Vortexbox serving WAV files

[Falcon Eddie]

Sarcasm: Open up wide, aVB4myHIFI or Dan, and take your medicine like a good boy....and you'll like it too! It is a shame when some things have to come to this. It appears to me that everything from "soup to nuts" is being decided for us that it is best and the result are these decisions are being forced fed to all of us whether we like it or not or whether it is right or wrong or both. It seems to just be based on the my way or the highway or if you don't like it I'll take my football home with me cliches. There are groups of people in every industry, for either good or bad, that try and convince any one of us that our ideas basically suck and there is only one way to do things and it is their particular way and here are the reasons for it. So many decisions are being made for us everyday on the assumptions what is good for one is good for the all/rest of us. There are some boundaries that are sacred to some people but/and not to others. This is true whether it is false or not. I think your suggestion has some merit. It is a step in a right direction.

[beeka]

This is actually not true. There is a processor in the Naim as in all network players that decodes the sound and sends it to the DAC. There in no difference in the amount of electrical noise decoding a FLAC or WAV. When you are decoding FALC the stream is not linear so you need to buffer it correctly to make sure your not introducing jitter. May players from the low end Logitech Touch to high end $15K+ players have code that does this very well.

Audiophile hi-fi is more than tech specs - quite often in an unhelpful way. I don't see how a £150 digital cable can give a better picture than a £1.50 one but there are enough people do to keep expensive cable manufacturers in business. The changes to the sound are more touchy-feely than quantative and the apparently logical reasons are equally slight. However there is usually some basis in fact - the variability in decoding a FLAC stream would cause a difference in emitted EMI compared to a WAV but I wouldn't expect this to affect the sound in any sane streamer design. I can't have the PSU for my Dell laptop anywhere near the hi-fi as the sound is abysmal and the effect is not subtle - it sounds like loading a Spectrum 48k game and you can hear when the mouse is moved - so I can see (hear?) why some might think it could cause a difference.

Your saying that because Naim refuses to optimize their code that we should write code make up for it? I'm not sure we should write special code just for one player. We would need to be very careful when writing the conversion code as to not introduce jitter in the VortexBox. Wouldn't it be better to get the player manufacture to just fix their unit to work with standard files?

Personally, I think the Naim code is just fine and can't see a reason to make a special case for the player. But I see no harm in providing some configuration options for those that want it. For example, making the choice of data source easier to change (IIRC, miniDLNA is defaulted to serve MP3) and supporting WAV streaming.

When FLAC files were first introduced they got a bad reputation with Audiophiles because many players could not play them as well as WAVs. Now virtually all the players out there can play FLACs as well as WAVs and Audiophiles can finally have one standard format to store their files.

I don't understand why FLAC support isn't everywhere: why is it so difficult to get Windows to understand the format when the code and IP is free? This is a more logical reason for a manufacturer ripping WAVs - disk space is cheap and it works everywhere.

Regards,

Steve.

[coyrls]

Naim users could also consider using Serviio for the DLNA server instead of minidlna. Serviio has transcoding options that may help. See How To Install the Serviio DLNA Server

Going back to the question of how, for whatever reason, you could transcode on the fly from FLAC to wav with a DLNA server on Vortexbox, based on a brief view of the Serviio documentation, I can't see that it could be done with Serviio. I have however found a description here: http://mediatomb.cc/pages/transcoding that describes how to do it with Mediatomb and an explanation here: http://info.vortexbox.org/tiki-index...stallMediaTomb of how to install Mediatomb on a Vortexbox. So it looks like you could serve wav transcoded on the fly from FLAC files by a DLNA server running on Vortexbox.

I haven't tried it because I don't need this feature and I wouldn't expect to see it included as standard but it doesn't look too difficult to do.

[aVB4myHifi]

coyris - thank you very much for that information, I will look into it. As I found out yesterday you can also run Asset UPnP on Mac OSX using CrossOver. That might be another option to consider, although I do like the idea of storing my music on a dedicated NAS or VB and not having to start up my MBP every time I want to listen to music. Cheers!

[sonorejr]

Team, why not drop some wav files into a folder and point Vortexbox's Logitech Media Server to it and have it DLNA to the device your using...

Jesus R

[Falcon Eddie]

Good one, sonorejr. That is an option to try out. I might try a folder or two out just for laughs and see how the file size differentiate, if any, between the wave rip and the uncompressed option in dbP. I think that uncompressed option in dbP is relatively new. One could use dbPoweramp to rip those to wave and/or a person could also use the lossless "uncompressed" option too and see what one thinks. I use the "uncompressed" option in dbP which allows for tags. I made an error before when I mentioned I used Flac "0" which still does use compression. I should have known better than to say that as I had to go back and convert 1/3 of my rips back to "uncompressed" when I discovered the option because I'm a geek about it.

[Falcon Eddie]

I am going to plant this link for aVB4myHIFI as it expands more on what I posted above about the dbP program, a couple screenshots, and a brief discussion on the new "uncompressed" encoding option . In short, according to this presenter, the uncompressed option here encodes to wave pcm. This probably answers my own question about whether there are visible differentiations between the two types because he already appears to show an example of ripping to wav and uncompressed in his screenshot. It appears cc with metadata included. You supposedly can have your cake and and polish it off too. Worth some more investigation if you are so inclined to be geekie enough!

p.s. wait...what happened to the link....the geek that I am forgot to plant it...I shot myself in the foot....crap, now I've now got cake on my face too.....hehehe..hehe!

http://www.audiostream.com/content/d...wish-come-true

[sonorejr]

Team, this is something you should all read
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/bl...-Final-Results

Jesus R

[Ron Olsen]

Team, this is something you should all read
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/bl...-Final-Results

Jesus R

Thanks for the link, Jesus. Of note is this final comment:

In conclusion, using my ears and measurement software, on my system, I cannot hear or (significantly) measure any difference between FLAC and WAV. Not only just file formats, but the rest of the audio playback chain as well.

Anyone claiming that WAV sounds better than FLAC must be able to pass a blind listening test to verify their belief. Sighted listening tests are NOT valid. See J. J. Johnston's remarks from 1:05 to 5:20 in the Audio Myths Workshop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ

[aVB4myHifi]

Thanks everyone for the intersting contributions! I downloaded free trial versions of dbPoweramp and Asset UPnP onto an old laptop of mine and will be doing a number of tests streaming various formats to my ND5XS over the upcoming weekend. I'll let you know of the outcome once done...