PC audio is it the next best thing?

woodsyi · « **Reply #40 on:** 1 May 2007, 01:16 pm »

Why do I hear a difference?

Everything I know about digital file transfer (admittedly not much) tells me that there shouldn't be any difference. It should work the same and the only difference should manifest as catastrophic failure. i.e. drop out. But no.

Damn me if I don't hear a difference. I hear a fuller sound. I must me hearing things. Holy crap! Some body save me from the hallucination. It just can't be. I must be going crazy. Oh dear quaquaquaqua, why must I be punished with this unthinkable afflliction -- the dreaded audio irationalism. Go ahead you DBXers and the acolytes of Ayn Rand. Excoriate me. Castigate me. Castrate my audio jewels and cast me out of the eden of audio ennui. Let me walk the road of shame flagellating my back with a zip cord strand.

I even asked my wife to listen and she said Joni Mitchell's voices were fuller and warmer wired....

Marbles · « **Reply #41 on:** 1 May 2007, 01:28 pm »

Which is better, wired, wireless?

Thanks

mcgsxr · « **Reply #42 on:** 1 May 2007, 01:29 pm »

When I get another PC, I will try wired, vs wireless, and will report what I hear. It is not likely to happen anytime soon, but I am the kind of guy who is firmly subjective, and will try to get my IT training out of my head, around how TCP/IP functions etc.

In any case, I do think that PC Audio is the next big thing, and with the advent of SB3, Roku, Olive, etc, it appears to be broaching the mainstream, for folks who care about sound, and are not looking for portable music.

GHM · « **Reply #43 on:** 1 May 2007, 01:30 pm »

Quote from: Carlman on 1 May 2007, 12:54 pm

I'm always entertained when people say bits are bits. While this may be true at some point in time and space, the entire chain needs to be considered. Playing a .flac file through a Squeezebox sounds a little different than playing the same file through Foobar on an Audio PC in my experience. I wouldn't doubt that wired vs. wireless SB's make a difference too.

I'd rather try to figure how there 'could' be a difference and not focus on why there 'shouldn't' be one. The latter is too easy.

I have found the 'original' recipe of Foobar and EAC properly setup and configured on an Audio PC with all the tweaks you can find (unmapping Kmixer, etc) sounds a little better to me than a Squeezebox or Transporter. I use the PC as a transport and use a USB Tube DAC (from Scott Nixon) at the moment. It's a magical combo. The sound from a hard drive provides the jitter-free near-analog foundation and the other tweaks provide extension and realism I never thought I could have....

Best of luck,
Carl

I haven't played with the SB3s..but O'boy you read my mind! We must be listening to similar PC systems or something.

I agree USB tubed Dac + Foobar + error correcting rips = amazing sounds !

woodsyi · « **Reply #44 on:** 1 May 2007, 01:33 pm »

Quote from: Marbles on 1 May 2007, 01:28 pm

Which is better, wired, wireless?

Thanks

Wired sounds fuller to me (and my wife).

lcrim · « **Reply #45 on:** 1 May 2007, 01:47 pm »

Very interesting thread as it has turned out. It isn't bits is bits, its wired ethernet vs. wireless ethernet. The SB does buffer all incoming packets, whether they are transmitted over copper or over the air. Are the buffers the same? Is there anything different in the topology between wired and wireless? I run entirely wirelessly w/ my two SB's and Slimserver. I have no reason to believe that Rim and his wife don't hear a difference but I can't account a physical reason for it.

GHM · « **Reply #46 on:** 1 May 2007, 01:59 pm »

I would guess this falls in the realm of why transports sound different. I for one do not have the answer,but I can't deny that transports do indeed sound different. The bits are bits claim just doesn't hold much water in audiophile land.

mcgsxr · « **Reply #47 on:** 1 May 2007, 02:08 pm »

Well, bits is bits is not quite what we are talking about, though it is related...

I think I am digging my own hole here!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(audio_CD_standard) - Redbook bits definition

http://mike.passwall.com/networking/tcppacket.html - TCP bits definition

Oh god, I am sure I am out of my depth now!

GHM · « **Reply #48 on:** 1 May 2007, 02:20 pm »

Quote from: mcgsxr on 1 May 2007, 02:08 pm

Well, bits is bits is not quite what we are talking about, though it is related...

I think I am digging my own hole here!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(audio_CD_standard) - Redbook bits definition

http://mike.passwall.com/networking/tcppacket.html - TCP bits definition

Oh god, I am sure I am out of my depth now!

Thanks for the links. I understand what you're trying to say. It's basically what Mr.Van Alstine claims with his Dacs and his theory of why transports should be the same. I know he's a designer of audio gear. And certainly more technically inclined than I am. He looks at audio from a strictly scientific point of view.

That's the crazy thing about this hobby.Once your ears recognize the differences. There's no going back across that fence.

DSK · « **Reply #49 on:** 1 May 2007, 02:39 pm »

If I understand correctly, the SB's wireless receiver is effectively turned off or inoperative when the ethernet cable is used .... perhaps this is causing less RFI inside the SB to contaminate the delicate audio signal

zybar · « **Reply #50 on:** 1 May 2007, 03:48 pm »

Quote from: woodsyi on 1 May 2007, 01:33 pm

Quote from: Marbles on 1 May 2007, 01:28 pm
Which is better, wired, wireless?

Thanks

Wired sounds fuller to me (and my wife).

Thanks Rim.

