I have always been somewhat of an Audiophile, primarily with home audio equipment and given the lack of technology for quality reproductions in the past and quality portable/auto players, was spoiled with the sound coming from my Klipsch KG4s in my "sound-tiled" room. But also, I am a software developer and at some point the marriage of these two passions had to merge. I can remember my first wav editor program circa 1995, that inspired me to write my own.

Well, upon discovering much better auto players, and reasonably priced quality drivers the chance presented itself.

Now, the glue that brought it all together was the information provided here from all of the users. I would like to send many thanks for all of the valuable information provided. Refreshing to know there are others that enjoy music at its highest fidelity.

In a matter of a day, after searching here and following links and taking suggestions via other posts, I have what I consider a "quality" reproduction setup. I have everything "dialed in" from EAC, LAME (with presets), MP3Gain, CDEX (just for fun), Burnatonce and alternately Nero, mppenc / MusePack. Dialed in down to the read/write offset level because exact reproduction is essential.

So thanks goes out to all of the developers, and the support forums and users here that have made it possible.

A question begs on Burning software however. If a particular "Target" player (Car CD player for instance) cannot read MP3 format, and must use the .CDA, It would seem that once I rip the files to WAV with EAC and I do not care about hard drive storage space and I am not going to create an MP3 disk, that there is not a need to compress with LAME. But then the question becomes quality. I know that I get an "un-basterdized" recording into wav with EAC, but how to maintain that quality Burning to .CDA? In essence it would seem that more emphasis would need to be placed on the choice of burning software for the conversion to .CDA, as apposed to having compressed them into MP3 and just burning a straight MP3 format to disk. Any suggestion? Thanks in advance.

??? You do know that EAC includes some basic CD burning software, right?

CDDA is 16-bit 44.1kHz PCM. The wav file extracted is just that, but with a Wav header attached to it.

Thanks for the reply. I do know that EAC has basic burning options, and that was my thought in order to keep the sound quality "linear", and am impressed with the detail in EAC thus far.

I see, so the format being the same from wav and CCDA (16-bit 44.1kHz PCM) cept for header, no real concern for loss of quality when selecting burning software.

Any real concerns for selecting a Burn software for MP3 (context of the question being the same)?

Thanks

The burning software is not relevant when burning data... --> mp3s...

Burning software for audio is only relevant because of gap/cue handling.

I see, that makes sense. And gap/cue handling being fairly basic in logic, I assume that most Burning software is comparable?

yes you should think so but actually only EAC handles the only correct cue sheet when you have the album tracks track by track in seperate files.

You should dig this unofficial EAC cue sheet "documentation":
http://doc.hydrogenaudio.org/wikis/hydroge...dio/GapSettings
(isn't HA wiki wonderful?!!!)

Jan S.

Excellent "Gap" documentation. Thanks for the link. And, I do primarily intend to rip into individual files, at some point I will do a listining comparison of CDs created from individual files vs one large, to see if there are any audible differences.

You should begin to rip them and compare the results (EAC\Tools\Compare wavs) in order to see if there is an actual difference.

Thats a good suggestion. Cannot always trust my ears. I will perhaps create a set of "benchmark" CDs with various methods, then rip and compare them with EAC.

The idea now comes to mind, that this comparison method can also be usefull to detect differences from an originally riped file (say an EAC extraction of a quality song) compared to a burned version (copy) that was extracted.