Current *working* lossless options?

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As someone who has roughly 50% of my music as FLAC at home, I really don't care to have it in my car. MP3s sound great in amongst the road noise of London traffic. I suppose if you had a really quiet car, like a Lexus LS, BMW 7, Jag XJ, or S-Class... with the double glazing option ticked too, it *might* swing it!

I'm in the same boat, I've got 99% of my music encoded as FLAC, for my main listening at home. The MP3s reside on another computer for transfer to the EMPEG and what ever flavor of portable MP3 player is in fasion at the house. I've tried out the FLAC stuff in the car (a very noisy Toyota Prius, except at a stop! ) and its just not worth it in my case anyway.

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Don't mean to make the empeg sound bad but... its old old technology (relatively speaking). Given that its the weak point in the setup will it be capable of delivering what true audiophiles want?

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I fail to see how an empeg playing FLAC via SPDIF can deliver anything other than perfect data..?

Rob

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Don't mean to make the empeg sound bad but... its old old technology (relatively speaking).

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extra memory ... it glitches

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That's because the player glitches when filling that extra memory. I believe that there might be a workaround for this in a recent Hijack.

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flac -d -c file.flac | lame - file.mp3

The | is a pipe character. Add any other LAME options you normally use for MP3 encoding.

Whups- sorry, me no espeak da g33k. Is that some BASH prompt command?
I was hoping for a freebie windoze application recommendation.

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I was hoping for a freebie windoze application recommendation.

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it is capable of prodcing beyond the spectrum of hearing in both directions

The local bats, dogs and dolphins will be impressed

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It is possible to do a good mp3. But a flac file will always be better.

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We are all after some degree of bragging rights, or we wouldnt have adopted the empeg.

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I adopted the Empeg because, after a few months of research, I decided that it was (and still is) the best solution for not having to carry piles of CDs around in my truck.

Amen to that!
All the extra doo-dads are just for fun, in my world.

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When your ribbons dont start rolling off till 40k and have usable responce to 60k, you want the recording to hold up.

I think this is extremely misguided, and suggests a lack of understanding of how digital music works. The original CD that you get your "lossless" files from has a sampling rate of 44kHz. As such, it can only reasonably represent frequencies in the original recording up to about 22kHz (google the Nyquist theorem). Even at 22kHz, it won't have much fidelity. In other words, your speakers do NOT have "reasonable response" to 60kHz, because they are limited by other parts of the system (the source). Its silly to have speakers that are flat out to 60kHz because the source is only good up to something less than 22kHz. In fact, you could argue that you may even want to filter anything above the Nyquist rate, as it is probably extremely noisy. This is OK, however, because human hearing is typically considered to extend only to 20kHz. For that matter, any sampling noise is probably inaudible too.

If you want to acoustically represent something that comes out of a signal generator (rather than a CD), and is considerably beyond the range of human hearing, then fine. But it ain't about the music. In fact, it ain't about the "sound" either, because "sound" is the human perception of air resonating up to about 20kHz. Oh, and if you're going to do that with the idea that you are going for accuracy, then you don't have tubes in the circuit. "Color" is another word for "distortion".

That's why I'm an engineer, I suppose. I think those practical considerations are the whole point. If you want to rub money on it for the sake of "bragging rights", that's cool. I guess we have different world views, is all

Jim

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Early mp3 rolled off way to early to compress the files.

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You won't be able to tell the difference between a really well encoded MP3 and the same song as FLAC.

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I've encoded my music library 3 times now and I can still tell the difference between a CD and my 320kbps EAC/LAME encoding.

Well, then, you've got good ears. My first suggestion is to follow mbcouple's tips for getting FLAC to work properly on the empeg. My alternative suggestion is simply to turn the volume up. After a couple of months, you'll no longer be able to spot the difference. It worked for me

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Regarding the "noisy" car environment where everybody seems to think mp3 distortion should be tolerated... here's my problem: road noise tends to be lower frequency. Audio compression artifacts tend to be very high frequency. (...) So to me they are compounded errors - I now hear road noise PLUS compression artifacts. I choose to fight both as much as possible.

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but it sure is a hassle trying to figure out how to create a "really well encoded MP3".

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If you look a couple posts down, i did get flac to playback. It took some small changes to the config file forcing the drives to stay spinning at all times.