Agreed. And that is that you believe what your ears tell you. If one solution sounds better than another then it does. What is concerning is that somebody disregards what they hear due to a belief that all solutions must sound the same if the rips are perfect. Again cold hard realism should indicate that perhaps there are factors at play that dictate the sound quality of a rip other than being bit perfect.
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To be honest with you I was locked into the Melco ecosystem. I already had the D100 and a Plixir PS (which I was previously using to power my Melco N100) and I was getting a good part x deal to upgrade to the Melco N50-S38. I thought the N100/Plixir was excellent with no obvious shortcomings, but when I heard the N50-S38 it just blew it away. I wasn’t expecting that quite frankly. It is just so much more musically coherent, with musical phrasings making so much more sense. There is much greater authority and solidity to the sound. Much more dynamic. Much improved timing and sense of drive and rhythm and the whole soundstage is now life-size. In short it just sounds so much more real.
We have the Moon 260 DT transport. It’s really for my wife who just dislikes streaming and wants to continue to play CD’s. All that I’ve said about the N50-S38 compared to the N100 holds true for the comparison with the Moon. It’s in a different class. I would say that the N100/Plixir was also a bit better than the Moon but to nothing like the same extent.
If judged on purely sound quality grounds I would say that the diffference between the Moon CD transport and Melco N100/Plixir was negligible really through the Qutest. I much preferred using the Melco for the convenience of it. Just so much nicer to simply tap an iPad screen than to have to keep getting up and down to change discs.
My wife continues to listen to her music on the Moon despite the obvious superiority of the new Melco and she doesn’t feel short-changed.
I hope this is of some help to you. Please don’t hesitate to ask if there’s anything else you would like to know.
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Hi. I had this before my atom. Its a streamer as well. I don’t use it for streaming anymore just for ripping. They are quite expensive over £1000 . It’s controlled by the bluos app and yes very user friendly. You can check it out from Bluesound website. Also it has the same make of DAC as the atom Bur brown but they are a world apart sound wise. Hope this helps.
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Genuine question here, what factors at play that could change how the data is on the harddrive that it affects sound?
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Qobuz/tidal are missing certain things for example I know it isn’t a huge need for most audiophiles but I love listening to video game soundtracks while the Sony ones are everywhere. Square enix and other Japanese devs like atlus have no clue anything but Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer exist.
I use my old Apple SuperDrive as a cd drive to my pc. I used to have an iMac luckily Mac’s have the ability to be partitioned and use windows built in so I can grab windows drivers for it. I figured this means I can make a server without any real outlay outside of the music.
I’ll eventually just get another ssd for my pc if necessary cheaper than a nas and no extra boxes.
Of course. In what way would it not be genuine?
Factors such as time coherence and jitter affect the musical integrity of a digital audio data stream. These are distinct from any considerations of it being bit perfect or not.
Jitter embedded inside the cd files?
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I’m not qualified to talk authoritatively here but no, not embedded inside CD files. Artefacts introduced by imperfections in the ripping process and present in the data stream output by the ripping mechanism.
This is why all CD transports don’t sound identical. The data streams they output may all be bit-perfect but they don’t sound the same. If being bit perfect was all that affected the sound then they would all sound identical.
Really though this is all old-hat now. We’re not in the digital dark ages any more. The days when all that mattered was getting all the ones and zeros right are long gone.
There was likewise a time when all that mattered with turntables is that they revolved at the correct speed and didn’t produce any rumble.
Times change. Any ripping device not capable of outputting a bit-perfect data stream would be a bad joke. But like CD transports, they don’t all produce identical musical results.
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Everybody can have their opinion on this. But I do hear the difference between my music servers of Melco and streamed content as well as I can hear a difference for the CD’s ripped by my Melco ripper, and in addition also having a good switch and Ethernet cables an essential factor in the overall sound quality. So I do differ in opinion from your dealer, however if people don’t hear the difference then of course it would be a waste of money……
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Most of todays cheap drives - especially if they play dvds and bluray - have lots of error detection and fast read speeds built in that make the process 100x faster than when I started ripping in the early 00s on a Philips pc optical drive. It’s the software (e.g. dbpoweramp ripper , EAC) that generates the accurate rip not the hardware. The start up cost even to start experimenting if you have a pc and can connect a drive is ridiculously small.
But you can check your rip against a database and if its clear then there are no errors.
Sorry this makes no sense.
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Snap 
Its not really ears. Its just software engineering. The music was encoded into 1s and 0s using computers and stored on the cd (a crap media for storing data and being able to read it back). Software like dbpoweramp reads the cd from an optical drive and with almost certainty (assuming multiple people have ripped a copy of the same cd) guarantees that the exact same 1s and 0s that were encoded in the first place are recovered. Thats an accurate rip. If anyone says their magic box makes the accurate rip sound more accurate than the above software then just simply don’t believe them. Its not true.
