Upsampling to 176.4/192 and transcoding

[simoncn]

(28-12-2012 15:11)Alekz Wrote:  When your player upsamples or does any conversions/transcodings it uses the internal CPU and the internal power supply, what eventually will affect the sound (via EMI or power contamination). So it might be better to offload all calculations to an external device. I tried upsampling in SqueezeServer via sox and got some slight but consistent improvements in clarity/noise floor/glare.

Interesting thing is that the servers "sound" differently. We compared PS Audio eLyrics server, foobar2000 and Minim servers with transcoding and got different (sonically) results. I prefer Minim (a bit brighter, but in my system it sounds a tad more dynamic and involving). My wife said that eLyrics is more dull but may sound more coherent but also you can easily ignore the music. Foobar2000 is somewhere in between. The sonic differences also confirmed by PS-Audio forum members.

I know that eLyrics uses ffmpeg to transcode to WAV. And I'm not sure if it's possible to transcode FLAC into different WAVs, since FLAC is lossless and bit-perfect.

MinimServer provides the option to transcode FLAC to either 16-bit WAV or 24-bit WAV. In your listening tests, did you try MinimServer with 16-bit WAV or 24-bit WAV?

MinimServer is using the JFLAC library to do the transcoding. I've checked that the audio signature of the transcoded WAV file matches the audio signature of the original FLAC file.

I'm not convinced that EMI or power issues would affect the sound of the transcoded data. I think any differences are more likely to be caused by transcoding algorithms or by differences in how network packets are transmitted.