[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: A sudden thought...
bludragon Wrote: I think that's pretty optimistic, unless living in the US means you have to suffer some really bad 'audiophile' equipment, or you're comparing it to something designed well over 5 years old. That whole part of the article seemed more like hearsay to me. Yes, squeezebox is good, yes it makes a good transport, but a modern $300 cd player uses a fixed crystal clock too. A pc may do a better job with a marginal/damaged cd, but otherwise the difference shouldn't be significant. The point to me was that the SB eliminates the mechanical transports completely - there is no CD mechanism, so the cost comparison isn't strictly fair either. -- CardinalFang CardinalFang's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=962 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18991 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: 24/96 flac files
dhuskey Wrote: I am doing my own recording into 24/96 flac format. Does anyone know if the SB3 can handle that format, or do i need to dither down to 24/48 or another format? Right now only 24/48 is supported. 96Khz support is listed as an enhancement request: http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1394 -- jhwilliams jhwilliams's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1876 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18999 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: SB1 digital out compared to SB2 and SB3
I think this really depends on your dac. I can tell the difference between different transports. But then my dac has a simple spdif input receiver [very common crystal 8412] with standard loopfilter - this only attenuates jitter above 25Khz. Adding a new clock to an old cd transport was noticable with this. More complex dacs attenuate jitter much more (in the digital domain using async resampling or by secondary plls with much tighter loop filters). With these any jitter on the spdif line should be much less noticable... -- Triode Triode's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18116 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: SB1 digital out compared to SB2 and SB3
pfarrell Wrote: On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 18:26 -0800, scan80269 wrote:[color=blue] I believe that most of the focus on jitter is hype to separate audiophiles from their money. I could be wrong. YMMV and all that. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html Yes, you are wrong. -- mauidan mauidan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1679 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18116 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Why doesn't Slim Devices create an audiophile version?
Has Slim Devices considered offering a higher priced version of Squeezebox that incorporates as standard equipment the modified elements that people seem to agree are beneficial to achieving higher sound quality - like improved power supply, improved DAC, etc, etc? It seems to be that there are a lot of people in the marketplace who would be happy to pay more to purchase such an off-the-shelf product, rather than having to do modifications themselves or pay third-parties to do such modifications for them. -- jgold0016 jgold0016's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2748 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19016 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Why doesn't Slim Devices create an audiophile version?
On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 09:06 -0800, jgold0016 wrote: Has Slim Devices considered offering a higher priced version of Squeezebox I'm sure that they have. The question is asked frequently. Since I don't work for SD, this is only a guess, but there are lots of reasons: 1) some of the mods, like using the HE DAC, adds costs but doesn't add value that can be measured. 2) having two products is hugely more expensive than having one. Just the cost of shipping the wrong product version and shipping it back has huge costs both out of pocket, staff time, and customer relationship. 3) audiophiles are a niche market, not clear that there are enough folks willing to pay the cost. For very low volume, Vinnie and others see a market and are meeting it. If Vinnie and the others are able to grow it into a huge business, then SD might buy them out :-) -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Squeezebox 2 - Subtle noise and distortion.
So, I've been messing around again this afternoon and have got a little closer to figuring out the root cause of this problem. It appears not to be the Slimserver per se, but appears instead to be the act of transcoding from AAC to another format via the stdio. I have performed a number of tests, with the following results: 1. Decode an AAC file to a WAV. COMMAND USED: faad infile.m4a outfile.wav RESULT: When I play the .wav using windows media player, there is no noise. 2. Encode the .wav from test 1 into an MP3 manually. COMMAND USED: lame infile.wav outfile.mp3 RESULT: When I play the .mp3 using windows media player, there is no noise. 3. Transcode an AAC to MP3 via stdio COMMAND USED: faad -w infile.m4a | lame - outfile.mp3 RESULT: When I play the .mp3 using windows media player, the music plays but with the same background noise as seen when listening via my Squeezebox and Softsqueeze. CONCLUSION: From the tests above, there seems to be a limitation when transcoding from AAC to another format via stdio. As a result, using this method of transcoding with Slimserver will introduce an unacceptable level of background noise. I will update my bug with this information, as since this is the transcoding method Slimdevices recommend when running Slimserver on a Linux server, I believe this is not an acceptable solution. If I can find a way to bypass transcoding and stream the raw music off of my server then that should hopefully solve this problem. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll be installing Windows again... Nick. -- slimnick slimnick's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2333 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18219 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Squeezebox 2 - Subtle noise and distortion.
