A couple thoughts on the subject. I HAVE been able to hear differences on an SB3 between streaming flac or PCM (wav). A couple times I have thought something was amiss, things were sounding "flat". It turned out to be the file type settings had been changed (I certainly didn't change them)
In general I have not been able to tell any difference between flac or WAV files as long as both are streamed as PCM. There was one case where it made a difference. At one point streaming flac files was sounding much worse (much bigger difference than what I hear between flac and PCM streaming). It turned out the FLAC files had replay gain tags and of course the wav files did not. Somehow replay gain had been turned on so it was applying digital volume control. The particular firmware in the SB3 had a bug such that it was not properly implementing digital volume control. This has been fixed for a long time, so even with replay gain on, there is very little difference now (other than the volume!). I've had many different versions recently (I'm a beta tester for the Touch) and have not heard any degradation in sound between any version. When I switched from 7.3 to 7.4 the firmware on the touch updated to version 130 but its remained the same for a long time now. What version of the firmware are you running? If somehow it didn't upgrade when you changed SC versions that MIGHT cause a problem, but even thats doubtful. The sound coming out of the SB3 with firmware 130 and the recent SBS versions have definately not been any worse and maybe slightly better than what was there before. (the Touch on the other hand has improved its sound significantly as things progressed, its now REALLY good). John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=71321 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
