Author Topic: Getting best sound from 16/44: Laptop vs CD  (Read 19472 times)

Offline drewshifi

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Re: Getting best sound from 16/44: Laptop vs CD
« Reply #15 on: March 21, 2015, 01:16:08 PM »
My experiences after another few days of fooling around:

1. JRiver
Bypasses the Eastern Electric DAC driver with its own audio driver, and alters the octave to octave balance.  Resulting sound is slightly exaggerated in both treble and bass.  I did not look for JRiver EQ options.

Also, some tracks ripped to wav files on my USB drive did not show up on the JRiver track lists.

2. Tidal.com, Streaming FLAC. 
On my setup, this is not ready for prime time.  Switching between FLAC and low bit AAC compression inside Tidal made no difference in the output, which sounded like highly compressed digital.  Part of the problem is that Tidal sources are not all lossless, so that if you pick an artist or track, you don't know the quality of the source material. 

I could not get CD quality sound from any track.
Could not find a lot of my favorite music.
Dropouts occurred about 1x per song, which is also pretty disturbing.  I am cancelling the service.

Conclusion:  Not for me at this time.  Maybe you mileage will vary.

3. Windows Media Player + EE Dac driver: 
Finally, listened to ripped wav files through WMP for a couple hours (till my puter battery ran out of juice).  Sound as good or better than CD transport/SPDIF.  Really nice.  But WMP is clunky for searches.

Started reseach into Sonos + NAS drives, but that will probably wait for a bit.  Anybody have experience streaming wav files through NAS/wifi/Sonus with SPIF output?

Interesting stuff.  Right now I am leaning towards buying a new CD transport as a stopgap measure till I get this puter stuff sorted out.