Re: New Thread: Preferred Formats

Mark Jay wrote:
>
> I was just wondering ... of those who read this list, what format / sample rate etc do you use and why? Speaking for myself, I elected to rip everything to WAV as I use the ATs in fairly good home audio systems; I have a separate drive to which I rip the content to MP3 at 192 (which I find to be a reasonable compromise between fidelity and file size as well as manageable for portable devices). I elected WAV as ny de-facto standard as I figured if I was going to archive my collection, given the affordability of drives (and getting more so every year) I should stick with the best fidelity possible.
> I only ask the question because I have read with some interest comments about the quality of the DACs in the AT and I wonder how much of the grousing about them comes from playing back (heavily) compressed files and expecting uncompressed results. I don't want to start a flame war...but to my ears...playing WAV files using the on-board DACs is actually very good overall.

format: MP3 for use with AudioTron,
         FLAC for backups.
sample rate: 44.1 KHz ;-)

Created using EAC and LAME --alt-preset standard (+/- 200 kbps).  Don't
use anything but EAC; if the rip isn't perfect, then bitrate doesn't
mean anything.

Also check out http://www.bestmp3guide.com/ and
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=28124.

Stan