Mitch, you may not believe this but i had guessed you were not only a lawyer, but a steelers fan. call it a premonition. (i'm an eagles fan, 9 sacks btw, and a PSU guy as well)
in any case... i have some possible bad news for you. itunes really is the devil. it sounds like you were able to defeat the DRM on it, and thats great, but there are at least two other related concerns i'd have with music from apple. the first is that the music you got from apple might have already been compressed, and i don't mean the file format. what i mean is who knows how apple masters the tracks b4 it makes them available for download? it wouldn't surprise me in the least if in an effort to make them louder, they compress them at the source, which is a headroom and bass killer. similarly, itunes itself applies changes to your local files. i'm not 100% on how it does it, if it uses innocuous replaygain tags, or something sinister like applying compression or actual gain changes / normalization to the file/music itself, but here again we see apple doing as it pleases. i'm not saying delete all your tunes, but considering your enthusiasm, i would consider getting the source CDs and making FLACs out of them. and if you like the Rolling Stones as an example, the 2002 remasters with 24bit sound blow away the original releases. its night and day. allmusic.com can help many times identifying which remasters sound best. (but this is a whole nother story, just wanted to clue you in) one thing i was curious about in your post, it seemed like you were saying that going duet > analog > z5500 was "the way" as opposed to duet > digital > z5500. is that correct? i do the same thing essentially, b/c the DAC in the SB is better than whats in my receiver. (btw, SBs have a slightly better DAC than the Duet, but i would never hear the difference. however, you should get a SB2 or SB3 just for the neat visualizations it does, like the EQ or VU meters, which i consider very retro 70s and fun) -- MrSinatra www.LION-Radio.org Using: Squeezebox2 (primary) / SBR (secondary) / SBC - w/SC 7.3b - Win XP Pro SP3 - 3.2ghz / 2gig ram - D-Link DIR-655 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MrSinatra's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2336 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55712 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
