Tonight I did some careful listening with the touch, FLAC and PCM streaming and TinySC. I can't listen to Wav on TinySC since it does not support WAV at this point (I hope it does in the future).
Now these are listening tests, no objective measurements, so those of you who insist on having measurements can tune out now. All the tests were done with the same track, a FLAC file ripped from track 25 of the King's Singers' Madrigal History Tour. This has very pure acapella singing recorded in a reverberant environment. I seem to be able to hear the differences quite well with this piece. I'm listening to the Touch with cheap $5 headphones that came with a walkman clone many years ago, plugged dirctly into the headphone jack. The Touch is stock, using the logitech supplied wallwart. This is about as "un-audiophilic" as you can get. First streaming from a 7.5 SBS server, TinySC turned off. I can definitely hear the difference between streaming flac and PCM. When streaming FLAC the whole presentation sounds a bit "flat" compared to PCM. With the PCM the singers sound more real, more alive. The sound has more richness. I can hear more subtlties, more neuances in expression with the PCM. Next I tried from TinySC. This is just flac since it does not support wav and TinySC does not do transcoding, so the same FLAC procesing is going on as when streaming FLAC from the external SBS. Interestingly enough this sounded slightly better than the FLAC from SBS, but not nearly as good as the PCM from SBS. Its was similar to the FLAC from SBS but had just a little more subtlety and "sparkle". Next I tried Streaming from external SBS, BUT TinySC was running though not playing anything. Both the FLAC and PCM stream were degraded, but the PCM was degraded the most. The PCM sounded similar tp the FLAC from TinySC and the FLAC was slightly more flat than it was with no TinySC. I TRIED to use AudioDiffMaker to see if I could measure any of these, but I must be doing something wrong because I could not get even a good null from the same track played with the same settings,let alone different settings. So for now this is pure listening with no objective "proof" whatsoever. When I have some time I plan on doing spectragrams of both the audio out (similar to what JA does) and of the clock going into the DAC chip which is a good indicator of clock jitter. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=70979 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
