Good advice, yea it's not the rip but my hardware that lets it down plus I have a very good stereo so you can't help but compare. Like I said it was my first rip and they are wma's, also if their's any crud on the cd they can come out a bit borked. Can a good sound card compare to a high end stereo ?
For some reason WMA's can sound very different eq-wise to the original The latest Xonar range are designed with Hi-Fidelity in mind, with interchangable pre-amps so you can change them depending on your taste. Here's a review I found with my powers of google fu. Newer Creative X-FI cards are being designed to compete with them. Even before these cards came out I immediately noticed a vast difference in sound quality and presence when switching from on-board to a Soundblaster card, but afaik more recent on-board solutions do offer better sound quality than the one's I tested.
Yes, if it's a really good one. Depending on what you class as a "high end" stereo you might be looking at £200-300 to reach similar source quality... and you'll then need an amp and speakers, because obviously the sound card doesn't include those. I have a Hi-Fi CD player here that you could probably pick up for £10 on eBay (80's AKAI thing) and it's at least as good as my Xonar DX as a music source. I imagine if I had a better amp for my headphones it would be easier to see a difference between the two, and my money would be on the CD player winning.
I have bought .WMV highest quality (that you can do in WM player) off Lynn records and some other firms are doing them too. Theoretically lossless or mathmatically lossless as MS claims, but the actual quality isn't quite up to scratch of FLAC or some other 'lossless' formats. Having said that you need a high end card like a Xonar ST to tell the difference and some very good cans.
