>From recent experiences it looks like a SB at full volume is still attentuating signals by several db. This is not a good thing in audiophile circles, there needs to be a way to pass the bits through unaltered.
This came about when I was showing off my SB3 I2S out to DAC to some friends, they said it was softer and overall didn't sound as good. Some things were better than the USB input but others were worse. We then tried it with softsqueeze and got the same results, the output was softer and not as good sounding as with direct to the USB input. This was on a mac using AIFF files. I then tried this on my linux system at home and got the same results, softer on both the I2S out and softsqueeze. The very low jitter with the I2S direct connect does make some things sound better, but the friends were right, other things are worse. And the things that are worse also show up with softsqueeze. I tried this with both slimserver 6.2.2 and 6.3.1 and got the same results. So it looks like either slimserver is attenuating the data its sending out, or both the SB3 and softsqueeze are attenuating by the same amount, even thogh the volume is set to max. BTW I made sure the "preamp volume" was set to 0. Taking a little bit of time pouring over the source code I see that there are two different methods of sending volume control values to the box, the 'old' 128 value method and the new fractional system. I was not able to figure out which is being used with the SB3 and softsqueeze. I was just wondering if there was something like a roundoff error in the conversion from 0-40, 0-100 and 1-11 (the three ranges I can use to set the volume) and the actual value sent to the box. Later this week I was going to try hacking up squeezeslave and seeing if I can bypass the volume control all together and see if that makes any difference. One other thing to try is the digital out and switch between affected by volume control or not. Right now I don't have a readily available S/PDIF DAC so I can't easily try that myself. Has anybody else tried that and seen a difference in volume over the digital out when switching modes? (if it stays the same that could still mean the slimserver it self is changing the data). Should I post this question over in the developer forum? I was thinking that audiophiles might actually be interested in whether its sending bit perfect data or not. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=26002 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
