VLC vs iTunes

[marksealey]

Hello,

Old hand with classical music, Macs and iTunes. New to VLC.

I have FLAC (24-bit) files I want to play with the most realistic sound possible, please.

'mid-2011' 2.7 GHz iMac running 10.7.3. AirFoil to Airport Express; DAC to ParaSound Halo P3/A23… the best sound quality possible is what's important to me .

Am I right that VLC will always give me better sound (= more faithful, fuller, less colored, in the context of symphonic, vocal, choral and chamber music) than will iTunes?

- if for no other reason than iTunes' lack of support for 24-bit.

And because by playing natively in VLC I'm not converting from FLAC to Apple Lossless?

TIA!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

No idea

[marksealey]

Well, does iTunes support 24-bit?

[Arite]

I think iTunes only supports Apple Lossless (ALAC) 24-bit, so you'd have to transcode from FLAC to ALAC to playback in iTunes AFAIK.

As for the "best" sounds... probably more of a question for the people at HydrogenAudio.org . I don't see why VLC wouldn't be as exact. It can output through S/PDIF so if you have an external DAC you could connect it that way.

VLC doesn't have gapless playback support though.

Arite.

[marksealey]

Arite,

Thanks so much for your helpful reply!

The more I look into it, the less I like the idea of using iTunes. Its chief advantage to me was in not duplicating software: one player, one library would be so much simpler. But not at the expense of poorer quality.

I'm actually planning to use AirFoil to send from my iMac to an Airport Express and then into my ParaSound P3/A23 stereo system.

[jltnol]

I seem to recall testing whether any of the WiFi audio devices, including Apple, compressed the audio before sending it out over WiFi. You can do the same test by looking at the outgoing network bandwidth when playing a low bitrate mp3 file and an uncompressed 24bit Aif or Wav file.... I did this once and think I remember realizing that WiFi delivery compressed the audio when sending it out....

[marksealey]

Thanks; if WiFi compresses, that's a big disadvantage.