The digital revolution has forced a lot of us (generally willingly) to rethink our record collections. CD's convenience and sound quality (at least once some early transfer niggles were sorted out) didn't take long to overthrow vinyl as the format of choice in the eighties and now digital music, in the form of MP3 and similar formats, threatens to do the same to the CD. Now that broadband is fast becoming as ubiquitous as colour TV, there's very little reason not to switch your collection to the virtual realm.
Very little reason, except perhaps the small issue of sound quality. The most popular digital music formats, the ubiquitous MP3 and AAC preferred by Apple's industry-dominating iPod necessarily involve compression and loss of data, where elements of the sonic picture are removed so that the file requires less computer storage space.
While the resulting sound quality is okay, especially for electronically produced music, it can often be found lacking when compared to a genuine CD-quality recording.
There is however, an alternative. There are several codecs (named for the COders and DECoders that compress or decompress the sound) which don't introduce compression and can copy music at virtually identical quality to CD. Codecs such as Apple Lossless, Windows Media Audio Lossless, WAV and FLAC can all reproduce music in virtual CD quality.
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Price: 99p per CD, + 27p per CD for each additional codec. Hard drives required to ship large numbers of FLAC files start at around £80 for 160GB
More info: CDlabs
Formats: MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, FLAC, others available on request
Encoding rate: Up to 320kbps VBR (variable bit rate)
Turnaround time: 5 working days
CD insurance: £15 per disc
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The theory
While you won't find these data-hungry codecs cluttering the servers of music download sites such as iTunes Store or Napster, you can certainly burn your own CDs using any PC. Ripping software such as Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Apple's iTunes are free for anyone to download (and indeed, probably came with your computer) and many others are available.
So what's wrong with doing it yourself? Paying someone else to rip the CDs you could easily rip yourself isn't everyone's idea of money well spent. But anyone who has ripped CDs using their computer's own system knows that this isn't always a painless process.
The DVD players in computers are generally serviceable do-it-all devices but they tend to be optimised for speed ripping rather than accurate copying, and use CD's error correction facility to cover up any scraps of missing data. They're not generally set up to concentrate on error correction and can often fall over at the merest suggestion of a flaw in the CD, leaving you with glitches on your audio tracks.
While any ripping service will offer to save you time by copying your CDs for you, the one offered by Essex-based CDlabs also claims to offer superior sound quality. The company claims to use some pretty fancy specialised equipment for the operation too. For a start they use dedicated CD drives which don't cache audio data in related hardware (they recheck the data as part of the ripping process - caching would mean they would rely on the same, possibly inaccurate data for each recheck).
They also use their own bespoke ripping software called Hi-Pro Encode, which apparently takes much longer to rip CDs than the likes of iTunes or Windows Media Player - up to 20 minutes per CD as opposed to around two or three (that's where the rechecking of data comes in).
Now there's MP3, and then there's MP3. CDlabs uses LAME MP3, considered one of the best MP3 codecs at 320kbps VBR (variable bit rate) - iTunes rips to AAC at up to 128kbps or MP3 at 160kbps, which gives you an idea of the difference in the technology, if not the sound.
Even the tagging of your tracks goes one step further, cross-referencing three CDDB databases to ensure accuracy, rather than relying on one as iTunes does.
CDlabs also offers other ripping options, such as converting your tunes to FLAC files, which aren't compressed at all (not even in a nice way). Its open-source, which means it isn't associated with any manufacturer, and they still take up about half the space of WAV files. Converting to FLAC offers you the chance of bit-perfect copies of your entire CD collection, which can be backed up for posterity and of course later used as sources which you can convert to MP3 or AAC format as you need them. You'll need to download some software to play them though, which is available from http://flac.sourceforge.net.
Conversion costs 99p per CD, whichever format you choose, and they will also convert to both MP3 and lossless FLAC files for a price of £1.26 per CD. There are discounts for quantities of 500 CDs or more. Minimum charge of £50 for orders of less than 50 CDs.
The experience
The first part of the CDlabs experience was receipt of a box containing two CD spindle boxes, each of which could hold 25 CDs. We rounded up 50 CDs in need of a good ripping, phoned the number for collection and waited. They were picked up next day and sent off to CDlabs' headquarters in Essex.
The following week our CDs were returned along with a 160GB LaCie hard drive which we connected to our PC via a supplied USB cable and dragged and dropped three different versions of albums in FLAC, MP3 and Apple Lossless formats. MP3 files were stored on an accompanying DVD, though CDlabs will also copy to CD on request.
They'll also load your music directly onto your MP3 player if you ask them nicely. Each were correctly labelled, including a few genre corrections on tracks that had been ripped previously. The hard drive is yours to keep incidentally, and comes in various sizes, starting with 160GB at around £80, or you can send them your own hard drive. You won't need it for MP3, but you will for data-heavy FLAC or other lossless files.
The results were impressive. With pretty much every example, improvements were obvious, without the need for especially close analysis. Our copy of Basement Jaxx: The Singles for example had regularly defied our attempts to rip it cleanly, coming through each time with glitches and breaks. The CDlabs version however seemed to eradicate this problem and there have been no problems with any of the other tracks either, though since there's around 6,000 of them, it will probably be a while before we can give you a definitive answer on that one.
But it's the sound that's most impressive. With the MP3 versions, virtually everything we tried in comparison with our home-ripped versions achieved a demonstrably fuller sound, with heavier and more rounded bass, a clearer, more defined midrange and a sweeter high-end. The Apple Lossless versions were again a step ahead of their home-ripped counterparts.
In fact, the only problem was that three albums which had already been burned to CD-R weren't converted - CDlabs will only rip legitimate professionally-produced and marketed CDs.
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Overall, we found no fault with the service whatsoever. It was quick and efficient, the results were impeccable and all our discs were returned intact and undamaged. If you're serious about your CD collection, it makes sense as a back-up and also to ensure the quality of the music you play back via your PC or media player. It's not cheap, exactly, but bearing in mind the expense and hassle of upgrading your equipment at home to a similar level, it is very reasonable.
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