On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Grant <[email protected]> wrote: <SNIP> > It sounds like real-time lowers both latency and jitter. Jitter > absolutely affects sound quality. I wonder if jitter could be the > cause of all this.
If a system is exhibiting severe jitter, possibly more typical in consumer level sound cards and assuming that's the sort of card you are using, then possibly the real-time kernel helps. I wouldn't argue that at all. I'm using a studio quality external DAC (Benchmark) with a low jitter external studio clock source (Apogee) driving a good quality digital sound interface. (HDSP9652) I stand by my earlier statement that says when I use industrial quality components the real-time kernel makes no difference that I can hear. On the other hand I'm so old and dusty who knows what I can hear anymore? ;-) As for the wave vs FLAC thing one must prove that we're talking apples to apples. Wave is lossless by definition. (As far as I know.) It's just 16 or 24-bit words bits packed into a file. FLAC may or may not be lossless depending on how it's encoded. If it's lossless, and if it's encoded from the exact same original data then the two formats should produce exactly the bit stream and if the bit streams are identical, and if they are delivered to exactly the same reproduction hardware at the same settings on the same day at the same time then they are going to produce the same sound. One thing digital audio has going for it is you can compare the two files objectively. The problem with the old A sounds better than D discussions is it's not apples to apples. Have fun, Mark
