Apologies for the tangential slant of this discussion to your OP question, Kingfisher, but I did wish to update on the ease of burning the Music CDs which John brought up. As he indicated his success with 'dbpoweramp converter', and with my lack of knowledge in this field, I followed his rec and purchased it today. I have already 'ripped' 32 CDs in our collection this afternoon as they take only about 5 min to produce a FLAC album file on the default setting of 5 (8 is max compression but takes longer to produce and read apparently, and 0 is without compression I'm assuming). I placed 5 albums on a 32GB Lexar USB drive as a test (it was already in FAT32 format).
Granted this isn't a blinded study, and no doubt an element of bias may be present, but for once the HK system sounded like the upgraded system I expected. There was more dimensionality with deeper base and well-rounded mid-range. Whereas it seemed 'thin' before, it didn't with the FLAC files.
As I now know how straightforward this process is, my plan is to convert all of our CDs to this FLAC format and place on a USB platform, to at least have them available. Will be interesting to listen to these at HWY speeds to see if the perceived improvement is less, but since we haven't noticed the noise issues others have had, I'm expecting the music experience should be a definite upgrade, at least to satellite. As for Spotify, we'll see. At least I'll now have our CD collection in a more user-friendly format.
