I've read through all of the posts in this thread just because I've had a similar experience a few months earlier and was hoping to find a solution/answer to the problem which I brushed aside at the time as insignificant but very intriguing one.
A few months after I purchased a Duet in addition to my SqueezeBox I read an article in Stereophile where an expert by way of offhand remark mentioned something like "I was shocked at the difference in sound of lossless compressed files and uncompressed wavs". Being an IT professional and knowing that theoretecally there should be NO difference between a flac and a wav files (other than one file is actually zipped) I tried to prove this claim wrong in practice. I took a wav-file (ripped from some audiphile CD) and a flac version of the same file and played these through my system (Duet -> Audio Alchemy DAC -> Parasound A21 power amp -> NHT 2.5i). To my surprise there was a diffirence. Wav played audibly better. To confirm these results I invited my two friends-audiophiles and after a couple of glasses of wine asked them to tell if there was a difference between two versions of the song. This was what you call a blind test, they didn't know if there actually was a differnce, beause I wasn't 100% sure either, and they didn't know what file was actually playing flac or wav. The funny thing was that they preferred and correctly identified 100% of wavs not knowing what I actually was trying to find out. They actually didn't know what flac is (they were CD-audiophiles) and why there should be no difference between the files until I explained to them the meaning of the test. The version of the server was 7.2. Well I took this result as a fact, but I had to live with this knowledge as the size of my collection was at the time 1.5Tb in flac files and I had to have this tag feature which allowed for convenient management of the collection. Now that you've read all of the above the question is (I couldn't find an answer in this thread): How can I make SqueezeCenter version 7.3.3 (which I'm running now) or any other Slim Server convert flac to wav (sorry, PCM) on the server side before it is sent to the receiver (if at all pssible). -- deadushka ------------------------------------------------------------------------ deadushka's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=35306 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=71321 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
