Sound quality comparison

[DavidHB]

(24-08-2014 19:21)simoncn Wrote:  I thought the original question was whether it sounds better to play a file ripped as WAV or a file transcoded to WAV. I have not heard any difference between these.

The discussion seems to have moved on to whether it sounds better to play a FLAC file without transcoding or with WAV transcoding. With my renderer (a Linn DS), it sounds better with WAV transcoding and better still with WAV24 transcoding.

Fair point, Simon. I was trying to generalise based on my own experience of transcoding rather than to move the discussion to another point; apologies to the OP if I started a red herring.

It seems reasonable to surmise that there is unlikely to be much if any difference in SQ between a 'ready ripped' WAV file and its transcoded counterpart, as the player will surely see them as the same thing and deal with them in the same way. Your experience would bear this out.

It is possible to imagine that, because the server presumably has to do more work with the transcoded version, there might be timing differences between the versions as the respective streams arrive at the player. But players typically use buffering to deal with such differences (which can arise from a number of causes), and also (at least in the case of the Linn models you and I use) the player 'locks' the incoming network stream to the clock in its own DAC. These player processes should remove any difference between identically formatted streams.

The differences we both hear between differently formatted streams would then, on this logic, be a function of the format rather than of transcoding as such. Sadly, I cannot think of any means by which we could objectively validate this interesting speculation ...

David