slimnick Wrote: So, I've been messing around again this afternoon and have got a little closer to figuring out the root cause of this problem. It appears not to be the Slimserver per se, but instead to be the act of transcoding from AAC to another format via the stdio. I have performed a number of tests, with the following results: 1. Decode an AAC file to a WAV. COMMAND USED: faad infile.m4a outfile.wav RESULT: When I play the .wav using windows media player, there is no noise. 2. Encode the .wav from test 1 into an MP3 manually. COMMAND USED: lame infile.wav outfile.mp3 RESULT: When I play the .mp3 using windows media player, there is no noise. 3. Transcode an AAC to MP3 via stdio COMMAND USED: faad -w infile.m4a | lame - outfile.mp3 RESULT: When I play the .mp3 using windows media player, the music plays but with the same background noise as seen when listening via my Squeezebox and Softsqueeze. CONCLUSION: From the tests above, there seems to be a limitation when transcoding from AAC to another format via stdio. As a result, using this method of transcoding with Slimserver will introduce an unacceptable level of background noise. I will update my bug with this information, as since this is the transcoding method Slimdevices recommend when running Slimserver on a Linux server, I believe this is not an acceptable solution. If I can find a way to bypass transcoding and stream the raw music off of my server then that should hopefully solve this problem. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll be installing Windows again... Nick. Hey, great slooth work! It would be interesting to try a different shell and see if that changes it. Assuming it's not the shell itself (which it probably isn't), it would be good to see whether the problem lies with faad or lame. One way would be to do (starting with known good infiles): faad -w infile.m4a | cat outfile.wav and cat infile.wav | lame - outfile.mp3 -- LavaJoe LavaJoe's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2331 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18219 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Squeezebox 2 - Subtle noise and distortion.
LavaJoe Wrote: Hey, great slooth work! Elementary my dear LavaJoe! ;-) Actually, further to my previous post, I have found the following entry on the FAAD2 forum: http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=151forum=2 Although this was seen on a Mac, this does seem to describe my problem exactly and so infers a problem with FAAD2. What is not encouraging is that this was reported back in 2004, so unless this is fixed in a newer version of FAAD2, I may have reached a dead-end with a Linux-based AAC Slimserver solution. So, unless there is a fix, I seem to be facing 2 options: 1. Convert all of my AACs to MP3 or FLAC. 2. Set-up a Windows server. Hmm, so much for a neat solution! Nick, -- slimnick slimnick's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2333 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18219 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Squeezebox 2 - Subtle noise and distortion.
slimnick Wrote: Elementary my dear LavaJoe! ;-) Actually, further to my previous post, I have found the following entry on the FAAD2 forum: http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=151forum=2 Although this was seen on a Mac, this does seem to describe my problem exactly and so infers a problem with FAAD2. What is not encouraging is that this was reported back in 2004, so unless this is fixed in a newer version of FAAD2, I may have reached a dead-end with a Linux-based AAC Slimserver solution. So, unless there is a fix, I seem to be facing 2 options: 1. Convert all of my AACs to MP3 or FLAC. 2. Set-up a Windows server. Hmm, so much for a neat solution! Nick, Problem solved! One of the bugs filed against faad2 addresses this. A newline character is being written to stdout when it should be written to stderr. I applied the change mentioned, and it produces clean audio. If you get the source code from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/ and build it, it will at least solve the problem. But I do not know why this has not been fixed in the official code release. The patch is to: frontend/main.c, line 835 (change printf( to fprintf(stderr, ) Note that in order to build on Fedora, I had to change another file: common/mp4ff/mp4ffint.h, line 304 (add static to the start of the line) Now. It would obviously be good to get this patch into the package for the future. Also, the patched version should probably be available for download on the Slim web site, and this issue should be in the FAQ so people can get good quality audio by using the transcoding. -- LavaJoe LavaJoe's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2331 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18219 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Squeezebox 2 - Subtle noise and distortion.
Aha - we may have a winner. I was looking through the Linux forum and found this post: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18828 This talks about using mplayer instead of FAAD2 to decode AAC files. So, I've installed mplayer (using 'yum install mplayer' on my Fedora Core 4 machine) and edited my convert.conf file to: mov wav * * [mplayer] -novideo -ao pcm:file=/dev/fd/4 $FILE$ 41 1/dev/null And the result is what I've been looking for: a nice pure sound with no audible disortion. One small problem though, there is a 'pop' at the start of each track, but I'll play with the mplayer options and see if I can't figure that out. So, it seems that faad2 is not the decoder of choice for Linux systems - mplayer is. Ideally the Slimserver Wiki needs to be updated with this, since it currently recommends using faad2 - definitely not the right choice. Nick. -- slimnick slimnick's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2333 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18219 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Squeezebox 2 - Subtle noise and distortion.
