watchnerd
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2008
- Posts
- 2,093
- Likes
- 775
When I'm in my office/studio my signal chain is pretty simple (Mac Mini & NAS -> (maybe an interface if I'm editing, otherwise not) -> Mjolnir 2 -> either headphones or monitor speakers).
But this is the signal chain for my living room, on the other side of my house:
After that it goes through a W4S Remedy re-clocker, then into a W4S mPRE (DAC/preamp), then off to the mono block power amps and the speakers.
Some points this brings up:
1. The entire process is glitch free >99.99% of the time (i.e. I can go over 20 hours of listening before it has a hiccup). No audio dropouts or digital distortion.
2. The process to queue the 1st song up and have things start playing takes 5-10 seconds. After that, the player (Roon) is smart about pre-loading the next tracks into RAM and there are no lags.
3. FLAC, ALAC doesn't matter. Sample-rate conversion happens on the fly. As does bit-depth truncation. Then it streams it...that's 4 separate computation steps that the software performs on the fly.
First of all, we may not have flying cars, but readily and inexpensively available technology can do all this. That's pretty damn amazing.
Then some science questions:
1. Why would anyone who listens to a lot of streaming invest in an R2R DAC when the files have been transcoded so many times?
And yet I read things like "Spotify sounded so much more [insert adjective here] when I used [R2R DAC] name here, I could tell it was closer to the original sound."
2. Why would anyone think fancy USB cables matter when you can do this...on the fly...over the air...?
3. How in the world could fiddling with process priorities make a difference when the computer in the other room can do all this...all with sub 15% process utilization?
But this is the signal chain for my living room, on the other side of my house:
After that it goes through a W4S Remedy re-clocker, then into a W4S mPRE (DAC/preamp), then off to the mono block power amps and the speakers.
Some points this brings up:
1. The entire process is glitch free >99.99% of the time (i.e. I can go over 20 hours of listening before it has a hiccup). No audio dropouts or digital distortion.
2. The process to queue the 1st song up and have things start playing takes 5-10 seconds. After that, the player (Roon) is smart about pre-loading the next tracks into RAM and there are no lags.
3. FLAC, ALAC doesn't matter. Sample-rate conversion happens on the fly. As does bit-depth truncation. Then it streams it...that's 4 separate computation steps that the software performs on the fly.
First of all, we may not have flying cars, but readily and inexpensively available technology can do all this. That's pretty damn amazing.
Then some science questions:
1. Why would anyone who listens to a lot of streaming invest in an R2R DAC when the files have been transcoded so many times?
And yet I read things like "Spotify sounded so much more [insert adjective here] when I used [R2R DAC] name here, I could tell it was closer to the original sound."
2. Why would anyone think fancy USB cables matter when you can do this...on the fly...over the air...?
3. How in the world could fiddling with process priorities make a difference when the computer in the other room can do all this...all with sub 15% process utilization?
