Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] PC World - Audiophiles guide to streaming music
Mark Lanctot wrote: Nonreality;355413 Wrote: It could have at least mentioned dbpoweramp Agreed, although there are more than just those two, and the article shouldn't have to go on for 20 pages... and a better overall ripper and converter than EAC. That's a subjective opinion though. Actually, Illustrate makes this claim, and from their perspective it's not entirely subjective. http://www.dbpoweramp.com/secure-ripper.htm ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Flac vs. CD
You can try disabling the native FLAC streaming and let the server decode the file and stream WAV. If this changes things you'll fall into the I hear a difference where one shouldn't exist camp. There are a bunch of folks that belong to this :). 1. SqueezeCenter Settings - Advanced - File Types - FLAC/FLAC = disabled, FLAC/WAV = flac 2. Flip to another song and start playing. If you're using Windows, you should see a process labeled flac.exe in the Task Manager indicating the server decode is operating. - Ken (hearing differences where they shouldn't exist) johan73 wrote: I have changed digital output to fixed Volume Adjustment/Replay Gain was set to No Volume Adjustment to begin with I have now set analog outputs (I guess you mean what is called Preamp Volume Control in SqueeceCenter) to 63 (why would this matter when I only use digital out?) Bit rate limiting was already set to No limits In Advanced File Types: File format Flac, Stream format FLAC was set to Native I think changing the digital output to fixed have improved sound, though I'm not entirely sure yet. (BTW, would a fixed output be equal to adjustable output where volume is set to max?) ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] What is connected to your Transporter?
TP - NHT Xd 2.2 -- Ken Rahaim Ken Rahaim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9526 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33868 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Audiophile Music Server
rhyzome wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wrote: if money was no object what music server would you buy? is olive any good? what others would you recommend. I'm pretty happy with my Macs going out to RME Firefaces. Hook up a Mini to a TV or LCD disp, you've got Front row for easy navigation and iTunes for easy ripping, and you can do other stuff too as a bonus - needn't just be a music server. OS X preserves bit-perfect audio through the playback phase. Never use my Squeezeboxes anymore to be honest. A good friend has a Mac mini set up at his home with a small LCD display and a remote control and I have to say that it's a very compelling setup. While much more expensive than a Squeezebox, the system makes a very nice package with a reasonably small footprint, and the software Apple bundles for controlling the media server is quite good. He and I discussed the differences between that outfit and my Squeezeboxes (I have 3) and the list of advantages provided by the Squeezebox was rather short when compared with the Mini setup. From my perspective, size, price, audio quality and multi-unit control are all the reasons that I'm not trading in my SB's, but I can see the draw of such a system for folks trying to replace a single television/audio control system. The system is rich functionally (audio, video, pictures, Internet) and the interface it provides is nice looking and easy to use. By comparison, the audio-only facilities and two line scrolling text display of the Squeezebox do seem somewhat low tech. As I said, I'm not any less of a fan of my Squeezeboxes, but I'd encourage folks to take a look at these kinds of small computer setups to understand the value they provide. ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Tool to convert flac to wma
It seems as though dbPowerAmp will transcode FLAC to all types of WMA. Check them out at http://www.dbpoweramp.com/. tamanaco wrote: I looked and searched (as much as I could) in the Hydrogenaudio forum and the foobar forum for specific instructions on converting lossless Flac to loosy VBR WMA, but I could not find specific instructions. Is anyone out there using foobar to conver Flac to VBR WMA? If you are, can you please post the version of foobar that you're using and the settings? I'm still waiting for a answer to a post I placed in the MediaCoder forum regarding the error that I'm getting with that tool. There's gotta be a better way to do this. Too many forums... too many posts... too many folks expecting everyone to be an expert. Folks in the Hydrogenaudio forum are not too friendly to those that are searching for answers related to wma. All I get is pressure to switch to mp3 and use Lame. Maybe this is good advise for some, but is not what I want to do. ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Tool to convert flac to wma
funkstar wrote: Robin Bowes Wrote: but it does illustrate that you are not *really* transcoding one format into another, but decoding and then re-encoding. Isn't that what transcoding is? :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Accuracy of EAC
Like most folks, I've taken on faith the accuracy with which Exact Audio Copy rips CDs and have ripped a large number of CDs using it over the past few years. Recently, I picked up a Plextor Plexwriter Premium CD-RW drive primarily to get a much faster ripping speed without (hopefully) loss of accuracy. To my surprise however, I found that the vast majority of rips using the Plextor were bit-wise different from those CDs I had previously ripped with EAC (I used the Foobar 'Bit Compare Tracks' feature to determine this). I was understandably concerned since I was led to believe that Plextools with the Plextor drive was capable of producing extremely accurate results. In reading some forum posts, I ran across references to AccurateRip (www.accuraterip.com) that provides a software plug in for EAC that will compare the rips (CRCs?) to an online database of collected results and report the correlation. I installed this and re-ripped several CDs with EAC, and AccurateRip indicated that the rips were not accurate (confidence value of 1). On the forth of fifth CD it asked if I wanted to use that CD to set the read offsets for the drive (why it didn't do this with the first few CDs is a mystery to me). I did this and found that it had changed the read offset settings in EAC for the drive from 0 to +30. I ripped the CD and lo and behold I received an indication that the rip was accurate (confidence = 9). I re-ripped the previous few CDs and the results from them were also listed as accurate. I compared these files with those from the Plextor drive and sure enough, the decoded audio data in all of them were identical. I took a peek at the Drive Options - Offset/Speed page in EAC and there is a button on the page that will presumably detect the read sample offset for the drive, but unfortunately it states that the drive is not in its database and it does nothing. This result was the same with the other 3 drives I have, and their offsets remained at 0 as well. So it appears that EAC is NOT entirely accurate unless the read offsets are correctly set, and this is not being done by default. Without AccurateRip, I would not have known this, and I would definitely not know what the proper offsets should be. Sigh... - Ken ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Accuracy of EAC
