Hi folks, this place has become more and more of a resource for me so figured I should get off my backside and register. I'm an active participant over on the wam but the PC is becoming a more and more important factor for me and there is still so much on the computer audio front that I have yet to get to grips with.
Won't bore you with the ins and outs of my kit and experience, other than I've been through my fair share (more than...) of high end kit over the years - if you're interested :
I'd originally posted this over on the Wam and it's turned into a bit of a rant so I thought I'd post this here and change tack a little towards the 'how can I improve my streaming'
In short, I've been off physical media for about 5 years now and during a recent bake-off I had a bit of a shock.
A couple of attenees brought CD transports as I only have streaming PC based music now so couldn't accomodate playing CDs without them. One a Nagra, the other a MF A1 CD pro, both very well regarded transports - both were fed with coax spdif into the same DAC, an Audiolab M-DAC.
I was using a Squeezebox Touch, streaming Apple lossless files from a dedicated PC server - again feeding via coax spdif into the same DAC.
As there are two coax inputs it was a pretty simple affair to AB between the same track, which we did on the Nagra. It was a huge difference, it sounded much crisper, etched, detailed, perhaps a bit toppy by comparison but definitely the 'better' sound. And this just doesn't compute, what the hell, its the same disc, the same DAC, just the 1s and 0s coming into it could possibly be different. I rip every CD on it's highest settings using EAC and a non-buffered drive. I rip directly to FLAC in EAC and then use DBPoweramp pro to perform the simple switch over to Apple lossless. (I use this by the way as I've been using Itunes for ages, did tons of comparisons with Foobar, WASAPI, ASIO, etc etc and found feck all difference so switched back to the SBT. I've also still got all the FLACs and compared those with Apple lossless and couldn't hear a noticeable difference either).
I've had the Transporter, then moved to a dedicated server and itunes, been through a multitude of DACs which all brought tiny changes compared to the difference with the Nagra.
So, WTF is going on? Would really appreciate your comments, I'm still of the opinion that ANY transport could not be better then a properly implemented streamer, it just couldn't do the read on the fly better than EAC having multiple attempts..... Or am I wrong in this? Is it what happens to those bits during reads, ie the Nagra DOES do it better in one pass than EAC on a dedicated drive can 10 times (in which case I'm screwed as my whole library is ripped the same way..) or is it what happens to those bits during their passage to the DAC - in which case I need a better streamer....
The various questions I addressed were also on whether I had all the replay gain disabled etc - I do, and have toolbox installed etc.
All bloody frustrating, and I guess the conclusion at the mo is that I should look for something a bit more upmarket, so I'm open to suggestions on where to look next to significantly better the SBT.
cheers folks!
Steve
