Alpine CD w/ Digital Out vs. iPod with Lossless Files
 

I seem to have this discussion with myself every year at this time as I think about pulling the car out of storage. With the new Alpine 305s, I am thinking about it again. First, off I don't need 4V outs because I am using an Alpine PXA-H701. I love the sound I get from my digital out Alpine CD changer (old 624) but would really like more ease of selection, so am considering using an iPod with Apple Lossless files and the 305. Just worried that the sound might not be as good as what I get now. Thoughts?

No one has any thoughts on this?

Lossless should be full size files. Should sound great. Can u put full size files on USB and use that. I run an Ida x100 which is a similar deck, but all my music is MP3. I'm not huge into SQ, like competition or anything but would like to have some good SQ stuff in case I wanna impress with clarity(clean music) instead of quantity(1000watts of bass)

On a different note how do u like the 701 and is it a whole lot better than the PXA-100 or whatever the other version is? If I opt for high voltage it's either imprint or we sell a 9v EQ 4-band parametric

the weak link is between the deck and the pxa as the old changer had a digital out to the processor and the 305 just uses analog ai net. Between the ipod and the deck is all digital and the deck has 24 bit burr brown dacs, so that might even it out a bit...though the changer's digital out is using the pxa's 24 bit dacs to convert anyway. Honestly, I don't think you'll hear a big difference, they both should sound great. I have a pxa as well with a cda 9833 deck using ai net and it's crystal clear with no audible noise at all. I've hooked up the fiber optic from a dva 9860 (i think it was that one) and didn't notice a difference in the same cd tracks...so not sure how much of difference there would be.

Guess I will give it a shot and see how it goes...I will be able to do an A/B with the CD Changer, so it should be interesting.

I'm using an Alpine CDA-117 with 24 bit Burr Brown DAC and a 60gb iPod full of Apple lossless tunes. I actually prefer the sound of the iPod over CD's. There seems to be more "warmth" to the songs. The only downside is that my 60gb iPod holds less than 2000 Apple Lossless songs. If I want to add new songs, I have to choose older songs that I'm not really into anymore. 95% of my songs are ripped directly from my 300+ CD collection. You can convert MP3's to Lossless, but they don't sound as good as CD sourced songs.

If it was possible to have lossless digital music, why wouldn't the whole music world convert to this? BECAUSE IT DOESN"T WORK...

If it truely worked, why would the music industry just record in this format?

Lossless are not perfect reproductions of cd quality but compared to MP3s, which are about 11 times smaller than the originals, lossless tracks are 40-60% of the size of originals. It's basically a different algorithm used to encode tracks that isn't as lossy as mp3 compression. Not perfect but far superior to standard mp3

I ripped a few CD's to my iPod in AIFF format. That is Apple's fully uncompressed encoder. High frequencies are quite a bit cleaner than lossless and bass response is noticeably smoother with a wider dynamic range. In comparison, the bass on lossless tracks almost sounds like it's clipping.

I've decided to buy a 160gb iPod classic and rip all of my CD's in AIFF format.

what the hell are you talking about, lossless is like a CD. Take a WAV file that you ripped from a CD and zip it (compress), the 70MB become a 40MB file and if you uncompress it and do a CRC check on the file it will match so there's no loss, meaning "lossless" , flac use the same principle, it use a compression algorithm that doesn't remove anything to the original.

Now, the implementation of the "codec hardware" use to decompress the "lossless" file in the HU can have an impact on sound quality but the same problem can be applied to the CD DAC too.

Also if you take a lossy file (mp3) and convert it to lossless, what have been remove before will not magically reappear, so the best sound you will get from this file is the mp3 sound.

So to recap, if the true lossless file sound different from the CD, it's the HU that change the sound.