Our WiFi system became overloaded while playing flac files to two sync'd players - SB Receivers, in this case. I'd added to the problem (I think) by recording the flac files, from analogue sources, using a 24 bit depth.
The topic has been much visited in recent weeks/months, in the context of looking for solutions, but the threads where it's been raised have produced some interesting 'numbers'. It's the numbers I'd like to think about (the solutions have been well-aired). The 24 bit flac files (44k sample rate) are showing bit rates which vary between 1.2Mbps to 1.4Mbps. These seem high compared with, for example, a posting in the (excellent) 'big party' thread http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpost.php?p=657983&postcount=15 suggesting that 16 bit 44k PCM is 1.4Mbps (presumably that's stereo, is it?). It seemed to me that flac isn't compressing PCM by much. (Well, maybe saving 8 bits per 24 bits isn't too bad, really?) Our flac files at 1.4 Mbps are taking 2 x 1.4 Mbps (ie, 2.8 Mbps) for transmission to two sync'd players and, in our case where we use a repeated signal because of line of 'sight' issues, actually 2 x 2.8 over the WiFi channel, roughly 5.6 Mbps. Adding 10% or so for IP overhead such as framing, error checking, acknowledgment, whatever, we're over 6 Mbps. Even using Wireless-G, this seems too demanding for our installation. There is one question I'd like to ask. I used Audacity to capture these analogue sources and save them to flac. Audacity has 'options' under its flac filesave menu, where you can select the 'quality' (best to worst), which confuses me a little. Since flac is lossless, I assume there isn't a 'good' or 'bad' in a fidelity or perfection sense; I assume the 'best' or 'worst' is a measure of the aggression of the space saving (with an implication for the ultimate decoder, the SBR in our case). Does anyone know if that is the case? Does anyone suffer a fidelity loss, after all, with these Audacity settings? And one query about SBS helping us out. We're getting some work done to install a wired network - it'll take a little time, though. Meanwhile, I looked at SBS settings to se if it would temporarily transcode flac down to, say, MP3, but MP3 is greyed out in settings. Can anyone think of any way to transcode flac in SBS so that a lossy format is transmitted to our SBRs, for the time being? regards, Atlantic -- Atlantic ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Atlantic's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=44239 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=91448 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
