In article , Richard
Kimber
wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 12:11:02 +0100, Jim Lesurf wrote:

What's curious about that is that sox should convert with no changes
in the values when 'reconstituted' back into LPCM. So either you'd
added a scaling or the player was up to something akin to the problem
I reported.

Did you just use something as simple as

sox in.wav out.flac

to do the conversion?

It was quite a long time ago (when I first saw reference to this in
HFN), but as far as I can remember, yes that's what I did.

And what playing software did you use?

I streamed the files to a Pioneer N-50 using minidlna using a wired
connection.

I don't have any experience with 'streamers' of that kind. I just play or
record on the basis that the player or recorder read or write the file.
Given that I *assume* the flac file is read by the N-50 and that's what
turns it into LPCM or whatever to output the eventual analogue signals. On
that basis it looks like the N-50 is scaling flac and wave differently.

This may be quite understandable as the device doing the conversion may
simply scale values in some way for some reason - e.g. shy of clipping
during the format conversion processing - which then means the outcome
differs from the LPCM that the flac file data represented. As I guess
you'll know, *correctly done*, wave - flac - should give a result
identical to the original. Alas, 'should' may not mean 'does' in all cases
with real devices, programs, etc. :-/

So it does look like an example of where a setup might cause an 'innocent'
reviewer would say "wave is better than flac" as a general conclusion
rather than "slightly louder sounded better" because they didn't check.

I've also lost count of reviewers saying 'DSD sounds better than LPCM' even
for the same source, and when many ADCs and DACs may use low bit
(essentially DSD) anyway. Such confusions between container and contained
are rife, alas. No help to the poor readers.

Jim


Jim

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