Quote Originally Posted by StanleyB View Post
There are so many variables to think of, I have started to get paranoid about the quality of the individual audio files that I have in my library. I'll probably do a write up on various technical aspects of things that I found out compared to what is generally talked about. But I might end up turning others paranoid as well...

The reason I typed the above is because the quality of the original file will affect the quality of the playback. Less forgiving decoding can quickly make a bad quality file sound bad, whilst a more forgiving decoding system can still make a poor audio file sound reasonably acceptable. Whether you use USB or optical is down to personal taste in any carefully assembled audio system. I myself prefer playing back some tunes via USB, whilst others sound nicer to me from optical. I don't so much use "better" as my reference, but "nicer".
I'd be interested to know your thoughts on this. I only discovered recently when playing around with the config file on my Zen that there are various compression rates for Flac (1-9?), and the default is usually 5. I reduced mine to 1 and thought it sounded marginally better.

There's also an optional volume equaliser setting (and I'm talking about the music signal, not metadata) which would be even worse I imagine.

The former caused some controversy on the Wam when I posted (I think I was in a minority of 1 in thinking there's an issue). I don't think anyone believed me about the latter, every time I tried to explain they kept saying don't worry it's just metadata (but that has a separate setting of its own in the config file).

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