Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Better SQ w/o iTunes integration
netchord wrote: you may be able to say the -files- have not changed. the music definitely has. What has definitely changed is what you hear - your *perception* of the soundfield generated by the system. After you switched off iTunes integration (not really expecting any difference), you did indeed perceive a difference. And so quite reasonably you sought an explanation. It seems logical to you to assume the difference must be due to some change made to the system, and you homed in on the fact that iTunes integration has been switched off. But there are other explanations for why you perceive a difference in what you hear. Human hearing varies day-to-day, even minute-to-minute, and is affected by all kinds of external factors. It is overwhelmingly more likely that you initially heard a difference due to some other factor (such as your physiological state at the time) rather than any change to the stereo system. But because you have internally correlated it with the change to iTunes integration, that belief has become part of your mental world model. Transporter - ATC SCM100A cliveb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=348 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Better SQ w/o iTunes integration
netchord wrote: sure i do. music is not defined by bits. You can only know what you think you hear - unless you verify it by objective means. Which you don't want to do. So we are back where we started - no way of knowing if there was a change in the actual sound waves in your room - and every reason to think there wasn't. Doesn't seem to be much point to keep rehashing this, I think this thread can be summarized as Move on! Nothing to see here!. To try to judge the real from the false will always be hard. In this fast-growing art of 'high fidelity' the quackery will bear a solid gilt edge that will fool many people - Paul W Klipsch, 1953 Julf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=42050 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Better SQ w/o iTunes integration
cliveb wrote: It is overwhelmingly more likely that you initially heard a difference due to some other factor (such as your physiological state at the time) rather than any change to the stereo system. But because you have internally correlated it with the change to iTunes integration, that belief has become part of your mental world model. not at all- i'm open to alternate explanations, but i resist the idea that i'm just imagining it, based on some unknown, and unknowable bias. i'm an educated listener, with a former career performing live, acoustic music in real concert halls. we don't listen with our ears, we listen with our brains, our souls, our hearts, and bodies. the belief in this forum that bits are bits and the zeal with which most posters here insist on debunking something that can't be debunked (ie, human beings experience the same music differently from one another) borders frankly on the religious. it's off-putting, and drives people away from both this forum, and the hobby in general. -- 4 TB Drobo--FW 800--mac mini--Ethernet Transporter-- Wireworld Eclipse 6 coax--Meridian G61 G61-- Nordost Red Dawn--Primare 30.3 Primare--Ocos--Vienna Acoustics Beethoven/Maestro netchord's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=21002 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Better SQ w/o iTunes integration
I don't think everyone here believes that we all experience music in the same way. I'm inclined to believe that you are hearing a difference. It's the why that is somewhat confounding. And while our enjoyment of music is highly subjective and individual, the mechanism by which digital audio files are communicated to a device which converts them to a signal that can be reproduced by analog amplifiers and speakers is not. And it cannot be because digital data transmitted on a TCP/IP based network *must* be bit perfect. When it's not, the packets of bits are re-transmitted until they are perfect or the communication fails. If that were not true, I could not be typing this message to you, could not send it to the forum, and you could not read it. And the Internet would not work. And my home network would not work. And every business network would not work. I've been an IT professional for 30 years and know only too well what happens when networks fail. But what you are describing is not a network failure. Your network works; bits are accurately communicated between your server and your DAC. Either those are the same bits or they aren't. If they aren't the same, why? If they are the same, then either 1) your analog set up is different or 2) you are different. You made the proposition that iTunes integration correlates with the difference and the question is, how? In what way would iTunes affect what bits of data reach your DAC? And if it doesn't, which according to people more knowledgeable about the subject is the case, then what other change in the digital domain would affect what bits reach your DAC? But bits are bits is not a belief-system. It is an empirically demonstrated quality intrinsic to the very fundamental operation of your (and everyone's) network. It is true whether you accept it or not. It is not alchemy, astrology, numerology, or some form of magic. The physics and mathematics of how networks function is well understood and documented in mind-numbing detail. So, yes, bits are bits. Win7Pro(x64)[3.3Ghz i5, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD system, 15TB storage], LMS 7.9.0 - Logitech Squeezebox Classic V.3 - Cambridge Audio DacMagic - NAD C160 - 2 x NAD C272 - Quad 22L2 get.amped's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10022 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Better SQ w/o iTunes integration