And just to add, that same software puts all the metadata for the cd into the ripped files - images art, track titles, artists etc from various databases on the internet. Sometimes its slightly out so another piece of software useful is a media metadata editor. Mp3tag for example which is free on windows if i recall.
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It may just be me but I suspect that there are two things being discussed here.
One - the process of ripping a cd to a location. This can, and usually is, bit perfect between various machines. Can include additional meta data.
Two - replay channel from the stored location via dac to amp to speakers to our ears. This channel sometimes includes some of the same items/components of the ripping process. But it does include other components and the totality of these can impact what is heard by individuals.
Happy to be told I’m off subject.
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All that discussion is only theoretical. Have you tried and verified if two different rips, both accurate, can sound different, even if your knowledge says it’s impossible ?
It’s exactly the same discussions with Ethernet cables. Some say it’s only 0 and 1 and that the data is identical.
Try. It’s not difficult. You bring one cd to a dealer who has a Melco D100 ripper. You rip it in 5 mins and put it on an usb stick. 10 mn job.
When you check your rip against a database you are checking for bit errors. So if it gives the OK it means your rip is bit perfect. That’s all. It won’t disclose any artefacts such as time domain errors inherent in the encoding and which will be transmiited in the data stream produced from a reading device and fed to a DAC.
In simple terms bit perfection in a digitally encoded music signal does not necessarily result in integrity of the musical information therein. It is a vital part of the story, but only a part of it.
Different replay channels - see my comments above. Stored locations are different and may deliver 1s and 0s in a subtly different way.
As before, please say if I’ve got wrong end of paddle.
Its not theory, its just software engineering (which is my background). If the cd was an analogue format, I would agree with you. Its not though, its digital. The music was encoded as a digital computer file (using a format called pcm) and that data file was stored on the disk that phillips called a cd. That puts it in the world of computing. And in the world of computing, software engineering rules and principles apply. Computers need to know when data is accurate, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other and have this discussion. The words would keep changing in front of our eyes.
Its the same rules of software engineering that gets your bank balance from the mainframe computer in the bank where it is stored, via four or five different computers to your phone. Its called asynchronous communication. The phone needs to know that your bank balance is correct and has not varied by 0.007% because it went over 100 ethernet cables to get to you. Those ethernet cables generated data loss for sure. However the software engineering protocols broke the data into small packets and calculated a checksum for each packet and passed that on down the chain. The receiving computer received the packet, performed a checksum and compared them. If the checksum matches the packet is guaranteed to be correct. If it is not a match, it sends a message back to the previous computer in the chain and says send it again. This works because the communication is asynchronous. The computer will wait and keep retrying until the data has arrived correctly.
That is what is happening in the digital chain with cds and media servers. The music data file was stored on a cd. Dbpoweramp reads the disk and compares the checksum of the data against the checksum generated by other people who read the disk. If the checksums match then we can guarantee that the exact same data that was stored on the cd in the first place has been recovered into the rip. Its is the same data that was originally stored on the cd. No other process can make recovering the same data into something that is both the same but different. Otherwise your bank balance would change randomly every time you checked it. (Your melco is using the same software engineering principles to recover the original data.)
If the files are identical to each other and identical to the original music data file before it was stored onto cd, its always going to sound exactly the same when you play it back on the same equipment. By the way its really fast for dbpoweramp to rip a cd - unless it detects an error then it keep re-reading the disk. If you have a pc at home you could easily get the trial version and play with it. Honestly it will make what I wrote above seem really clear if you did.
The media server passes the music stored in the ripped data file to the digital streamer asynchronously using the same techniques described above. If you are imagining that when you test different ethernet cables or switches you are hearing a degradation in the music data, you are not. The data arrives perfectly because the communication is asynchronous.
What you do hear is the effect of electromagnetic noise from the network leaking into the streamer together with noise picked up by the ethernet cable itself adding distortion into the DAC. You hope that the streamer is designed well and can isolate itself from that noise. But sometimes the noise is too much and it creates distortion.
So yes the ethernet cable is all 0s and 1s and is totally unlike say a speaker cable or an interconnect cable. When you test ethernet cables you are hearing different noise profiles generated by the network and cable.
I think there are two schools of thought on that. Either minimise and manage the noise as best you can in your network, hopefully to levels below the audible threshold of your streamer and get a good quality to spec ethernet cable that doesn’t add much more noise to the chain. That has been the traditional path recommended in this forum.
Alternatively find a cable that alters the noise profile to something more pleasing. That is entertaining but risks being like building a house on shifting sands as the noise profile can change over time and with different events in your network. So your 6k cable sounds amazing on friday night, and totally different on Sunday. That is probably a discussion for another thread.
Hope all that was clear and sorry for such a long post.
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The data is accessed asynchronously not synchronously as if you were recording a record onto a cassette tape.
Edit. No ripping process will recover issues in the original pcm encoding.
Edit 2. The communication is asynchronous from the media server until it has reached the streamers buffer. Then the cpu in the streamer feeds the data into the dac synchronously (mostly). When ripping a cd the access is asynchronous.