OK, so I've been developing a rapidly growing taste for audio over the past few months, and have dropped quite the pretty penny on some nice home theatre solutions for myself to help out....and the knowledge is helping more an more everyday...because it directly affects my income. I work in a commission sales environment specializing in home theatre equipment. Now, I know plenty about the video side of the market, as I've been doing this for a little while now, and my tech junkie nature has lent itself greatly.
Were I reach the limit of my knowledge is when I'm trying to find the best way prepare an audio demo. Now, the company I work for put us through an extensive training program that did an excellent job of teaching us anything and everything we would need to know to get the best sound quality from a given source....but I have some other (more specific than my job really requires) questions.
For myself, I have a very nice homegrown PC linked into my equipment that I play pretty much all of my media through. It's HDMI 1.3a out to an Onkyo TX-NR906 receiver, and I'm very pleased with the functionality. For audio, I mostly use FLAC, and am equally as impressed with the ease of use.
Now, I would love to be able give demonstrations of a sound systems full capacity with media as convenient and impressive as FLAC....but there is hardly such a thing as a high quality media player that will support the FLAC extension...and hooking up a computer is hardly an option at work.
So the question is, what is the best codec to use that will be supported by most players? Where's the best place to obtain lossless music files? I can convert the extensive FLAC and SACD library that I have on my PC now, but I want to make sure I'm getting the best quality possible.
So, thanks tremendously for any help you can provide, and I hope to be around the site a lot more. I know there's an enormous wealth of information for me to learn, and it seams like a lot of it can be found here. I'm glad to have stumbled upon this site!
