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107.77.200.4
Been toying with the idea of music server (Raspberry Pi in particular) and wondered how the quality of the digital outputs from todays offerings may compare to that of a Squeezebox 2? I ask because I never found the overall sound quality of playing my ripped CD's as FLAC files sent through my SB2 to my then DAC (a Theta Pro Basic, sometimes with a Genesis Lens in front) to be any better than spinning the actual CD's. I'm not sure that they even sounded equal to playing the CD's, but it was never better. What might I expect in today's digital player landscape?
marc g. - audiophile by day, music lover by night
Follow Ups:
The reason that you never found the Digital Stream better than a CD is because the CD is also a Digital Stream. It's basically the same information stored on a CD (Plastic Disk) vs. your CD stored on a Hard Drive..... So, you should not hear much of a difference.
Once you understand that Digital Music is sent through a DAC on your CD Player just like streamed music is sent to an external DAC, you are playing with a small minutia of differences.
If you want Larger Differences in Sound Quality, Look at upgrading your speakers or Amplifiers..... Or as Everyone eventually finds out..... Your Room Acoustics.
Cut-Throat
Yes and no. When you play a cd, the timing for the "stream" is based on the actual spinning disk. The motor, servos and error correction all affect the quality of the timing; i.e., this is where jitter comes from. The Redbook standard laid out what parameters were minimum requirements and there could be some variation among players. One reason people flocked to the Radioshack portable was that it seemed to improve on some element of timing and had lower jitter in an era when nobody was paying much attention. When Linn introduced the CD12 Sondek, it used novel read methods and apparently the timing of the "stream" wasn't tied to the spinning disk. People went bananas over the improved sound. Computers use cd-rom-style data readout and when you play from a computer hard drive the data ic cloked out in frames that are not explicitly tied to the timing of a rotating disk. There is ample room for improvements in jitter because of that alone. The SB2 wasn't a very good digital transport. It was inexpensive, didn't have much decoupling and probably had as much or mire jitter than a typical inexpensive cd player of the day. What you get nowadays is a lot more attention paid to the grounds, transformer decoupling and precision clocking. I'm sure Fred won't be able to resist jumping in with some pedantry here so perhaps you will get even more information.
Edits: 03/30/17
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