SC is a rather different type of "player" to Foobar, WMP etc. It is primarily designed to stream audio to the firmware and hardware in the physical players that do the actual PCM-analogue or SPDIF conversion. As Snarly says, given a lossless rip and provided that certain server side features are not used, the bitstream is perfect as evidenced by DTS and HDCD replay via an external DAC, neither of which work at all if the bitstream is not 100% perfect.
The volume/replaygain/crossfade features (if used) operate in 24-bits like many high-end hardware implementations, which means they are "Pro" quality as mentioned in that article. That article has very little relevance to SC. SC is not designed primarily to drive a PC "sound card" in real time. Replay Jitter etc is not relevant in any discussion of SC. It is a hardware issue that starts in the physical player itself. The path from hard disk via SC to player over TCP/IP is asynchronous and has no time domain context, only value and sequence - there is no "timing" or "clock". This is easily demonstrated, because there is a hardware buffer in the players that holds many seconds of music and the player will continue to play with NO change in audio quality if you disconnect the network and so SC is not talking to the player hardware and thus cannot influence it in any way. I would contend that the bit-perfect stream + physical indepedence of the bitstream conversion process from the server hardware and software = as good as it can possibly get. Audio replay quality discussions really should focus on the player hardware+firmware when these two conditions are met. This simple statement seems impossible to grasp for almost anyone writing in the audio press... although I suspect it continues to give sleepless nights to many high-end hardware designers. -- Phil Leigh You want to see the signal path BEFORE it gets onto a CD/vinyl...it ain't what you'd call minimal... SB3 (wired) - TACT 2.2X (Linear PSU) + Good Vibrations S/W - MF Triplethreat(Audiocom full mods) - Linn 5103 - Aktiv 5.1 system (6x LK140's, ESPEK/TRIKAN/KATAN/SEIZMIK 10.5), Townsend Supertweeters, Blue Jeans Digital,Kimber Speaker & Chord Interconnect cables Outdoors: Boom ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=63646 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
