AJones wrote: > As a software developer for professional audio I can tell you with > absolute certainty that is you use any lossy encoding you will lose > something. > > That said i have done tests with my senior engineers in the studio > playing back a WAV file and a simple VBR mp3 on a Protools HD machine > with an apogee DAC (the setup that almost all you music is mixed on > these days). The result is they could not hear much difference. Though > one of my junior engineers could always spot the mp3. > > My belief is that our ears always lie. But our ears are what we use in > the end. My Transporter with FLAC sounds great to me, but maybe not to > others ears.
I trot out this anecdote every time this subject comes up, but it's worth repeating... I find that it is often not possible to hear differences in short-term comparison testing, but differences often show up over extended listening, even comparing lossless to lossless, i.e. two DACs. When my SB1 was my only device I used an external DAC as the SB1 DAC wasn't the greatest. FWIW, I had a modified Art DI/O. To get best quality, I kept the digital output fixed so had to use the knob on the amplifier to adjust volume, i.e. get out of my seat. Sometimes I'd prefer to use the remote to change volume so I'd switch to listening via the SB1 analogue outputs. Now, in a direct comparison, there wasn't much difference between the SB1 output and the DAC output. It was possible to hear some small differences on certain music if you knew what you were looking for. But they were very close. However, if I "forgot" I'd switched to the SB1 output and listened for any extended period I found that listening became tiring and I wanted to turn it off. I didn't get this reaction when listening via the DAC. So, to recap the point, I believe that short-term comparison testing may not always show up any differences between sources. R. _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
