I hear you DB ! That thought often crosses my addled mind too.
The best switch is no switch at all ?
When it goes wrong - I get frustrated at the more complex Streaming solution of many inter-working boxes to find out what is happening.
When it is all working fine (most or the time) then it is an overall better musical experience is how I find it.
I’m always cautions of changing things that ‘work’ until I hear the ‘better’ experience’ comprehensively enough that I get the subconscious urge/want that it is the way to go. I’d not really had that with Streaming until a few years back and was happy with the superb performance the CD555 gives which seemed to blow-away the Streamer systems.
That did change so I migrated to Streaming - but the simple ‘one box’ solution has a lot of strengths. If something goes wrong then it is very clear what is happening and what to get fixed.
DB.
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The problem with streaming is that it is not as stable as a CD … on a good day it sounds perfect. CD always sounds the same… despite the devices and cables we invest around the streamer even when they are expensive… still frustrating
Conversly I find now I am streaming with the ND555 vs Cd555 the system sounds more stable and has less bad days. I also find that almost all of the dull lifeless sounding CDs have been brought to life. Everything sounds good vs 50/50 on the CD555 where some recordings sounded amazing and other just poor. I am yet to find a poor sounding recording on the ND555. Obviously some are still better than others but streaming has breathed new life into some CD’s for sure. Maybe as simple as the playing surface had degraded over time and reading the data was harder… who knows!
Really? I would have expected just the opposite!
By the way, I do not think that it makes much sense to convert whole libraries to a format that happens to sound (at a given point in time, in a given setup) better (than other formats) on a specific device. Just transcode on the fly to that format.
Transcode…how?
Every decent UPnP server can transcode from FLAC to WAV, AIFF or vice versa. I do not know which UPnP server you use. In MinimServer, I just set flac:wav in the stream.transcode field, see
I’m not using Minim tried it free in the past,prefer Twonky in terms of sound
I would expect Twonky to also support transcoding but I have no first-hand experience with this server.
The point that I was trying to make is that it doesn’t make sense (to me) to convert a whole library to optimize the sound quality for a specific network/player/streamer. Just take what you have and transcode it on the fly to the format that (currently) best matches your network/player/streamer.
No they don’t use transcode… I used to transcode with Minim when I tried it for free but went back to Twonky …before Melco I used on my pc Asset media transcode all to wav in my view I think Asset is the best media server…