Chrobrego wrote: > I don't buy the bit-perfect statement as a scientific fact. What about > the timing in this reasoning? Should we also state that a cd should > always sound the same in whatever hardware it is read only because it > contains the same bits in both situations? > > The reality is instead that there IS a process difference between "AIFF > to sound" and "ALAC to sound" chains. If the ALAC file was fully > transformed to AIFF before it follows the same decoding then that would > be a different story. But that is not the case with those systems which > manage the transcoding in real-time. > > So the real question is if that results in audible difference or not. > And I can believe that sometimes yes, sometimes not. And that may > depends on persons ears as well. We need to respect each other views and > differences, no need to have an ideological conflict there. > > BTW: I am using flac so don't categorize me as audiophile :-)
I don't think anyone disagrees with this Chrobrego; what you say is logical and plausible. That's after all the core debate around the importance of jitter and these minute timing differences. However, we need to be reminded of 2 important observations: 1. Nowhere in audio science has there been proof that real human subjects have ever been able to differentiate data-correlated jitter of the magnitude present in consumer grade audio (we're talking reasonable mid-fi gear here, not the super-expensive stuff) when listening to *real music* (not test tones). 2. If we strive for the IDEAL - then good equipment that is bit-perfect *should* sound inaudible even with this small about of processing to convert ALAC --> WAV or FLAC --> WAV or whatever! Like I said before, hearing a difference for real (not just psychological bias) is NOT good and is an indicator of something wrong. One observation - don't you think it's ironic that the DSD audiophiles don't complain of DST --> DFF lossless processing in their SACD players!? In fact, DST processing appears to be less optimized and takes more processing power than FLAC based on what I have seen! How come there are no cries of audible difference between say the 1st press "Kind Of Blue" (single layer stereo only with no DST compression) compared to the second pressing with multichannel (DST compressed) with claims that it's the compression algorithm? Anyhow, guys - good news - this AM I just took delivery of my new Teac UD-501 DAC. Should be fun listening to some direct DSD tonight to see if I hear anything "magical" ;-) Over the months, I've collected a few "genuine" DSD recordings and analogue-to-DSD stuff. Of course, will post up some results comparing this DAC with Transporter, Oppo, Essence One in time... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archimago's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2207 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98630 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
