I agree with iPhone completely. Our brain is pretty good at noticing differences between 2 different sounds, but it isn't very good at judging the quality of a sound without a reference for comparison. My system has more of a warm tonality to it. When I inserted the Mark Levinson DAC into the chain it lost a lot of the warmth, and I immediately noticed the difference. However, after playing it for a while it began to sound "normal".
Flac files, or any lossless files, will produce the same digital bitstream as the original CD assuming no errors have been made in decompressing the file. This is generally a good assumption considering that you can unzip program files for the PC without a single bit being in error. If an error does occur in the digital bitstream it will usually produce a dropout or skip in the sound output. It won't change the tonality. Think of a dirty or scratched CD. So as long as the signal is digital, and as long as nothing is broken, the sound quality shouldn't be degraded. The problems arise at the D/A chip and the analog stages that follow it. Converting the digital signal to analog is a tricky process. If the digital bitstream isn't clocked through the D/A at precise intervals (jitter), the noise level will increase which will reduce the dynamic range. Also, the quality (e.g. linearity) of the D/A chip and the filtering used will have a major effect on the sound quality, including the detail, distortion and noise. -- duke43j ------------------------------------------------------------------------ duke43j's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15911 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47988 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
