Better sound

[Mficek]

My entire music library, thousands of albums, 10s of thousands of songs, is stored on an external hard drive, which I play through iTunes on my Asus laptop which is connected to my Yamaha RX-596 stereo receiver via the headphone jack, and on to a pair of MTX and a pair of Boston Acoustic speakers. Since slowly becoming completely digital I have become increasingly disappointed in the lack of sound quality compared to that of when I was strictly playing CDs. I am not sure what format all of my files are or if they are compressed or not or were ripped lossless etc. What I want is to make my system sound better. I play music daily, it is an integral part of my life and it needs to sound better. I am not opposed to spending money to solve this issue. I would really appreciate it if someone could spell out what steps I could take to improve what I have or even what I need to replace. Thank you in advance for any and all of your help.

 

[mtrycrafts]

My entire music library, thousands of albums, 10s of thousands of songs, is stored on an external hard drive, which I play through iTunes on my Asus laptop which is connected to my Yamaha RX-596 stereo receiver via the headphone jack, and on to a pair of MTX and a pair of Boston Acoustic speakers. Since slowly becoming completely digital I have become increasingly disappointed in the lack of sound quality compared to that of when I was strictly playing CDs. I am not sure what format all of my files are or if they are compressed or not or were ripped lossless etc. What I want is to make my system sound better. I play music daily, it is an integral part of my life and it needs to sound better. I am not opposed to spending money to solve this issue. I would really appreciate it if someone could spell out what steps I could take to improve what I have or even what I need to replace. Thank you in advance for any and all of your help.

Welcome

Without knowing what quality your recordings are, hard to give recommendations as you source may be at fault, or the chain from the hard drive to the receiver.

How lare is the listening room? How loud you listen? Have a sub? That headphone jack may be an issue?

I am sure others may have better answers, hopefully.

 

[markw]

Since you say you notice a drastic difference from CS's, the first place to look is the how they are stored on the hard drive. If that's the root of the problem, nothing will fix it short of re-ripping them at a higher bit rate.

 

[Mficek]

So how do I go about determining if they have been ripped properly? Also many of them are digital purchases. I would be willing to bet that I may have multiple qualities or formats

 

[markw]

I have windows 7. This is what I do.

Go into your music folder, go into an artist and then go into an album. A list of song titles should appear.
Then, I hove or the title and right click. A list of attributes and check boxes appears.
Click the box by format and bit rate.

If that doesn't do it, tell us what you're using and perhaps one of our resident computer nerds can help.