I recently purchased an MP3 player and went through the task of ripping all my cds to mp3 via Windows Media Player ver 11. I then thought that I would burn these to dvd-a for the TL. I noticed that the DVD-A program (from this site) converts the mp3 back to wav (TL deck does not play mp3) and the file size greatly increases. Question is, am I losing a noticable amount of quality doing it this way or should I convert the cds to wav and then burn to dvd-a?

 

The easy answer, especially if you're crazy about great sound: rip them into the wavs originally when extracting them from CD.

There are a number of other audiophiles on this site who will probably agree with me, and they'll be able to give you "good" reasons because they're the pros. My short answer is probably all you need, though.

 

^^^^^^ agree rip from original cd to wav for best sound.

 

Re-rip the CD directly to .wav, then use those files to burn the DVD-A. Depending on the MP3 settings you used in Windows Media Player, you could be losing a huge amount of sound quality.

 

I used the highest available quality setting for the mp3s and thus I wanted to know if it was worth the trouble of ripping all the cds again to wav. I'll test by ripping one cd to wav and burn it to dvd. I'll compare this one to the one I created from the mp3s and see if I can tell any difference.

 

In a word, YES, it is worth the re-rip.

"Highest Quality" can mean different things to different mp3 encoders. Even a CD->mp3->wav trip where the mp3 was made with LAME @ 320K CBR will have noticiable differences to many people. Others will not hear any difference. It's not a "bad" thing or "knock" on you if you hear no difference. It's just the way it is.

If you are in the crowd that hears no difference then you just might want to invest in an aux-in solution (BlitzSafe or PIE for example) and use your mp3 player in the car. That way you aren't using all that time up making DVDAs of what's already on your mp3 player.

CD->DVDA is a great way to retain original CD quality but pack lots of songs onto one disk. That's it. One could also just carry around lots of CDs it they want.

Lastly don't confuse DVDAs made of CDs with a real mutltichannel DVDA. The multichannel ones can be quite a treat.

 

Well I completed my little test and here is what I found based on my listening. Had my original cd to mp3 to wav to dvda, a new cd to wav to dvda and the original cd. Mp3 and wav were set to highest quality.

-cd to mp3 to wav to dvda: was OK but it sounded flat with the highs and lows not being as good as the original cd. I would imagine that mp3s of a lower quality would not be as good and I would then definitly go to creating wav files.

-cd to wav to dvda: better, was pretty close to the original cd. You really had to pay close attention to notice the difference.

All in all, I could settle for the wav files with no problem and as far as a good quality mp3 to wav, if I couldn't do a direct comparison, I probably wouldn't really notice it (but I would always wonder what it would really sound like from the original).

 

The WAV files should sound EXACTLY as good as the original CDs as they SHOULD be bit for bit identical. I highly recommend you use a better ripper than WMP such as Exact Audio Copy or Audiograbber if you are noticing any degradation.

 

i realize you've probably already figured out which method is the best as far as sound quality, but it's fairly simple and here's how i think of it: ripping from a cd to mp3 gives you an audio file with lower bit rates, which gives you lower quality...so obviously ripping from a cd to wav file will give you an audio file with higher bit rates, giving you higher quality...i won't get into the nitty gritty details about wav and mp3 files, but basically wav files are uncompressed and mp3's are...

it's kind of like taking a high-quality image and scaling it way down...then trying to scale it back up, but all you get is distortion...

 

Right. It's possible that WMP is dicking up the CD->WAV process somehow (wouldn't surprise me). Try these third-party solutions suggested by enormus. Should sound exactly the same if you go CD->WAV->DVDA.