marcoc1712;499966 Wrote: > Hi John, could you explain a little the kind of differences you hear > when streaming PCM instead of FLAC? > > Thanks, Marco.
Hi Marco, the two areas that are most noticeable are ambience and "aliveness". When streaming PCM the music is more at home in its acoustical space. You can hear the reverberation as naturally part of the environment, its there but doesn't call attention to itself. When streaming flac the reverberation seems somewhat artificial and painted on a screen in front of the music rather than filling the space. The whole thing feels somewhat "squished" and flat. The aliveness is a little hard to define, musicians seem more real and less canned. You can sense subtle emotional nuances of expression easier. Its not that flac sounds BAD, if you never listened to it with PCM you would think it sounds great, but then when you hear the PCM stream its WOW, where did THAT come from? Now I realize other people do not hear this and I have no explanation for that. Some people can and some can't, I don't know whether its people differences, environment differences or what. So far I have not been able to measure any differences. Sometime early next year I'm going to attempt a blind test as outlined earlier in this thread. We'll see if I really CAN hear a difference. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 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
