Can any Evoque Owners comment on the Meridian stereo system?

Be interesting to know when you do get it, I could be wrong! Most of my stuff is at 192kbps which I think is minimum before it can be noticed, i'm starting to use 256kbps now for anything I buy, if you can go lossless then great but my hearings not that good anymore! too many rock concerts and motor races!

I think anything above 192kbps should be ok for mainstream pop music (since most of the current pop production sounds like it had been compressed so much anyways), but for finer music like jazz/classical (or even classic rock/funk to a certain extent), 256kbps is the most minimum as they have a wider range of frequencies in their recordings. 320kbps is perfect for most applications.

However if space is abundant, lossless is always the best.

There is no need to use compression ever these days. 320k is about 25% of the bitrate of WAV or AIFF files (identical uncompressed, the first is MS, the second Apple and the format used in many top recording studios). WAV and AIFF files are over 1400kbps in comparison.

In compressing down to MP3 etc a lot of the data is chucked away and once lost can't be replaced. If you rip your collection MP3 you're stuck with it. An unnecessary waste given the Evoque can handle WAV and AIFF and hard drives are under £100 UK for a terabyte which is way more than you'll ever need, even with the biggest lossless collection.

Pretty much all pop music (and a lot else besides) has compression applied in the recording phase, but this is a different type of "compression" - it doesn't throw away data, it essentially evens up the dynamic range so loud sounds don't dominate and quieter sounds can be heard - it smooths out the volume. Quite often, and for pretty much all serious commercial releases, downloads or physical product, after the music is recorded in the studio it is mastered, where as well as additional eq being applied (fancy tone controls in short) extra compression is sometimes applied. It happens with all genres of music, including classical.

Anyone interested in a bit more info should google or wikipedia "fairchild compressors" and "Abbey Road Studios" and look for their mastering section.

Just to chip into the debate on bitrate on portable devices I use a quality 192 VBR as a minimum or 320 in vanilla mp3 compression, but use AIFF or FLAC where possible as I listen with ACS T3 monitors which can detect the difference like night and day.

Also, I rarely listen to pop music nowadays as lots of recordings are optimised for listening on mobile phone built in speakers because that's what kids do nowadays. Unbelievable!

---

(13-10-2011 11:11am)mcrodgers5 Wrote:  Anyone with an iphone/pad/pod (and most MP3 players) will be able to store uncompressed WAV (AIFF is simply Apple's name for WAV and is identical).

What you have said is technically correct in that AIFF = WAV but in the context of Apple and iTunes AIFF <> WAV so I'd just like to clarify for people.

1. A CD uses WAV and a long album will fill the whole CD = 650MB

2. ITunes "compresses" WAV into AIFF without quality loss = 350MB approx. Think of it like a ZIP file - the original file is still in there but you save space. Your iPod or whatever extracts the file as it plays. Apple calles it the "Apple Lossless Format".

3. On Windows and Linux people usually convert WAV to FLAC. FLAC is an open source version of AIFF and there are program's out there which will convert to and from WAV, FLAC, and AiFF with no quality loss.

4. MP3 and OGG will lose quality with an album = 60 - 100MB depending on bitrate.

If you prefer MP3 and OGG and need the smallest possible files, I highly recommend choosing a VBR encoder. Variable bitrate will compress the bits your ears can't tell any difference more than bits you can. So a 192 VBR file can sound better than a 256 constant bitrate.

I started this post wanting to simply explain that AIFF is approximately half the size of WAV but got a bit carried away, so I hope this is useful to some people!

All good info, Sadly the Evoque doesn't play WAV files off a USB Stick/Disk... Just tried ripping a CD to WAV and got No audio media found. Doesn't play FLAC either

(18-02-2012 01:51pm)PhilSkill Wrote:  All good info, Sadly the Evoque doesn't play WAV files off a USB Stick/Disk... Just tried ripping a CD to WAV and got No audio media found. Doesn't play FLAC either

I don't know any car systems that play WAV from USB. They always assume it will be MP3 so you're also out of luck if you prefer OGG too.

I'm a bit shocked Meridian insisted only ripping to lossless limiting the hard disk to 10 CDs. We are the bloody consumer and should be offered the option! Hifi snobbery at it's worst, given the tightwad 10GB HD. Wonder if the HD can be easily replaced with a 1TB version?

Yes very odd design decision, the small internal disk only stores lossless, and the USB which can have any HDD size can only play lossy MP3/WMA, damn shame that isn't the other way round.
Still 320kbps wma will do me, was happy with 192, then 256 till I started looking into it.

Since I have my USB Harddisk, I haven't even inserted a CD in the slot, only tried a DVD!

Haven't got round to upgrading my 60GB PS3, not even going to start thinking about upgrading my Car!

Wonder what type of hard disk is in there? Not only for size but to help they whole thing start up faster (maybe the rear camera can actually be up and running before I'm done reversing) it would be nice if we can replace the standard HDD with a SSD drive.

Do we even know it's not a Solid State, at 10GB you'd have thought it was?

As you only get the cd hdd when you go tech pack, won't the car software be held on something different? (admittedly possibly another hdd)