SB high rez through digital outs

Audio Gear Talk Squeezebox
1

I still find many of the high rez discussions confusing.

I have an Sb Classic that i would like to use with an external DAC. I know the Classic DAC will not play high rez. However, i was wondering whether the Classic can stream high rez to a DAC that can play high rez? I assume no, but would love to know the answer.

Thanks much.

2

From memory only the SBT can be made to pass through > 24/96, with the EDO applet installed, The SB3 can probably pass through up to 24/48.

1 Like
3

Don’t try to hard. Interesting read:
https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

4

A very flawed article (from 2012) dressed up in science-speke. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet…

5

Could you please tell me what is flawed in this article.
And being from 2012 is not a problem for me, the human ear didn’t change in the last 4 years, only the audiophile gurus get more creative with their promises of salvation.

6

TBH, it would take a long time (which I don’t have - you will have to do your own research). In short:

  1. Our ears haven’t changed, but our understanding of the human auditory system has changed in the last five to ten years due to the insights from neuroscience – the author of that blog (and many others) does not consider what the brain does with ears (plural); the brain works magic with two ears :slight_smile: .

  2. The unfortunately very influential Mayer-Moran paper – which claimed to prove that humans could not distinguish the benefits of greater than 1x sampling rates – has been thoroughly de-bunked (Jackson, Capp, Stuart, The audibility of typical digital audio filters in a high-fidelity playback system, AES Convention Paper 9174, which won that convention’s award for best peer-reviewed paper).

  3. As discussed in that paper, ABX listening tests are also flawed. On this latter point, I will simply quote from it. Unfortunately, one of the main reasons is statistical (i.e. difficult to understand for the layperson), but no less real:

ABX tests have a high sensitivity, that is, the proportion of true-positive results out of total positive results is high. However, ABX tests also have low specificity, meaning that the proportion of true-negative results out of total negative results can be spuriously low. Translating this into outcomes in psychophysical tests, the proportion of the time that a listener scores well on an ABX test by chance is low, but the proportion of the time that a listener can score poorly on a test in spite of being able to discriminate the sounds is high.

[Further] An ABX test requires that a listener retains all three sounds in working memory, and that they perform a minimum of two pair-wise comparisons (A with X and B with X), after which the correct response must be given; this results in the cognitive load for an ABX test being high.

7

I thought it could pass 24/192 with EDO?

8

I think that’s what evand said!

In short:

  • Everything apart from Transporter and Touch is limited to 48kHz (though I’m not 100% sure about the Radio).
  • Transporter is limited to 96kHz. (it can also do the important 88kHz, though this isn’t listed in the Wiki below).
  • Touch is ordinarily limited to 96kHz, unless you install the EDO plugin, in which case, it can do 192kHz on it’s USB output.

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Hardware_comparison

9

I don’t doubt that the SB3 will not stream high rez through its digital out. However, as I understand it, the wiki page linked above shows max sample rates for the dac not the stream through the digital out. I understand that dads have limits to what they convert. I do not understand why the streaming function would have the same limitation. Why is the streamer so limited? Just wondering.

Thanks for the input.

BTW, I could not love Roon more. What an upgrade from LMS.