Go visit Henno and play the entire disk half a dozen times

Yeah Rob, consider yourself invited (anytime)!

Then you take the disk (or the empeg version of it) to your car and start tuning and tweaking until you make it as close to what you heard in the home system
This is what Rob and I started doing some 2 weeks ago, but never finished.

Remember the discussion on sound stage that developed when Rob mentioned some ICE judge criticizing the empeg? It evolved in a long discussion on WAV vs Xing vs Lame. This was just after the first Mk2's shipped.

To validate the comments, we ripped two tracks using Frauenhofer and the Xing rippers. And attempted to also push the track onto the Mk2 in WAV format. WAV failed: apparently there's only 14MB or so of space in the directory we copied it into and we ran out of time (doing this over serial *is* slow). This is what we tried (sizes inMB)

original WAV 42.6 MB

Frauenhofer 160 4.8
Xing 160 4.8
Xing Med/High VBR 4.7 (reportedly 157)

Frauenhofer 256 7.7
Xing 256 7.7
Xing High VBR 5.6 (reported at 193)

As I said, we didn't finish this. Preliminary conclusions:

1. The Empeg playing WAV over a high-end stereo beats any MP3 by miles; Empeg sound quality is more than sufficient for MP3s
2. The Empeg is not a high-end player, but sounds *very* decent
3. The Frauenhofer rips sound nicer; the Xing ones more course, grainy
4. The sound image of Frauenhofer is much less distinct than the Xing image
5. VBR quality improvement within the same space is significant: Xing 256 (at 7.7MB) and Xing High VBR (at 5.6MB) difference is hardly noticeable
6. The difference with 128 is enormous
7. There is a clear difference between 256 and 160 (or High vs Med/High).
8. Xing is much faster in ripping than Frauenhofer

In my car (factory speakers , the differences between 256 and 160 (or High vs Med/High) are is hardly noticeable. The difference between Xing and Frauenhofer is much more significant. You'll have to decide for yourself what you like. I haven't decided yet (was happy with better stereo image; may try some more Frauenhofer rippings to see if this conclusion sticks).
Have all my MP3s ripped with Xing at Med/High VBR

(Have done this in a hurry; may want to qualify some of it later)





Henno
mk2 nr 6