Reading from different parts of the file at once will actually slow you down. The bottleneck in the conversion process is the hard disk speed-- converting to bars is a simple process and the CPU should be able to process the incoming data much faster than the hard disk can supply it. The hard disk supplies data the fastest when data is read sequentially. It can only read from one location at once, so if you try to use random access, the read head will have to seek back and forth which will slow things down.
Since you are limited by the hard disk transfer rate, you can speed up the conversion by storing your data in as compact a fashion as possible.