I have had an SB3 for 5+ years. It feeds into a passive preamp (Alps attenuator) and a McCormack DNA .5 amp, driving a pair of Martin Logan Aerius i's. Pretty mimimal signal path. The MLs, like most electrostatics, are very revealing and unforgiving when it comes to bad source material.
Anyway, I have long thought that the SB3 sounded slightly better at decoding WAV streams (I am using it wirelessly) than FLAC. I never worried about it too much - just set the server to transcode and forgot about it. Then two things occured at roughly the same time: I upgraded to Squeezebox Server 7.4.1 (running on Windows Server 2003) and ripped the entire new Beatles box set to FLAC. I did not change the default transcode settings. It sounded really bad. It's as if there was some sort of digital grunge on many tracks. It hurt my ears. Very similar in sound to the early days of CD players with lousy DACs. Initially, I thought I had created bad FLAC files, since I had just recently upgraded the pc I use for ripping to Windows 7 64 bit and re-installed EAC. But then I did a bulk conversion of my FLAC files to high bitrate MP3s and they sounded fine on my iPod Touch with Sennheiser earphones. So I started looking at the trascode settings on the server (which frankly I found confusing in 7.4.1). I disabled FLAC native and WAV to FLAC transcoding. Problem solved! Now to be honest, I did not even attempt any blind or AB testing and I will admit that psychoacoustics is full of subjective interpretation. But my wife and I attend lots of live symphonic music events (we are long-time season ticket holders to the BSO) and I will always prefer live music to mechanically reproduced stuff. So I am a critical listener and feel comfortable in saying that there was a noticeable difference. FWIW - the only thing I can think of is that there is some sort of error in the SB3 FLAC decoder firmware and that it grew even worse with 7.4.1 - which confirms why some posters may prefer the sound of 7.2 when using FLAC. -- wtnh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ wtnh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=36993 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