On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 11:12 -0800, LavaJoe wrote: Problem solved! One of the bugs filed against faad2 addresses this. [snip] Now. It would obviously be good to get this patch into the package for the future. Also, the patched version should probably be available for download on the Slim web site, and this issue should be in the FAQ so people can get good quality audio by using the transcoding. Is the patch going into the mainline sourceforge sources, by you or someone else? Its probably wrong for everyone. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Squeezebox 2 - Subtle noise and distortion.
pfarrell Wrote: On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 11:12 -0800, LavaJoe wrote: Problem solved! One of the bugs filed against faad2 addresses this. [snip] Now. It would obviously be good to get this patch into the package for the future. Also, the patched version should probably be available for download on the Slim web site, and this issue should be in the FAQ so people can get good quality audio by using the transcoding. Is the patch going into the mainline sourceforge sources, by you or someone else? Its probably wrong for everyone. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html Yes, it's certainly a bug. And yeah, I think this patch should go into the mainline, and the bug is only 3 days old (interesting timing), so I imagine this fix has a chance of making it. I'll email the guy and tell him of the slimserver impact. -- LavaJoe LavaJoe's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2331 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18219 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Replaygain affecting sound quality?
I'm using 6.2.1. A lot of the tracks seem to have over 6dB of gain reduction. Anyway, I've turned it off for now and am very happy with the sound quality. Thanks Andrew -- Andrew B. = SB3- Benchmark DAC1 - EAR864 valve pre - ATC SCM50ASL active speakers... nice! Andrew B.'s Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2619 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18948 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best mod?
just bought mine from allied a week or so ago -- jplatner jplatner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2320 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18491 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Replaygain affecting sound quality?
Try the 6.2 nightly - the volume control bug is fixed, so it would be good to know replay gain works too. -- Patrick Dixon www.at-tunes.co.uk Patrick Dixon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=90 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18948 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Bookshelf speaker recommendations?
I'm thinking about replacing my main speakers (Boston Acoustics CR-8s). I've got a Marantz SR7200 receiver (110 wpc) and a Carver Sunfire Jr. subwoofer. I'm looking for clean, scintillating highs and punchy mids and lows. This is for music only -- DVD is totally secondary. I listen to rock, blues and jazz primarily. My bookshelves will handle a maximum of 21 inches in height. Price range is approximately $300-$400 each. Any suggestions? -- Kyle Kyle's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2541 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19023 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Bookshelf speaker recommendations?
I would suggest the 'Axiom M3ti' (http://www.axiomaudio.com/m3ti_main.html). -- vdorta DIY computer (EAC, AccurateRip, FLAC) -- wireless SB2 (Bolder digital analog mods, Sonicap Platinum bypass caps, Bolder Deluxe Power Supply) -- Stello M200 monos -- ACI Sapphire XL on dedicated Sound Anchors + REL Storm III | JMT PPA headamp with bass boost -- AKG K501 and Etymotics ER-4S vdorta's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1446 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19023 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Replaygain affecting sound quality?
I was thinking about this too the other day, what do you think about having a new replay gain mode, similar to Smart but which doesn't use replay gain on albums? That way you'd get replay gain when playing random (which is when you need it most) but if you play an album you get it full whack - just the same as if you were playing the cd. Of couse this could be achieved by setting all your album gain tags to 0db while leaving track gain tags as they are. Craig -- Craig Craig's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=96 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18948 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Bookshelf speaker recommendations?
How about Quad 11L??? I have a pair connected to an Audible Illusions pre/Quad 909 power and they sound excellent. I love them so much that I bought another pair for the bedroom (where SB3 is used) -- stedes stedes's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2695 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19023 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: How to get a deep soundstage
teanau Wrote: lossy compression, poor speakers, poor speaker placement, all seem to comprimise sound stage, would that imply alot of it is dependant on the high frequencies? _sam So, when I use the lossless compression with EAC, good monitor speaker, good speaker positing then, I will have a good soundstage? -- hkfind hkfind's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2648 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18878 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
