Another Heads up for SB Touch owners...

[WAD62]

Hi Jan,

Cheers for the info...

I've got 2 receivers (one into an additional DAC), and an SB3 (that uses the Burr-Brown PCM1748E which I think is 24/96 capable).

I thought I'd spotted that somewhere, re. the receiver's DAC hi res capabilities. Have you used it at a higher resolution?

I'm using 7.3.3 (SqueezeCenter) on a linux platform, and SoX is conspicous by its absence, what version of SqueezeServer are you using using 7.5? And is SoX bundled in with it, or is it an optional plugin.

Given that the DAC on my main system (Audiolab 8000DAX) is only capable of a maximum of 24/48 upsampling is rather pointless for me at the moment, but it might prove useful in the future.

Edit; One further thought, what are the implications of upsampling via SoX with respect to ReplayGain? (answered my own question below

Edit#2; I also run winamp against the same FLAC library I use for my squeezeboxes, this goes into an M-Audi 2496 soundcard.

There's a SoX input plugin for Winamp, FFSox, now downloaded and installed, with some very interesting results...

Firstly when checking my current playback form the M-Audio mixer I spotted that it was at 48K, I'd used the default settings which was using the Multi media codec and not the stereo one. So after switching to the stereo codec I was back to 44.1, with a noticeable improvement.

FFSoX for winamp page;

http://in-ffsox.sourceforge.net/

FFSoX is an input plugin, which provides not only upsampling capabilities for multiple file types, but also respects replaygain both album & track, and additionaly replaygain pre-amp. So one has to turn these off on the standard playback options, as the 'effect' is already being applied by the input plugin.

I've set the upsampling to 24 bits & 96khz (highest quality conversion), the highest my card will support, along with Album ReplayGain and +3db ReplayGain pre-amp to emulate my previous playback settings, and turning off Winamps own Replaygain processing.

There is a definite improvement in sound quality, particularly in the smoothness of the top end, everything seems more controlled (not in a bad way)...I like it

Not only is it an improvement on the original FLAC, but it is also an improvement on the original CD (which sounds identical to the FLAC). Is it the 24bits or the 96Khz or both? Time for some research

N.B. there is an overall increase of around 10% cpu usage for one stream, so this technique may give rise to a performance issue on the squeezebox server when running multiple clients