I had read claims in Stereophile and (I think) The Absolute Sound that music sourced from a hard drive sounds better than music sourced off a CD player. I was skeptical of these claims, and am skeptical of my own ears, which seems to confirm the fact.
As soon as I started listening to music served by my new SB Duet system, I detected a certain more lively and engaging aspect to the music. I did an A/B comparison to assure myself levels are matched (they are), and on close A/B listening, I cannot identify any difference. Yet, the fact remains that my impression of music played back via SB is more favorable, and this is not a subtle impression, it is a definite emotional "wow". Here are the two different music paths: path A: Nakamichi MB-10 CD player digital out --> Tact 2.1S digital processor --> Mark Levinson 360S DAC path B: Netgear ReadyNAS Duo --> SB Receiver digital output --> Tact 2.1S digital processor --> Mark Levinson 360S DAC I cannot pin down any good reason why path B, with the Squeezebox, should sound better. Both paths use the same, very high quality DAC. Up to there, bits is bits, one would think. The audio mags claim music servers sound better because lack of jitter on hard drive playback; that doesn't make sense for two reasons. First the Levinson DAC has sophisticated dejitter circuitry, but more fundamentally, the problem with jitter arises with the nature of clock recovery from the S-PDIF waveform content. Both path A and path B use S/PDIF digital signal to transfer the music data. The other potential reason is the effect of error correction on CD playback. This would imply that the cheapie CD-ROM drive in my laptop computer does a better job of reading music data (i.e., lower raw error rate) than my CD player, giving rise to fewer uncorrectable errors (uncorrectable errors cause the software to "fake it" by throwing the data out and interpolating across the gap). Anybody know of comparisons in raw error rate in playback on CD player vs playback on a computer CD-ROM drive? --Steve -- bhr1439 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bhr1439's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=22189 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=57173 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
