When I bought my SqueezeBox Duet and hooked it up digitally connected to my DAC I was disappointed to find that the sound quality was not up to the standard I was used to with my Teac Esoteric DV-50 as a CD transport. And I just assumed that, OK, maybe one should not expect better performance from such a cheap device as the SB Duet.
But recently I happened to check the transmitted bitrate with Netpersec and relized that the SB server only sent data at a variable bitrate at around half the bitrate for wav. I then found through this thread how to change the settings so I got wav to be sent in its native format. Actually, I never expected much difference. Flac is lossless compression and many people seem not to be able to hear any difference between the settings. But to my big surprise the difference was very easy to hear. Now I got quite a bit more air, space and deeper soundstage. Comparing this with the Esoteric I found that the SB was now on par or even better than the Esoteric. I repeated the tests a number of times, and there was no question about it, when using the flac compression the sound got flatter and duller. I do not know why the difference is so clearly audible in my system when others cannot distinguish one configuration from the other. I know that my DAC (the hand made Bremen Licence No. 1), although a great performer when fed a high quality signal, is very sensitive to cheap transports and poor digital cables, probably because it does not have any jitter reduction. (I really had problems with previous transports and cables than I have now.) Other DACs could be less senstive to a small difference in the signal. Another possibility could be if there are other bottle necks in the signal chain in a system obscuring the difference. My system is pretty good and I have tweaked it quite a bit to make it perform optimally, but then it is quite sensitive when introducing imperfections in the system. Anyway, I am very grateful that I found the information in this thread how to change the settings. It made me quite a lot more satisfied with my SB Duet. -- Erik L ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Erik L's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37356 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
