|
Computer Audio Asylum Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies. |
|
|
|
Computer Audio Asylum Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies. |
|
In Reply to: You omitted one important detail. posted by carcass93 on August 30, 2014 at 14:04:37:
"For you personally, on your system - what is the result of that simple test with buffer size?"
Well, I don't recall what I may have posted in the past. However, the last time I checked this, my impression was : 1) smaller buffer sizes don't sound worse and 2) smaller buffer sizes probably sound better. I don't like to make definitive statements unless I am prepared to put my life, fortune or sacred honor on the line. :-)
While I am not certain that playing FLAC files doesn't sound worse than playing WAV files, I suspect that is the case on my system. I do not make a practice of playing FLAC files in real time. Instead, my practice is to convert them to WAV and then play the resulting WAV files. I get an additional benefit from this conversion: I store the resulting WAV files in a RAM disk, so I don't have to worry about I/O taking place from my 4 GB piece of spinning rust. While I have not personally heard differences between WAV files that were converted to FLAC and then re-converted back to WAV, I have observed that the two WAV files are not necessarily identical. While they have the same PCM samples the headers are sometimes different. Accordingly, I consider claims that WAV to FLAC and back to WAV produce different sounding files can be valid if the player software is not written appropriately. For this reason, I do not consider Cookie Marenco’s claims to be kooky. (I love the sound quality of her recordings, so I am certain that she has good hearing.)
Unfortunately, that Asus tablet that you suggested I purchase has proven an excellent device for reading documents and I have yet to butcher it up to use it for audio. (Thank you!) It seems to be fairly low power, but not as low power as I would like for an audio transport, probably because of the Intel processor and the use of DRAM instead of static RAM. So if you leave it on standby for a while the battery runs down and then you have to put up with the back of the unit getting warm while recharging the battery. My metric for a system being low noise is the equivalent of one that I came up with for cars in the 1960's. The less power consumption the better. So if you look at power consumption in watts, that's a single number where lower is clearly better. The metric for cars was gas mileage. I figured that worse gas mileage meant less efficiency and hence more wear and tear, and the general rule back then was that one dollar spent on gasoline translated sooner or later into one dollar spent on repairs. (Or more, in the case of my 1965 Lotus Elan.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Follow Ups
- RE: You omitted one important detail. - Tony Lauck 08/30/1418:03:53 08/30/14 (0)
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]