Looks like it is time to break out the 50' cable and compare.

George

Carlman · « **Reply #51 on:** 1 May 2007, 07:41 pm »

Rim's results mirror mine when I did my A/B test of the SB3's... but it was a few months ago and it wasn't very scientific... so I could've done something wrong... but wired sounded better with the same difference... it was a richer or 'more real' sound to me.

I also compared playing files in Foobar using files on various PC's around my house... I used the same file and copied it to every shared drive in the house... and then queued each song and compared all 4 locations/hard drives... they all DID sound the same... so there are some sane results out there if you look hard enough.

-C

opaqueice · « **Reply #52 on:** 2 May 2007, 12:07 am »

Bits is bits can be wrong logic when we're talking about S/PDIF, because that's a synchronous digital signal - that is, the bits are sent in real time, and the clock for the DAC is reconstructed from the timing of those bits. Small differences in their arrival times (jitter) result in a distorted signal.

The way the SB3 functions is completely different. Bits really are bits, at least in so far as insulating the SB3 from the source goes. The packets that arrive at the SB3 don't contain anything like an S/PDIF signal - they contain (typically) FLAC encoded audio data in a TCP/IP packet wrapper - in english, a sequence of 1s and 0s that is many times removed from the analogue signal. After checking those packets for errors, the SB decodes them into an audio stream and sends that to its DAC (or to the digital out), along with a locally generated clock signal. There is no way jitter in the signal chain anywhere upstream from the SB can affect this process.

That does not imply wired is identical to wireless - for example, the SB's CPU will have different processing tasks in those two cases, or you might have mis-calibrated slimserver to lossily compress the audio sent over wireless, or many more possibilities. So you can worry about that if you want - personally, I don't. You may also find this thread relevant:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=14811

Please read posts numbers 1 and 35.

lonewolfny42 · « **Reply #53 on:** 5 May 2007, 05:02 am »

Any more results of the wired vs wireless SB comparisons...soundwise ?? Thanks....

tomjtx · « **Reply #54 on:** 5 May 2007, 10:04 am »

I tried wired and didn't hear a difference.

But I have tweaked the slim server settings to not transcode alac to mp3.

By default slim has the option to do that so you have to change that setting.

That is one possible explanation some people hear a difference?

JLM · « **Reply #55 on:** 5 May 2007, 11:12 am »

I mentioned somewhere around AC a year ago that I thought wired sounded marginally better. I'd stumbled into trying it as the SB was receiving marginal signal strength from the wireless network located 2 floors up. But I was laughed off at that time. So maybe I'm not as crazy as everyone thinks?

Double Ugly · « **Reply #56 on:** 5 May 2007, 01:14 pm »

Quote from: tomjtx on 5 May 2007, 10:04 am

But I have tweaked the slim server settings to not transcode alac to mp3.

By default slim has the option to do that so you have to change that setting.

That is one possible explanation some people hear a difference?

And a very reasonable explanation it is, but it was not the case in my experience.

-Jim

Tweaker · « **Reply #57 on:** 5 May 2007, 05:16 pm »

Damn you all. I just read this thread and now find compelled to hard wire my squeezebox to see if I can hear a difference. Of course you all now realize if it's discovered that there is that this opens the door to ethernet cable swapping and Oxygen free copper cryo-treated cat 6 cable.
I have a spare cat 6 and it's a Belkin "High performance #R7J704-BLU Type CM 4pair UTP 24AWG Stranded FT4. I probably paid about $4.00 for a 20 foot length. How much do you think Audioquest will charge for theirs?
Damn you all...

opaqueice · « **Reply #58 on:** 5 May 2007, 05:23 pm »

Let me just recommend that, if you hear a difference, you try sleepysurf's method in the thread I linked to above. Have your wife or husband or friend or whoever switch back and forth randomly out of your sight, and see how well you do.

He heard a "night and day" difference knowing it was wired, but guessed correctly just 4/10 times blind. It's worth checking before you go to a lot of trouble. Personally I couldn't hear any difference.

audioengr · « **Reply #59 on:** 6 May 2007, 05:49 pm »

Quote from: opaqueice on 2 May 2007, 12:07 am

The way the SB3 functions is completely different. Bits really are bits, at least in so far as insulating the SB3 from the source goes. The packets that arrive at the SB3 don't contain anything like an S/PDIF signal - they contain (typically) FLAC encoded audio data in a TCP/IP packet wrapper - in english, a sequence of 1s and 0s that is many times removed from the analogue signal. After checking those packets for errors, the SB decodes them into an audio stream and sends that to its DAC (or to the digital out), along with a locally generated clock signal. There is no way jitter in the signal chain anywhere upstream from the SB can affect this process.

Absolutely true. This is what makes networked (not wireless) streaming audio interesting and superior technically to USB or Firewire etc...

However, jitter is still significant from the SB, and this is because of:

1) encoding and decoding of S/PDIF (uses PLL)
2) jittery clock in the SB itself
3) power noise in the SB
4) non-ideal S/PDIF interface and signal path design

These things can all be improved with mods or redesign in a new SB4 for instance. They can also be totally eliminated with a reclocker that provides a master clock to the SB. This is a more interesting solution IMO. This way, the S/PDIF stream from the SB can be very jittery and I dont care, because it will be reclocked anyway. The reclocker would not generate S/PDIF output either. This just adds jitter back in, so it's counterproductive. It would have I2S output.

Steve N.