duke43j

Wow! I can’t believe you went to the trouble of duplicating my system to evaluate the sound. You guys are amazing. So, it looks like the Mark Levinson did NOT adequately eliminate the jitter. That is surprising since it was a $6K unit when it was new, and I think it uses an oven controlled clock. Maybe the unit I had deteriorated over the years, or maybe it’s just old technology. Thanks Rick. I think my next step is to try a more modern DAC with the SB3. If that still doesn’t work, then I need to step up to a Mac server. Thanks again for the help.

Hi everyone. I didn’t realize I would get such an enthusiastic response. That’s great! Thanks for the help. Unfortunately, my Rega Apollo doesn’t have a digital output, so I couldn’t feed it to the ML DAC for comparison. I did connect a 5 year old el-cheapo DVD player to the ML DAC and it sounded better than the SB3 – ML DAC combo, but not as good as the analog out of my Rega. The DVD – ML DAC sounded thinner in the mid range and upper bass than the Rega, although the bass did seem quicker with the ML. Maybe it’s more a matter of preference, but I liked the warmer, richer sound of the Rega. The SB3 – ML DAC was definitely a step down. The instruments didn’t pop out at me; they seemed one dimensional. The notes seemed to decay faster; they didn’t “ring” as much. I was not happy with the sound. I used Exact Audio Copy to rip the CDs to FLAC files. I don’t know much about the software settings, but it seemed to work OK. I noticed that I did get some errors on some of the tracks (e.g. 99.9% correct). I don’t know if this is normal or not. I agree with Steve that the data packets shouldn’t have an effect on sound quality. If there is a problem with the data transfer I would think it would show up as dropouts or skips, not tonality. It’s the jitter going into the actual D/A chip that needs to be regulated precisely. I was under the assumption that any decent DAC would reclock the input to virtually eliminate jitter problems. But, based on Rick’s comments, maybe that is not a good assumption. The only experience I have with outboard DACs is the Mark Levinson 36s that I had for a couple of days. Do you think I would see better results with a more modern DAC? Or, am I going in the wrong direction entirely with the SB3? Incidentally, my system consists of Rega Apollo CD player --> VTL 2.5 preamp --> Classe’ CA-100 100 W/Chan Amp --> Thiel CS 2.4 speakers

Hi everyone. I just stumbled upon this website and found it very interesting. I’ve been a hi-fi nut for many years, but I only recently have been able to afford a decent rig (just when my hearing is starting to go). I recently purchased a Squeezebox 3 and absolutely fell in love with the convenience of having all my music at my fingertips. The sound of the SB3 is surprisingly good considering its cost, but it doesn’t compare to my Rega Apollo CD player. So now I’m on a crusade to find out how to get the convenience of the SB3 without sacrificing sound quality. After reading some of your comments it seems that this may be the place I can get some help. My first thought to improve sound quality was to feed the digital (spdif) output of the SB3 to a decent DAC. My local hi-fi shop was kind enough to loan me a used Mark Levinson 36s DAC for a few days. This is an older DAC, but highly rated in its day. With the ML DAC in the system the sound quality improved, but it still wasn’t up to my Rega CD player. Just for kicks, I connected the spdif output from a decidedly lo-fi DVD player to the ML DAC. The sound was noticeably better than the SB3 – DAC combination. This absolutely baffled me! Why would the digital bits from a DVD player be any different than the digital bits from the SB3? I’ve got several theories, but I don’t really like any of them: 1) The PC software that does the FLAC compression somehow drops the least significant bits during the arithmetic. I find this hard to believe because it would be so easy for the software designer to check (i.e. by comparing the original file with the compressed/decompressed file). 2) Bit errors get introduced in my 80 foot length of Cat 5 cable from my PC to the SB3. I don’t think this is happening because I’m not hearing any dropouts or skips in the music (due to packets being discarded for failing the error check). Besides, the entire tune is affected (i.e. narrower soundstage, notes don’t “ring” as much, etc.). It’s not something that happens just now and then. 3) The software in the SB3 somehow drops the LSBs during its processing to convert the FLAC/ethernet data to PCM/spdif data. This seems to be the most plausible theory, but I would discount this for the same reason stated above. 4) The SB3 introduces jitter in the spdif output that is beyond the ability of the ML DAC to handle. I find this hard to believe because the ML DAC has excellent jitter suppression. It has a FIFO that accepts the incoming data stream and clocks it out using a very stable clock. Besides, the SB3’s internal DAC seems to handle the jitter reasonably well without the elaborate jitter suppression scheme of the ML DAC. Does anybody have an idea what is happening here? From previous posts it appears that some of you think the Squeezebox is the culprit, but I can’t figure out why. I would hate to spend money on another music server or Mac without having some confidence that it will be any better than what I’ve got.