The other night I was listening to Roger Water's Amused To Death through itunes and thought I noticed less of the "Q" sound effect. I popped in the cd to do a side by side comparison and sure enough the spatial effect was greatly diminished through the Mac Mini. All of the music seemed to be there but lacked that spatial openess the Q sound provides.
A few weeks ago I installed XLD on the Mini so this morning I decided to rerip the cd with XLD to check the accuracy of the itunes rip. The difference is not subtle. I used track 12, Three Wishes, from Amused To Death as the test track. On this track a woman's spoken voice is located about 3 feet out from and two feet in front of the left speaker. With itunes standard AIFF, the voice was nearly centered between the speakers. After reripping the track with XLD, the voice took it's proper location outside the speaker plane.
This tells me in order to get a bit perfect or closer to bit perfect rip, music needs to be ripped through XLD and not simply itunes. The good news is bit perfect copies are possible. The bad news is I'll have to rerip the 500 or so cds using XLD in order to get it.
If you aren't familiar with this cd or Q sound, what it does is throw sounds all over the room for effect. When things are set up correctly, you can actually hear sounds directly behind you. It's a gimmick, but pretty cool.
My system is the Mac Mini which feeds a Monarchy Super Dip via the toslink out, which inturn feeds a PS Audio DLIII via coax. CDP is a Resolution Audio CD-50 which has a high quality variable out to allow level matching.
