Lossy and compressed MQA sounds better than lossless and uncompressed AIFF?
local is better than streaming.
When you made your judgements in the squeezebox ecosystem did you realize that LMS by default streams WAV and AIFF as compressed FLAC? That is to say by default LMS converts uncompressed sources to compressed before sending them to the endpoint?
yes, but my files were already ripped as AIFF. i started with computer audio very early, used iTunes with an external USB dac. moved to networked audio later.
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iâm not 100% certain this has always been the case, since the Transporter, for example, plays AIFF natively.
and in any case, FLAC is not a file format, itâs a container, so one can have FLAC-AIFF and FLAC-Wav, etc.
my point, made above, is the local files sounded better than streaming files.
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Iâm pretty sure it was the case since the earliest squeeze boxes, let alone the Transporter. Compressing WAV or AIFF to FLAC before sending to an endpoint made even more sense then than it does now, as wifi bandwidth was less and doing so roughly halved network traffic. Sure the Transporter (and the Touch) can and could play WAV and AIFF natively, but unless you changed settings on LMS, WAV and AIFF would be compressed to FLAC before being sent. Many people who made claims about WAV sounding better than FLAC on a Touch or Transporter fell silent when this was pointed out.
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relative to this thread, iâm unclear what point youâre trying to make.
That people should be sceptical when other people make sweeping, unqualified statements about the sound quality of one format versus another, especially (as in the case of your experience with the Squeezebox) they may not even have been listening to the format they thought they were.
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What, in your view, is a sweeping unqualified statement? Especially when the writer is talking about extensive listening experiences of his own. What then would you classify as a âqualifiedâ statement (Iâm curious)?
It concerns me that on the one hand, there is a trend to dismiss expert opinion (highly experienced mastering and recording engineers) as ârelying on authorityâ. But here we seem to be dismissing experienced listeners. And then we also dismiss novice listeners as not qualified enough. So whose opinions are actually acceptable?
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To quote but one example.
local is better than streaming.
------To quote but one example.
But actually this has been said over and over, by many people. On this as well as other forums. Itâs a very common user experience, and for that reason has to be taken seriously, meaning there is a technical reason behind it. That doesnât mean it is universally true; whatever the technical cause is, there may be other situations in which it doesnât surface, or the system is unresolving enough that differences are not obvious.
The fact that someone states this as his experience doesnât make it a sweeping unqualified statement. In statistics, itâs one point on the data curve.
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I had an opinion once but I was told I was wrong.
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Yeah, far enough Raz, in context, I was thinking of new Turntable, amp and speakers as my old system was dated and i saved for two years. Some of the prices for just a turntable are eye boggling. Turned out the Room correction in Dirac taught me the speakers were fine
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Ha Ha, everyoneâs entitled to there opinion.
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Hiya Simon. For clarity, I did not mean to be cheeky and donât want to be misunderstood 
The M10 is over ÂŁ2k here and by my standards, not a budget system Great piece of kit and my main setup.
Did you get a turntable for it?
or perhaps folks should not make sweeping statements about how someone had their file transcoding setup:
Thatâs an LMS settings page from ten or more years ago when the Transporter was current? Or squeezeserver as it would have been then. Really?
LMS; this is from ~5 years ago i believe.
⌠to be honest - I just hooked up my Esoteric X-05 CDP (amazing machine it still is!) and played redbook CDs - beats streaming every time! Now I do enjoy streaming a lot - but I di not think that the SQ is as great as people like to believe. Thus I can accept that local may sound better. But maybe thats because the ripped CD comes from a different master tham the streaming file⌠who knowsâŚ