Dac-less streamer survey!

[Jwg1749]

Hi Phil

As I said, I've a degree of cynicism about this whole issue though not enough to stop me being curious ...

Anyway, here is what Antipodes say about their dedicated ripper component in their dac-less streamers, one of which is commented on by a Devialetchat member (not that he has expressed a specific view about the ripper as far as I can see):

"Most ripping software is designed to get you a decent rip in just a few minutes. The problem is it means a lot of error correction is used. The difference between a typical rip and an excellent rip is very significant. Getting an excellent rip requires two things: the right software (not all ripping software has a 'paranoid mode' which keeps ripping till it gets the best possible result) and the right optical drive (many optical drives include additional processing which means a perfect rip is impossible). We have assembled both of these ingredients for you in Antipodes music servers, enabling you to get the best possible rips and therefore the best possible sound. Some other combination of software and optical drive may be capable of just as good a result but we have taken the uncertainty out of it for you. But you do need to appreciate that a perfect rip does take more time, and can fail with non-compliant disks (with the Redbook standard). A common non-compliance problem is when a 'hidden' track is inserted at some point in the disk, but there are other examples. You may need to rip non-compliant disks on a more forgiving, if less accurate, device."

It's fair to say that Devialet's original proposition was that Mac/iTunes for ripping (and for all the rest of the front end too) was all that one needed.

And it's also fair to say that Antipodes aren't saying that theirs is uniquely the best, simply that the typical rip is worse in some (unspecified) respect.

With modern ripping software, the quality of the optical drive's hardware is more or less irrelevant. So long as your optical drive is capable of meeting a basic standard, i.e. actually extracting some information from the disk, it can produce perfect rips. It's the software thats important, not the hardware.

The clever thing these programs (e.g. dbpoweramp or Exact Audio Copy) do is compare the results of your rips to an online database. For instance dbpoweramp will tell you whether its been able to find your CD online, and it'll even tell you how many other rips of the CD it's compared your rip to. (Indeed, most of the rippers included in streamers, if they're any good, use the same ripping software as you can buy for your PC; I'd be very surprised if the Antipodes didn't use dbpoweramp or similar.) 

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that dbpoweramp finds 6 rips of your CD online, it compares the checksums, and tells you that your rip is bit-for-bit identical with these six other rips. The chances of your rip being bad are infinitesimally small.

As for software being insufficiently paranoid, I've had instances when dbpoweramp has been unhappy with a rip and has done a frame-by-frame re-rip, checking each frame individually. This can take hours. But it sure does inspire confidence.

For my own purposes, I wouldn't buy a streamer with a built-in ripper. I see no virtue in it, when my PC can do the job just as well, using the same software. 

Matt