A month or so ago I did a test on this, I took some tracks ripped to wav and converted to FLAC. I tried all the combinations, wav file wave stream, wave file, FLAC stream etc.
The results were that I could definately hear a degradation in sound when streaming FLAC, whether it was a FLAC file or transcoded in SS. Flac file streamed as wav was better than FLAC:FLAC. Now the difference was not a masive night and day difference, but it was definately there. I'm torn on the issue of is there a difference between storage format, sometimes I think I can tell a VERY slight difference between FLAC and wav files, but other times I can't tell any difference. I just put together a large RAID server that can easily hold my entire collection in either format so space is not an issue. I DO like the capability of tagging in FLAC. I'm tempted to go for FLAC files for that purpose, but I have this nagging feeling that I might find out later on that WAV files do sound slightly better and them be kicking myself for choosing FLAC. I'm undecided at this point. As to why the FLAC stream sounds worse, I don't really know. I haven't done a jitter analysis yet, but my guess is that it probably doesn't make any difference. My guess is that its back to EMI. The processor does have to work harder decoding a FLAC stream and I'm guesing that sends out more EMI which is getting picked up by the system. It would be interesting to try that with a transporter which is much better shielded than the SB3. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32999 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
