Use level 5 and tick the box.
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I have to add that I find this kind of marketing mildly insulting: āaudio-gradeā, āreinvention of the musicā, āmilitary gradeā ā¦ do these people really believe that we are all stupid? Are they possibly right? Are they insane? I do not know. But I do not trust companies that pay people to come up with meaningless marketing slogans.
nbpf,
You suggest CD rippers are largely same and differences are principally marketing. Iām old enough to recall the same being said about turntables and how journalists and retailers mocked brands like Linn & Naim.
40-years ago I heard of store that sold āmore interesting hifi.ā I only had main streets that was not very long and when I passed normative consumer electronics store I stopped in to inquire. I was told with generous laugh the shop I was looking for was the one that sold āthe preamplifier of the week, or was it turntable, donāt be sucker and buy that stuff.ā I found the store and bought LP12 and lived to regret not buying Naim.
Is there any supporting evidence that Naim or others who allege to construct more productive/worthwhile CD ripper are, or are not doing so?
I know from acquiring Naim gear that it repeatedly and progressively enhanced my listening experience. Iām not suggesting Naim is perpetually unblemished, but most owners find the value/pleasure stays with them, canāt say that about many purchases. Itās too bad Naim doesnāt speak up regarding grievances and suppositions being made above.
PR Agencies are full of ideas people who donāt generally have a clue about the engineering/science behind the catch phrases they come up with to sell to the marketing departments of their clients.
Everyone in the PR Agency is trying to out hype their colleagues and the marketeers who buy these campaigns are more concerned with the affirmation of other marketeers. They give themselves awards and reviews. They praise themselves in their trade journals and the get together (pre COVID-19) at least once a year to celebrate themselves.
If you think the Oscars, BAFTAs,. etc. are so much self aggrandising drivel, you aināt seen nuffink until youāve seen how they do it at marketing awards ceremonies. Itās not that they think we are stupid. Itās just that we donāt understand how clever they are. But thatās OK, because they tell themselves and each other all the time, in a number or predictably ācreativeā ways.
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Apples and bowling balls.
An accurate rip is an accurate rip. Resources such as dBpoweramp have a potential advantage here because you have wealth of control over the process and the data used to reference the accuracy. The best case comparison scenario is that a Naim rip is equal in accuracy to the same gold standard as all the other rippers that have been engineered to achieve this, such as but by no means limited to dBpoweramp, EAC, etc.
Less impressive is the way Naim rippers handle metadata and particularly how they tag WAV files. Or more accurately, how they donāt tag WAV files. Naim were lashing this up 10 years ago and selling it as ābetterā. It isnāt. It never was. And they are still doing it with a format which doesnāt need a proprietary solution (being open source and platform independent), particularly one that was already knackered 10 years ago.
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I have an (almost) all Naim system (nDAC, SN2, S-400) and I very much value Naimās engineering. However, the Core is a miscarried product and the pomp with which it was annouced was embarassing. Melcoās fairy tales of āaudio-gradeā SSD were also embarassing. This is not to suggest that these companies are not delivering excellent products. It is just that, by investing money and resources in silly marketing, they are compromising their reputation. In my view, of course.
Another marketing department trying to sell a proprietary system as something it isnāt.
If the results speak for them themselves it is all to the good. Linn, Naim excelled at overengineering the basics so that anything built on them was the best it could be. Rega also, who sell stuff which is still spectacularly good value for money. Hanging these silly labels on them is, well, silly.
Regaās strapline for my Planar 3 was āthe best sounding turntable youāve laid eys onā (or something close). Thatās old school clever. No "NASA approved bearing oil " claims. Rolex claim that their rubber strap isnāt really rubber.
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nbpf,
I canāt speak to the engineering and outcomes of ripping from different devices, but I entered this discussion feeling let down and locked in by Naimās software for classical music storage. I would write to MD if I could get his email. Consumers are owed respect of response and perhaps recognition.
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Thatās the point. With the Core, Naim have pretended to have āreinvented the musicā but in fact they have delivered a lousy software that cannot distinguish between director, conductor, artist and composer. Implementing a decent UPnP server is not rocket science. MinimServer offers outstanding indexing and impeccable functionalities. Naim should have better kept the ball down, fired the marketing dudes, gone back home and done their homework.
I didnāt go there before, but a rip and replay from my Core is better than a rip and replay from my Mac.
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I bought a Core about 2 months back to rip my mostly classical (but plenty of jazz and some 60ās/70ās rock) collection of CDs, some of which are 35 years old or more. At the moment I have about 130 albums done. (several hundred more to go). On the negative side, yes I do wish ācomposerā and āconductorā were directly in the metadata, however I have not found any real problems in finding the music I want. I do find that the meta data needs to be checked post rip. Usually all if fine, but sometimes it is off (incorrect genre, album title, etc). I check the other (not Rovi) possibilities in the app, and quite often the artwork is missing/wrong.
As an example, I have four sets of the Bach Cello Sonatas (two CDs in each set), including two sets by Yo Yo Ma. I donāt have any problems locating the exact recording I want to hear.
An essential accessory is an iPad with an actual physical keyboard, so that the edits when necessary, go quickly. Finding and changing the artwork is quite fast and the app supports this well. Sometimes when nothing can be found on-line, I simply take a picture of the CD with my phone, which is then immediately available in the app on the iPad for use. Very simple!
Occasionally (about twice in over 100 rips) I have found the Core will not rip a CD due to the number of errors. In these cases I have ripped the CD on my Mac using dBPowerAmp and then downloaded the resulting file to the Core with no problems. I donāt know what is going on here. Perhaps the Core has too lofty standards for error free ripping.
The Core works seamlessly with my Atom and the sound is perfect, sometimes revealing the less than stellar recording practice from the early CD days.
Before I got the Core, I did try ripping to an external drive that I then attached to the Atom, but gave this up as it was much more troublesome than using the Core has turned out to be.
Overall, consider me a happy user of the Core. Iām glad I bought it.
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Exactly how I use my Core,Analog, into an Mscaler/TT2 DAC without the need for a streamer, unless you want to rent music from Tidal/Quobuz. Since the Core and my Fraim are my only current Naim products, I still feel I am a legitimate member here.
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Compression levels go from 0 to 8, the higher the level, the smaller the file size. Uncompressed will have a larger file size again. More compression takes a little longer, but itās a one-off process, and on a reasonably powerful computer itās probably not going to take ages. Having said that, the space saved by compressing to a higher level isnāt that much. I would probably just leave it at 5.
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āAfter Encoding Verify Written Audio - once compression is complete the compressed audio will be read and compared to the source, verifying the compression is without error (hard disk, or very unlikely codec induced).ā (from the dbpoweramp website).
@jsaudio thanks so much for asking that question. Iād naively assumed that it meant that I had secure ripping set. On googling to ensure I was answering correctly I discovered that secure ripping was something else entirely. It turns out Iāve been using burst mode for about six years! Never mind, they all sound good to me, but it will be secure mode from here.
I work different with metadata. I have a very distinct own structure which means I go in over artist or conductor orchestra, without now looking from a composer angle while I could. This works for me as I never try to compare a piece between two or more artists.
Melco and mimeserver are perfectly suited for thisā¦
You can use Accurate Rip from Assetās Perfect Tunes software group to verify your entire collection.
We do. I posted the answer in a reply to you above.