netchord wrote: there's a 3rd possibility- the same bits are being interpreted, or communicated, differently by some of the devices on the network. i postulated iTunes integration, or lack there of, might have some, previously unexamined effect, perhaps a minuscule increase in jitter, or some other digital artifact- transmitting music bits is not the same as send text over a network. This is simply not true. Once they hit the network interface they are exactly the same as sending text (or images or program code or *anything*) over the network. Again, digital music files are not special because they contain data that gets converted at the destination to analog representations of sound waves. Jitter is a question of how that data is assembled and handled by the DAC. It has nothing to do with TCP/IP network communications. If you don't get the data from the server to the DAC, you will see rebuffering issues or disconnections, not subtle variations in sound quality. If there are digital artifacts, they are either present in the encoded digital file, meaning they were introduced during the analog to digital conversion, or they are a consequence of how the DAC has decoded the data it receives. They are not introduced by the transmission of the data over your network. The network protocols which allow any of this to work have checksums and error correction to verify that the data sent is the data received and do so on relatively small amounts of data at a time. Most home networks use a default Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) of 1500 bytes. A typical ethernet packet, including headers and data is 1530 bytes. Every one of those packets is guaranteed by the specification of the protocol to arrive at its destination complete and in sequential order. If an error occurs, the packet is re-transmitted. It's possible that software on the server (i.e. transcoding on the server) modifies those files *before* transmitting them. Maybe the files were being transcoded before and they are not now. I don't know. But I am 100% certain that the network i.e. device interfaces, routers and switches are not the place to look for any sound quality differences of the type you are describing. Win7Pro(x64)[3.3Ghz i5, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD system, 15TB storage], LMS 7.9.0 - Logitech Squeezebox Classic V.3 - Cambridge Audio DacMagic - NAD C160 - 2 x NAD C272 - Quad 22L2 get.amped's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10022 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Better SQ w/o iTunes integration
It's not really surprising that the same themes keep arising around the questions of digital sound capture/transmission/decoding and sound perception. Some of the facts can seem counter-intuitive to many, and it can be a struggle to assimilate the information. I think there are two fundamental issues here: a) the nature of digital sound encoding vs analog encoding and b) the nature and malleability of perception. These have been addressed by others more cogently than can I, but here is my perspective. It's instructive to think about the differences between telegraphs and early telephones, which can be understood as digital and analog devices respectively. A telegraph is a kind of binary device. There are dots and there are dashes (and the spaces in-between). The signal is very nearly impervious to poor transmission conditions, as the dot/dash signal can be easily picked out from very substantial background noise; when decoded, the error rate will be practically zero (assuming a trained operator) regardless of noise on the line. The resulting typescript will always be the same, regardless of operator. An early telephone, on the other hand, was very much impacted by transmission noise. The analog signal (the words being spoken at one end, and transmitted as an analog waveform) can be masked or altered substantially by line conditions, with great risk of data loss, and certainly loss of audio quality. In the case of digital sound, the data is binary in the same way that the telegraph is binary. Noise is largely irrelevant, the digital packets are managed in a way that information is NOT lost during transmission. An exact copy of the digitized data is made available by the transport mechanism to the DAC, regardless of transmission conditions. Of course, the sound quality is impacted by the DAC, the amplifer/preamp and the speakers, but the DAC will get the same information to work with regardless of how the digital packets are provided to it. This is not true for an analog process. Perception is a vast topic, and one that has been covered well here. I am by profession a psychologist, and familiar with (but not remotely an expert on) the literature on perception and memory, and how our experience of things like sound is very much mediated by factors other than the energy impacting our ears in the form of sound waves. Experience is CONSTRUCTED by our brains; the bottom line is that we should never trust eyewitness (or earwitness) accounts of anything unless corroborated by hard data, if we're actually interested in the truth. It's why double-blind tests are essential if we are to trust anyone claiming to hear a difference between two signals. R. LMS on a dedicated music server (FitPC2) Transporter (ethernet) - main music listening, Onkyo receiver, Paradigm speakers Duet (wifi) - home theatre 5.1, Sony receiver, Energy speakers Boom 1 (wifi) - workspace Boom 2 (wifi) - various (deck, garage, etc.) Radio (wifi) - home office Touch x 2 - awaiting deployment UE Radio - awaiting deployment Control - 2 Controllers (main listening, home theatre, all others), Squeeze Remote (on Surface Pro 2), Music2Touch (BB Playbook) RonM's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17029 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] What Would You Replace a Transporter With?
Simple answer is get something like a Wandboard + Squeezelite as transport and add the asynchronous USB DAC of your choosing. SqueezeWand | 'Vivere DAC MKI' (http://vivereaudio.com/post/2013/08/16/DAC-I-is-Born!.aspx) | 'ATC SCA2' (http://www.atcloudspeakers.co.uk/hi-fi/electronics/source-pre-amplifiers/sca2/) | 'ATC SCM100ASLT' (http://www.atcloudspeakers.co.uk/hi-fi/loudspeakers/tower-series/scm100aslt/) *'Linux finally gets a great audio tagger' (http://www.ubuntugeek.com/linux-finally-gets-a-great-audio-tagger.html): 'puddletag' (http://puddletag.sourceforge.net/)* - now packaged in most Linux distributions. audiomuze's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=33613 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=100948 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
