cables. You buy expensive cables so they sound better.............in your head.
It's called psychoacoustics.
Did you do another compare after you'd checked in Audacity just to make sure you couldn't hear a difference any more?
Good question. Major?
Did you do another compare after you'd checked in Audacity just to make sure you couldn't hear a difference any more?
Good question. Major?
Even armed with that test I bet you would have difficulty believing that the cheap drive sounded as good as the 'expensive' drive in your iMac. It is just so difficult especially for old time analogs like me.
1s and 0s are 1s and 0s, optical drives, usb/hdmi cables do an identical job without fear or favour, deeper black or whiter white.
Yes, but did u check for super sub sonic aberations and phase deficiencies beyond 60khz?? Good test. We need more of those!
Did you do another compare after you'd checked in Audacity just to make sure you couldn't hear a difference any more?
Good question. Major?
Even armed with that test I bet you would have difficulty believing that the cheap drive sounded as good as the 'expensive' drive in your iMac. It is just so difficult especially for old time analogs like me.
1s and 0s are 1s and 0s, optical drives, usb/hdmi cables do an identical job without fear or favour, deeper black or whiter white.
The sound produced was from the stored data files - after being read by the drives. ie the drives were acting as a data transfer mechanism to create files.
This should not be confused with "playing" music using a CD drive. Playing a music CD directly uses a totally different and out dated mechanism. Its like the difference between streaming TV and playing a stored TV programme.
I don't know why nobody has developed a CD player that rips the music to internal stored files and then plays them
I don't know why nobody has developed a CD player that rips the music to internal stored files and then plays them
They have.
Example...
http://www.naimaudio.com/hifi-products/type/hard-disk-player-server
It rips from the CD and stores it as a file on internal storage.
There are other brands making these as well although I'm not terribly familiar with them.
Did you do another compare after you'd checked in Audacity just to make sure you couldn't hear a difference any more?
Good question. Major?
I did...and couldn't tell any difference. Because there wasn't any. It was an illusion, caused probably by some niggling worry at the back of my head that the Apple drive would do a better job than the cheap external one, even though common sense told me that it wouldn't and couldn't.
Did you do another compare after you'd checked in Audacity just to make sure you couldn't hear a difference any more?
Good question. Major?
I did...and couldn't tell any difference. Because there wasn't any. It was an illusion, caused probably by some niggling worry at the back of my head that the Apple drive would do a better job than the cheap external one, even though common sense told me that it wouldn't and couldn't.
Interesting. Tbh it wouldn't have surprised me either way. It's a useful lesson in how 'expectation bias' is commonly misunderstood, as people often say 'I didn't expect a difference' (or variations like preferring the cheaper item that in fact sounds the same), whereas you of course knew there was not a difference and did not expect one and yet still heard one. Thanks for the post major 
But, Major, isn't it the case that different hard drives sound different?
At Bristol at the weekend someone stood at the front of his audience and told us that different rips sound different. I'm pretty sure it was the guy in the Naim demo. If he says that it must be true surely 
But, Major, isn't it the case that different hard drives sound different?
Funny you should say that...some of the HiFi audio players like Pure Music can be be set-up to load tracks or even whole albums into RAM* before playing them, as opposed to streaming them from the HDD, which apparently improves sound-quality... 
Some people also say computers with solid-state drives sound better than those with conventional HDDs...
*kind of relies of you having enough spare RAM of course...
It's cheap and plentiful and far bigger than any track or album. You'd only need 1GB of RAM at most. (a CD has about 700MB capacity).
In fact you'd probably get away with far less than 1GB because the RAM doesn't need to hold a whole album - or even a whole track - to do what you describe.
A CD transport with error correction software that doesn't have to correct errors 'on the fly' could then be used.
Get your wife to walk in mid test and ask what you've changed as the sound is soooo much better????