A few days ago our esteemed senior member Triode created quite a stir when he published his Enhanced Digital Output App for SBT (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?94512-Announce-Enhanced-Digital-Output-app-USB-Dac-and-192k-Digital-Ouput). The app is awesome, as it very efficiently and very elegantly offers improvements to SBT with regards to USB DACs and also turbo charges the player to be able to stream 24 bit/192 kHz formats to outboard DACs.
I'm not using USB, but I do have several 192k FLAC files in my music library, and I was always wondering whether these high resolution formats could offer any discernible difference. So I decided to install the app, especially since the instructions seemed brain dead easy:) I first did a full factory reset, which brought my SBT to the 7.7.2 level. Once that was done, I sat down for a listen. I was quite surprised to hear how the 'vanilla', out-of-the-box SBT sound appeared so thin, brittle, and lacking much of the heaviness and the body I got accustomed to after months of listening to SBT fitted with TT3.0. Not being able to withstand the graininess, pixelation and the overall nervous, bright and brash digital sound, I've proceeded to delve into the Enhanced Digital Output App. As I expected, the installation was a breeze, fully automated, so in no time I was up and running with this shiny new app. Sat down for a listen again, and got pleasantly surprised at how better the sound got. Much of the digital glare and harshness got somehow tamed by this app. My completely and unabashedly dilettante hunch is that this change is attributable to the fact that, by choosing the digital output (in my case spdif), the analog outs got decommissioned, and the sound became less noisy, less jittery, less nervous. Even though that wasn't the stated objective for this app (according to its author), the unintended consequences came to me as a fat, juicy bonus. I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who's using an outboard DAC with SBT to do the install, because it will elevate SBT to a more pleasant listening experience. Of course, I proceeded to fit TT3.0 and SBGK's mods on top of this configuration, which then pushed SBT to even higher levels. But that's a contentious topic in this community, so I'll abstain from feeding the trolls here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ magiccarpetride's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37863 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94606 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
