Sound differences

[simoncn]

(05-02-2013 18:33)Peter@57m Wrote:  A few years ago I was uisng a Chordette Gem to receive music from an iPod Clasic with a aptx bluetooth dongle. I played around with apple lossless and wav files and found wav much superior.
I mentioned this to Chord while at a Bristol HiFi show. They said they had discssed ths with apple who admitted that the iPod did not have the processing power to unpack compressed files without it affecting sound quality. I don't know the specifics behind this.
Now I know this is an extreme example and did not involve Mininserver or Linn. But I believe it could point to a difference between the Linn handling wav vs other formats. I hope my Linn Klimax has enough processing power to unpack flac without it impacting the sound, but who knows. The fact it has to do it means there is a difference between how it handles flac vs wav.
I could guess about 16 vs 24 bit. But what if the Linn upsamples all formats to 24 bit. Then again it would be doing just little more work when receiving 16 bit files vs 24 bit. My QNAP 459 NAS has a decent processor and never uses above 10% of CPU when serving music including flac to wav24 transcoding on the fly. So hopefully does not adversely affect the sound and this is confirmed from what I hear.
I believe I hear a small difference between flac and wav24 received by the Linn. But its small. I cannot readily hear it when swapping back and forth but if I don't use wav24 for a while, I feel there is something missing. The music doesn't grab my attention quite the same way.

This all makes sense to me.

The Linn DS upsamples all input internally to 24-bit 352.8 kHz or 384kHz using a custom FPGA, then feeds this upsampled data to the Wolfson WM8741 DAC. There could be some small difference in the internal code path within the DS that does the upsampling for 16-bit inputs vs. 24-bit inputs.

I hear the same difference as you do between FLAC and wav24. For me, the difference is consistent and immediately noticeable on familiar material.