Interesting. This is definitely something I missed. However, I've tried a dozen or so reasonably popular CDs with EAC and none have been recognized as key disks. Is there a list of these someplace? - Ken Mike Anderson wrote: So it appears that EAC is NOT entirely accurate unless the read offsets are correctly set, and this is not being done by default. This is nothing new. You should have read the instructions for setting up EAC beforehand. You're supposed to use a key disc to calibrate the read offset. Somewhere on the hydrogenaudio forum there's a post with the instructions for setting up EAC properly. ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Dropouts ruining my Squeezebox dream
One thing you might try is changing the wireless channel you're using. In my area, I can detect 5 or 6 access points on the default channel my AP uses (channel 11), and switching to a less crowded channel significantly improved the reliability with my SB 1. Ken bec143 wrote: Well I have had my SB2 for a while now, and after eventually deciding that I like my Naim CD player more for regular listening, I have used my SB2 primarily for radio since the Spring. With reports of all sorts of new mods on the horizon, I decided to check out the SB2 compared to my CD again. I should add that I would love to be able to eventually switch completely to a SB2-based system someday. The problem is, I still am plauged with frequent dropouts when playing ripped music, whetehr it's AIFF, Apple lossless, or even just AAC files. This never happens with the radio, and it makes listening to the SB2 nearly impossible, since you never know when it's going to happen. I use Apple Extreme and a 1.5 Mhz G4 as the server, and signal strength as reported by my SB2, never dips below 55%. I have the lattest firmware etc., and have tried everything suggested whrn I brought this up last spring, but now I'm out of things to try. I'm sure this might be cured with a hard-wired system, but its not an option in my house. It will need to be wireless, or just a radio. Any new advances in solving this problem? Thanks, Bruce ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: FLAC onboard decoding v. server side in SB2
Timbo wrote: Hi there folks - I wonder if anyone can comment on my findings here as I think my brain has seized (well it is 1:30am and I shouldn’t be playing with my Squeezebox at this time of night...;-) Anyway after reading all the advice on the forum I eventually settled (after much trial and error!) on EAC for ripping and FLAC for compression (I would prefer to use totally uncompressed WAV or AIFF as I have loads of space and a wired connection to the SB2 - but obviously no tags for WAV show through in SlimServer and as far as I can make out there is no native support in EAC for making AIFF files (unless I missed something?) Anyway, just to check that FLAC really is no different to streaming the uncompressed WAV/AIFF file, I made a FLAC copy of an album (using external compression option in EAC) and a WAV copy (just clicking the WAV button in EAC) so I could compare the audio quality of each. I cued the tracks in FLAC/WAV alternate order in SlimServer and went to have a listen. Instantly I played the first track and then it’s WAV counterpart it was obvious the WAV copy was better! Now I have made sure SlimServer Player Settings/Audio/Bitrate Limiting is on ‘Unlimited’ (see I do read all the posts :-) - but I can tell the difference easily, no lengthy comparison required (although I did plenty of backwards and forwards testing on each track to make sure!) - the WAV file sounds more detailed within the first few seconds of listening. Now as I see here posted (and on Hydrogenaudio) lots of times that ‘lossless’ means ‘lossless and no messing’ so I thought I better look into this a bit further. Obviously one of SB2’s new features is built-in hardware decoding of FLAC on the fly, so looking in Server Settings/File Types I came across lots of ‘convert this to that’ type tick box options - so - I un-ticked FLAC - FLAC (built-in) and made sure FLAC - WAV (flac) was ticked (WAV - WAV ticked also of course). Another set of listening tests later and now I really am confused, there might be a tiny difference, my ears are getting tired now, but it would appear to all intents and purposes that FLAC sounds pretty much the same as WAV...which of course it should really. My conclusion is this (bearing in mind it is late and I might be hearing strange things!) - server side decoding of FLAC and then SlimServer sending the WAV down the line sounds better than SB2 decoding of FLAC on the fly. Anyone else care to try this and let me know what they think? PS. This SB2 is an amazing piece of kit - I have SB2/Chord 64 DAC feeding Meridian 502/557 into Ruark speakers and I am hearing things in the mix I didn’t with my Meridian 508.24 - missing a little subtlety and airiness perhaps but that could be the DAC being a bit forward - Meridian 566.24 DAC on it’s way to check this out :-) Timbo, I discovered this as well a while back and have since used PCM rather than FLAC streaming with my unit. I find that at times the differences are quite apparent, and at others not so much so. Its hard to draw distinct conclusions from less than reproducible results. A more definitive test might be to capture and record the PCM output of the Squeezebox using both types of streaming and then compare the results. I believe that there are PC sound cards that can do this (MAudio is one I believe), but I unfortunately don't own one with such capabilities. At the time I discovered this difference, I posted this result to the newsgroup but was unable to provide anything but a subjective evaluation so the thread quietly died out. However, it's good to know that others can hear the same differences. - Ken ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
