Advantages of MinimStreamer

[DavidHB]

As there is an important distinction to make, we probably ought to discuss terminology first. When MinimServer/MinimStreamer presents your FLAC files to the player/renderer as, say, WAV24, it is transcoding rather than converting. The FLAC files on the server are unchanged, but are streamed in the different format.

What is the advantage of doing this? The only one I know is sound quality. You will find many reports on this forum and elsewhere (including reports from Simon himself) that with transcoding the sound is more 'open' and 'clearer'. Of course sound quality is very much a matter of individual judgement and experience, and the effect of transcoding will no doubt be different on different systems. So you need to experiment for yourself and make your own judgement. If it doesn't work for you, you can always switch it off.

Why does transcoding change the sound quality, if it does? I don't think this is fully understood. What we do know is that streamed music often sounds better than the same track played direct from the CD because the system has less to do when the digital data is already, as it were, pre-read. We also know that sound quality is affected by tiny differences in timing ('jitter') and that different formats require different amounts of processing effort to render them as input to the DAC. These and other factors will, I guess, mean that the behaviour of each system may well be subtly different in a number of complex ways, and presenting the music stream to the player in a different format may have a bearing on some of these subtle differences. This is why, in the present state of understanding, it is best to just try transcoding on your system, and see if it makes a difference.

I use FLAC to WAV24 transcoding on my system, and think that it makes a noticeable if not dramatic difference. It's a no cost option, so that is fine by me.

David