Everyone who actually listened to The TT2 rates it very highly and it’s got a lot more power for to hard drive headphones than the DAVE. Don’t get me wrong, the DAVE is a great DAC, but it’s amp section cannot drive all headphones well.
Plus, any Chord fan knows that all Chord products sound good, even the Mojo, [Moderated].
You can’t have it both ways. You say the minimal processor cycles it takes to decompress FLAC negatively affects what you hear coming out of your speakers versus AIFF. If that is true, then the multitude of processes running on your Mac, all using processor cycles, must negatively affect the sound coming out of your speakers at least as much and likely much more.
You lose all credibility when you put together arguments with such huge holes!
That is just plain false…
Roon runs in exclusive mode to the DAC and the computer is usually not doing much of anything else. Speaking of credibility, I’m one who bases things on my own experience, not what someone else says. Again, my set up sounds great and I’ve had the Roon Nucleus before. Maybe it’s due to the M Scaler with it’s primed galvanic isolation or whatever, but I know what I hear.
I’ll add that everyone who thinks there is no difference between the compressed lossless and uncompressed lossless, has already been proven wrong in this thread by multiple people, not just myself, but including Roon themselves, and others.
So, you’re wrong. [Moderated]
If the M Scaler usb input is isolated, and it’s being fed RAAT, it really shouldn’t matter whether the source file is flac or wav or whatever… but given you do hear a difference, have you considered the possibility that your computer is modulating the mains supply and affecting the analogue stages of your amplification?
I don’t think any Roon employee has responded in this thread, so I am not sure what you mean by this. If there is, please provide a link.
No one has proven anything to anyone. You hear a difference. Personally, I do not. And I did a lot of testing before converting 2 TB of WAV to FLAC.
I doubt a computer can modulate the mains power supply, that seems far-fetched. Plus, the Mac is sometimes running off the battery and the audio quality remains the same.
For anyone curious-you can run the Roon core on a computer and get near (the same for me) audio quality as a server with these steps from Roon - https://kb.roonlabs.com/Sound_Quality_in_One_Computer
Use uncompressed lossless files and you’re golden.
Oh, it can… but if you’ve done the critical comparison and no change… could be RFI… you’re not running tubes are you?
You’re the one who said he’d do a blind ABX test of AIFF vs ALAC. We’re still waiting for your results…
If I can find an app that actually works for an ABX text, I’ll certainly do it but I don’t know why you care what I think anyways. You have your own ears, do the test yourself. Hear no difference, you’re good to go. Everyone hears differently anyways.
ABXTester.app works fine. You just need to grant it access to the music files you want to ABX (in System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Files and Folders). See Apple’s Support Page.
Nope, it’s not compatible with Catalina. I heard back from the guy in Japan who wrote it. Have to wait for an update.
Ok. (So do I, btw. I have used the M-Scaler over USB from the Nucleus, now use it through a MicroRendu because it’s in a different room.)
My point was, a USB connection is a completely different architecture from what Linn is talking about. Your quote is irrelevant to your argument.
No it’s not. they, Linn, state there’s an inherent audio quality difference between the FLAC and WAV files, which backs up what I have been saying precisely.
What does exclusive mode have to do with the what the processor is doing outside of Roon? Also, “not doing much of anything else” is more than what Roon does when decompressing FLAC.
How does what Roon does on your MAC decompressing FLAC make it through the legendary M Scaler with galvanically isolated inputs and outputs to your Hugo TT2? Based on what Rob says, that should not be possible.
Look, if you want to believe this fantasy that AIFF is better than FLAC, go ahead. But your “technical” arguments are fallacious at best. What you say makes not sense when viewed from a technical perspective.
That’s the problem. Isn’t it?
I mean, when I drop some cheap blotter, I have amazing experiences. Usually. But they are not evaluations of… well, of anything, really. A proper evaluation has to be based on more than an experience.
No, that is not what Linn says. In regard to power rails in the DS, Linn says that “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.” They go on to say “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.”
How you get “inherent audio quality difference between the FLAC and WAV files” is beyond me.
