[slim] Which format puts heaviest demand on SB?
I want to be able to stress test and am curious as to which of the audio formats would provide a heavy load on the SB3? Would it be FLAC, since the SB3 would have to uncompress a large audio stream before playing? Thanks! -- joek joek's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3318 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=20825 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Which format puts heaviest demand on SB?
joek wrote: I want to be able to stress test and am curious as to which of the audio formats would provide a heavy load on the SB3? Would it be FLAC, since the SB3 would have to uncompress a large audio stream before playing? What do you mean by stress? The CPU runs all the time. If it is doing more useful work, say uncompressing a FLAC stream, do you consider that stress? the cycles were going to happen anyway, electrons would move, etc. FLAC was designed to be easy to uncompress by very low capabilities systems. Feeding a stream of bytes to a D-to-A convertor makes the DA do something, but that is what it was designed to do. The SlimServer is much more likely to get stressed, and only when driving lots of SBs in parallel. I'm not sure what stress is to a dumb box like a SqueezeBox. Its a slim device, after all. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Which format puts heaviest demand on SB?
Pat answered most of your other questions, but I guess you should qualify: load on the system in terms of bandwidth required or load on the Squeezebox CPU? For bandwidth, it would be WAV: completely uncompressed, full bitrate, 1440 kbps. Note that FLAC was designed to be very easy to decode, placing most of the processing power requirement on the encoding step. It's assumed that a track will be encoded on a typical PC, so the encoding emphasis was on compression rather than efficiency. Once compressed, the format is designed to be extremely easy to decompress. Even though no hardware FLAC players existed at the time of its creation, the FLAC developers realized that the efficiency would have to be concentrated on the decoding first and foremost. Thanks to that forward thinking, the Squeezebox can play FLAC with only modest demands on its 250 MHz RISC processor. joek wrote: I want to be able to stress test and am curious as to which of the audio formats would provide a heavy load on the SB3? Would it be FLAC, since the SB3 would have to uncompress a large audio stream before playing? Thanks! -- ___ Mark Lanctot ___ __ Find your next car at http://autos.yahoo.ca ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
