mwphoto wrote: > I know - it's a good question, I just wanted to raise the point that > from both sides of the fence we each have 'beliefs' about what matters. > We only disagree in some areas. The interesting thing about the > difference is what causes it. For the most part in the audiophile world > the killer feature is: > > 'I believe I can hear a difference' > > and no amount of forum discussion will change that. The really > interesting thing about this for me is: > > 1) can you tell a real difference? > > 2) do ypu just believe it is different (this can be tested in ABX > tests) > > and for me, I'm also curious as to why we believe we hear a difference > if there isn't one.
In the case of lossless vs. uncompressed (I am thinking flac vs. wav here), there can not be any difference - flac decodes to the exact same bits that were used to create the compressed file. There is a school of thought that says that the additional work done by the CPU on the SB to decode flac natively can affect the audio output. That may well be the case. However, if you consider the case of flac decoded on the server vs. wav files (i.e. both are streamed to the SB as wav files) then there can not be any difference - the Squeezebox will receive *exactly* the same bits in both cases. Indeed, it will not even know or care whether those bits came from a wav file or from a flac file decoded on the fly. R. (with his "engineering" head on - not interested in the social aspects of why audiophiles are weird today :) ) _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
