Sound differences

[Peter@57m]

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.

[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.

[Kingpin]

(05-02-2013 18:50)simoncn Wrote:  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.

I also think this is it !

There is more 'strange' about this player:
http://hddaudio.net/viewtopic.php?id=91

But this can be the hearing differences.
There are a lot of conversions between the original file and the analog output ...

[Peter@57m]

(05-02-2013 18:50)simoncn Wrote:  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.

Simon - in truth I haven't done a lot of listening with Flac. If you remember I had all my music as wav and tagged using MediaMonkey. However I wanted to try MinimServer (and Lumin) and so converted everything to Flac after I found out about the wav24 option.
So I was really a wav believer and the wav24 option allowed me to use MinimServer

[Alekz]

(05-02-2013 16:56)simoncn Wrote:  In the MinimServer vs. EMM comparisons where MinimServer sounded "brighter", was MinimServer doing wav24 transcoding? Was EMM also doing 24-bit WAV transcoding?

Does the same "brightness" difference apply when comparing MinimServer streaming native FLAC and EMM streaming native FLAC?

The comparison was made using 24/96 FLAC files transcoded to WAV "on the fly". So, apples to apples. But 16/44.1 files sound also brighter on Minim. foobar2000 is somewhere in between.

[simoncn]

(05-02-2013 23:33)Alekz Wrote:  The comparison was made using 24/96 FLAC files transcoded to WAV "on the fly". So, apples to apples. But 16/44.1 files sound also brighter on Minim. foobar2000 is somewhere in between.

It would be interesting to do an offline conversion from FLAC to WAV and stream the same converted WAV file from both MinimServer and EMM to see if the "brightness" difference is still there. If so, this would indicate that the "brightness" difference isn't caused by transcoding but by some other factor.

[Alekz]

Very good point! Asked in the PSA forum. I can't test that at the moment.

[Kingpin]

(06-02-2013 00:18)simoncn Wrote:  It would be interesting to do an offline conversion from FLAC to WAV and stream the same converted WAV file from both MinimServer and EMM to see if the "brightness" difference is still there. If so, this would indicate that the "brightness" difference isn't caused by transcoding but by some other factor.

That's a good point, i will asked this also in the other forum!

[jvilly]

Did anyone test this, yet? I am just really curious

[Kingpin]

(16-02-2013 18:31)jvilly Wrote:  Did anyone test this, yet? I am just really curious

Me too. I asked them to do this but heard nothing again from them.