I said I do hear a difference between networked SBS or TinySC, at this point I don't know for sure why. It MAY be different data, but I don't think so. Phil's test will prove that one way or the other.
If the bits are identical then "proving" it gets hard. At this level of quality (I DID say the touch's outputs are very good didn't I?) finding iron clad causal relationships between measured signal parameters and perceived sound gets difficult, the differences in the signals are very small. By the time you get sensitive enough instruments to measure the small differences you have a lot of noise sources riding on top of things. It seems the human perception system can be affected by very small amounts of certain types of distortions even when they seem to be swamped by other distortions and noise. Unfortunately we don't know what these are so its hard to come up with filters in the measuring systems to match. The point of all that was that if you want hard measurement data that proves it, you are probably not going to get it. That leaves what people hear. Thats much more difficult to "prove". What brought all this up was a change in the firmware several weeks ago that at least for me brought an improvement in sound quality. This had nothing to do with the USB interface, I was listening on headphones plugged in directly to the Touch. The developers said they had done nothing to change the audio processing. But they did say they had done some major re-writes improving the overall efficiency and "speed" of the code. Since TinySC adds a lot of extra processing I decided to try it and see if I could hear a difference, and yes I could, some of the extra WOW that happened with the firmware change was gone. I then tried it with the USB DAC connection and I heard the same thing. The network server did sound better. The primary areas of difference are in soundstaging and ambiance, reverberation. So this is somewhat recording dependent. The biggest differences are in recordings recorded live in reverberant spaces. The sense of space of the performance, the "you are thereness" is decreased somewhat with the local server. I have heard this before in other low power linux systems. Two audio players, both outputting the same bits, can sound significantly different. In most cases the simpler one with smaller, tighter loops winds up sounding better. Before someone asks me to come up with measurements to prove it, I'll reiterate, I can't. And this is not just me, there are many other people hearing these same sorts of things with different software and identical bits. I can't give you a proven mechanism for this. Does this mean everybody who hears these things is deluding themselves? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know yet. Remember that either way the sound form the Touch is still way better than from an SB3 or SBR, so even if you do go with a local server its still a good thing. If what I'm hearing holds true its a choice you have to make if getting the best sound possible out of the Touch is important for you. Its just another trade off people obsessed with getting the best sound have to go through. Also remember that the firmware is still changing significantly and since all this started with what I heard at a firmware change, things may be different at ship date. I hope they manage to preserve the improvements I heard, but who knows what will happen. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=70979 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
