ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Love our Essense MKIIs we have 5 at home, the flexibility for Airplay and the ever improving B&O app make them a hit with all the family, (after our BeoSound 5 disaster).
From the BS 5 days we have loads of CDs ripped to WMA lossless, but the spec of the Essense's for file playback are as follows;
MP3, WMA, AAC, ALAC, FLAC, WAV, AIFF Standard sample rates up to 192 kHz, stereo and up to 24 bit Note: WMA lossless is not supported
Our enviroment are iOS devices and a mixture of Macs and PCs running iTunes.
Do you think that converting everything to Apple lossless and putting it on a DLNA/itunes server is the way to go as then everyone will be able to use their kit B&O andi iOS with great sound quality?
I went for FLAC when effectively being cornered by my library being all WMA lossless on a BS5, Avant media renderer and wanting to add a couple of Essences. FLAC I think was the only common.
Converted everything and placed it on a WD EX4100 NAS. Everything runs on that now and I keep good backup as well.
I also went the FLAC way : free and open source, it's more future proof than Apple Lossless. What's nice is that all your files can be transcoded without loss from WMA Lossless to Flac (or any other lossless filetype), so you can do this just by putting your (big) music collection to a correctly setup converter (I use XLD on Mac).
If your music collection is on a NAS, some music servers can even transcode on the fly your files : I have a FLAC only library, and on my Synology NAS with the iTunes plugin, I can Access it directly from iTunes, even if iTunes cannot play Flac!
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