Sorry, I made the impression that I would stop commenting.
And with that I agree. It is not about SQ; SQ is just a variable in the enjoyment of music. And not even the most important one. More important is one’s attitude towards the music and the attention you give it. Good, enjoyable music, is good music. It’s still as good whether it’s encoded as a flac or wav file.
And luckily so; as an example: this singer is just amazing and it’s totally possible to appreciate that despite the less then ideal SQ.
Cool. I knew about Naim’s view; not about Linn in this context. Interestingly (well, maybe) the wav/flac (and wired/wireless) difference on the current Naim boxes is arguable. I doubt my ears/system could tell, and in any case I feed it RAAT by wireless…
Rob Watts knows what he’s talking about having done the research over the course of something like 30 years. For anyone interested, there are a few of his lectures online such as this one: https://youtu.be/BXyjsSYjnL8
Again, we need to stop just believing what we’ve always been told. Watts has proven that the human ear-brain can perceive well beyond what has traditionally thought possible.
Wrong. That’s why I am in the audiophile upper echelons and you are not. I simply build a Siemens-Heisenberg-Tesla Earth rotation compensator field around my house. Now I don’t have to deal with such pesky noises you peasants have to live with all day every day. That’s quite the 200 IQ home improvement don’t you think?
If someone is interest in such a Siemens-Heisenberg-Tesla Earth rotation compensator field which is made of a tri-vibranium-palladium permalloy and only cast at waxing gibbous moon just send me a message. Starting price is at 3.5 million € for a single family home.
Agree on foobar2000. I’ve used it in the distant past to ABX different mp3 bitrates to try to determine my own threshold for transparency so I could create a lossy library for mobile use on my ipods/iphone/ipad. Very simple to do, and requires no other person to help.
This is an important point that often gets missed. In using Roon, the Roon Core converts the music file to PCM, no matter what format it started from, and streams that PCM data to the Roon endpoints. The endpoint doesn’t know that the PCM file began as a FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF file. Making this entire thread somewhat weird. But as someone pointed out, this is the internet.
I was catching up on the forum this morning first thing, was enjoying your thoughtful, science based reply, but almost spit out my coffee when I got to your last line. Thanks for the laugh and getting my Friday morning off to a good start.
1. If we measure the power rail that feeds the main processor in the DS we can clearly see identifiable disturbance patterns due to audio decoding and network activity. These patterns do look different for WAV and FLAC - WAV shows more clearly defined peaks due to regular network activity and processing, while FLAC shows more broadband disturbance due to increased (but more random) processor activity.
2. If we measure the power rails that feed the audio clock and the DAC we see no evidence of any processor related disturbances. There is no measurable difference (down to a noise floor measured in micro-volts) between FLAC and WAV in any of the audio power rails.
3. Highly accurate measurements of clock jitter and audio distortion/noise also show no difference between WAV and FLAC.
The extensive filtering, multi-layered regulation, and careful circuit layout in the DS ensure that there is in excess of 60dB of attenuation across the audio band between the main digital supply, and the supplies that feed the DAC and the audio clock. Further, the audio components themselves add an additional degree of attenuation between their power supply and their output. Direct and indirect measurements confirm that there is no detectable interaction between processor load and audio performance.
The takeaway here is that they optimize out the differences with their hardware. If your playback is from a computer or other device not specifically optimized, differences can be noticed, as per above.
More context from Linn…
If we measure the power rail that feeds the main processor in the DS we can clearly see identifiable disturbance patterns due to audio decoding and network activity. These patterns do look different for WAV and FLAC - WAV shows more clearly defined peaks due to regular network activity and processing, while FLAC shows more broadband disturbance due to increased (but more random) processor activity.*
If we measure the power rails that feed the audio clock and the DAC we see no evidence of any processor related disturbances. There is no measurable difference (down to a noise floor measured in micro-volts) between FLAC and WAV in any of the audio power rails.*
Highly accurate measurements of clock jitter and audio distortion/noise also show no difference between WAV and FLAC.*
The extensive filtering, multi-layered regulation, and careful circuit layout in the DS ensure that there is in excess of 60dB of attenuation across the audio band between the main digital supply, and the supplies that feed the DAC and the audio clock. Further, the audio components themselves add an additional degree of attenuation between their power supply and their output. Direct and indirect measurements confirm that there is no detectable interaction between processor load and audio performance.*
Really? I guess you didn’t read the last paragraph?:
The extensive filtering, multi-layered regulation, and careful circuit layout in the DS ensure that there is in excess of 60dB of attenuation across the audio band between the main digital supply, and the supplies that feed the DAC and the audio clock. Further, the audio components themselves add an additional degree of attenuation between their power supply and their output.
This is not across the board true. It still depends on how you’re playing back through Roon. This is why Roon recommends that the Core and the Output actually be separate devices ideally: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality
Because I run Roon from a computer, I help bridge that gap by using uncompressed lossless tracks (AIFF). Whereas if I was running a separate Roon server, the file format differences would hardly be as noticed, if at all.
Granted, the sound quality difference is subtle, but there nevertheless.
Linn describes a system with a different architecture than Roon’s.
It describes a server that does the file format decoding and contains the DAC and other audio circuitry in the same box, with the same power supply.
Roon is explicitly designed for a different way of working.
A computer with an internal DAC and audio circuitry?
Why?
Wow. If you ears are so sensitive that you can hear the difference between WAV and FLAC, how can you stand using a Chord Hugo TT2? Listening through that DAC was one of the most disappointing audio experiences of my life. The Dave, on the other hand, sounded great.
So you are using your general purpose desktop computer to play music through. So all the processes it runs to do stuff other than music is also destroying whatever advantage you think you are getting by using AIFF.
If you really cared about the sound quality, you would run a dedicated server for audio.
