I think we are in danger of losing the plot of this thread here (if it ever had one?).
Let's seperate 3 things: 1) The TAS article, in particular its claims about wav-flac conversion being an irreversible, detrimental process. This is what I'm railing against when I attack them. It is just a plain and simple lie. It is mathematically provable - as with many other things, but unlike most audiophile nonsense. I don't care what they convinced themselves they heard. It was all in their heads. None of it is true. Not in this universe/reality. 2) Things that can possible impact playback on a PC music system, by which I mean (and only mean) a PC motherboard connected to a hard disk and to a PC soundcard (internal or external) or a USB-S/pdif interface or a USB DAC. These things include the influence of USB cables or the influence of fragmented disk drives. 3) What happens/might happen in a "normal" SB system (the thing this forum is theoretically supposed to be focussed on). By "Normal" I mean where the music files live somewhere on some network and there is no connection from that place to the SB player except via ethernet (wi-fi or wired). We seem to be partially conflating these things. I've tried to be very explicit in my posts about #2. In #2 all manner of unpredictable cr@p can and probably does happen because computers are NOT designed to minimise noise that might impact DAC's or (even more fragile)s/pdif interfaces. They are designed to handle certain types of noise that might interfere with the computer doing its essential job of number crunching and interrupt handling. In many DS devices (Linn, Naim et al) that are basically computers+ disk drives +DAC's in a fancy audiophile box, they are carefully designed to handle the motherboard/disk noise issue. This is why they will easily outperform most if not all traditional PC-based systems. In #2 I wouldn't be in the least surprised to hear of differences from USB cables connecting PC's to USB DAC's. Nor would it totally surprise me to hear of differences from caching the data into RAM or using SSD's or even fragmentation of a hard disk. In fact, there are so many possible variables that the only real way to fix the problem is to do what Linn, Naim etc have done and design it out through better hardware. This is also one of the reasons why I jumped on the SB bandwagon 7 years ago. Many of the problems of the #2 variant simply do not (cannot) apply... and the Linn/Naim route has proved extremely and unnecessarily expensive. Now of course the Touch IS a computer and if you attach a hard disk to its USB i/f... you are back at #2 again (at least in theory). Whilst a Touch gets its "music data" from ethernet, it is immune (in audio quality terms) from anything that happens on the music data host... or is it? There is a possibility of noise entering via a wired ethernet connection... or via the powser supply or even via (back from) the external DAC if one is connected... So: power supplies can be improved, ethernet can be galvanically isolated (it is supposed to be anyway), we can use the correct (not solid silver!) ethernet cables (or wi-fi... oh no, I forgot that's a no-no right?) Other than that, we really don't need to even think about what is happening outside of the SB player. We certainly don't need to worry about any of the things raised in the TAS articles. -- Phil Leigh You want to see the signal path BEFORE it gets onto a CD/vinyl...it ain't what you'd call minimal... Touch(wired/W7)+Teddy Pardo PSU - Audiolense 3.3/2.0+INGUZ DRC - MF M1 DAC - Linn 5103 - full Aktiv 5.1 system (6x LK140's, ESPEK/TRIKAN/KATAN/SEIZMIK 10.5), Pekin Tuner, Townsend Supertweeters,VdH Toslink,Kimber 8TC Speaker & Chord Signature Plus Interconnect cables Stax4070+SRM7/II phones Kitchen Boom, Outdoors: SB Radio, Harmony One remote for everything. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93549 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
