Mitch G;225556 Wrote: > A question about SB1 support of WAV, vs SB2/3 support of FLAC. Even > though my files are ripped as FLAC, is native support of FLAC a > critical benefit? In other words, both FLAC and WAV are lossless, > right? So, even though my FLAC files get translated to WAV, does it > actually affect the sound quality? > (The bottom line here is that I've been wondering if it would be worth > upgrading due to this FLAC->WAV conversion that occurs for my SB1.) > > > Mitch
There's no loss of quality in the FLAC->WAV conversion. In fact, there are a handful of folks who claim that transcoding FLAC->WAV on the server results in better audio quality than doing it natively on the SB2/3. There's been no technical reason for this uncovered, and I sure can't hear a difference, and no one (to my knowledge) has shown measurements that show any reason for it to be true...so I'm skeptical :). You may still, however, see an audio improvement simply due to the fact that the SB2/3 models have better DACs and measurably better (in terms of clock-accuracy) digital outputs. I have SB1s and SB2s and run them all digitally and I can say that the difference is subtle, at best (the difference is much more noticeable in the analog outs). But there are other, non-fidelity-related benefits to the native FLAC decoding on the SB2/3 models: 1) Slightly lower bandwidth demands on your network (streaming FLAC requires about two-thirds the bandwidth of WAV). But if you're not seeing dropouts with the SB1 then this probably won't matter much to you. 2) Fast-forward and rewind support is only provided to native formats. So you'll be able to FFW and REW FLAC on an SB2/3, something you've probably noticed you can't do on your SB1. -- azinck3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ azinck3's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3967 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38209 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
