CavesOfTQLT Wrote: > > > And many, many thanks to Listener. > >
I'll take that as encouragement to make a few more observations. If you are serious about sound quality, you want a S/W + H/W solution that is dead reliable in playing without pops, gaps or glitches. You don't pay money to get a music-on-hard-disk system that does play perfectly. That isn't easy for a user-mode program like Softsqueeze. Every now and then Windows may do a blizzard of disk I/O to save its state. Firefox produces periodic disk I/O storms too and Slimserver may rescan the music folder at intervals producing its own disk I/O storm. The web has a number of little communities of audiophiles who mostly agree on a technical approach. USB based DACs are popular on several of those communities. The isochronous method of transfer theose USB DACs use is not a good starting point for high-quality audio. (No re-transmission, clock is ultimately derived from the USB traffic, etc.) However, Windows provides a builtin driver for that method of audio data transfer. There is a right way to do it, but it requires writing a kernel-mode audio driver for Windows and then building a USB DAC that talks to the new driver. Nobody has done that. Instead, they do more-or-less heroic efforts to work around the limitations of isochronous transfer. The Squeezebox connects to its server via an Internet via an Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. It does the job right: data can be re-transmitted if necessary and the all-important word clock can be generated in the Squeezebox with very low jitter. And the DAC is outside the electrically noisy PC environment with its own power supply. So the Squeezebox might produce better sound quality for $ 250 than a USB DAC or an high-quality soundcard. You might still use a Squeezebox with a PC in the same room as your stereo. Bill -- Listener ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Listener's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2508 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19342 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
