xandcg wrote:

I am not surprised this kind of bizarre affirmation coming from a guy whom aim to live of royalties from copyrighted material. WAV or WAVE (aka Audio for Windows) is owned by Microsoft and IBM, and AIFF is owned by Apple Inc. I do not know the current legal state of WAV, but if you want to commercialize AIFF audio files you shall pay royalties for Apple. And you probably will only really know how it works (if it do modify or not the data) if you do some agreement with Apple. Flac is open source (GNU GPL) a kind of license called copyleft. What basically means you pay nothing to distribute Flac material, and depending on what you (he) do code-wise with it this code also became GNU GPL automatically... Flac is not indeed a "file format", it is just a contender. If you use compression (yes, you can do it without using compression), a md5 hash will be taken from the original data -> it will be inserted into the Flac contender. When you play it, it will be uncompressed -> a md5 hash will be taken again, but now from the uncompressed data -> the md5 hashes (of original file and the uncompressed one) will be compared -> if everything match the file will play, otherwise it is marked as corrupt. There is no difference between the original PCM data and the uncompressed one (not even a single bit) unless it was made by some weird custom software/algorithm instead of the Flac one. It is indeed more easily to have the file damaged during a download from the internet (or while you copy it from one storage device to another) than on the Flac compress/decompress activity, because most internet downloads (and copy tools) do not hash the data and compare them later. If you really want to make a test, get any raw PCM data (or any other data) -> create a md5/sha256/sha512 hash of it (store/write the result) -> compress to Flac (or even 7z, what is the most aggressive compression algorithm commonly available) -> decompress -> do the hash again, but now against the uncompressed data -> compare the result of both hashes. Cheers!

xandcg wrote:

Amir, I did an update in the previous post. Why using so old mpd? The current mpd version is 0.20.6!

xandcg wrote:

Are you running that script on the fly? If you are concerned with added load that script add in a lot more load than the flac decompression.

Charlie Hansen: "All of this can be boiled down to a simple phrase. “All of the problems with digital are analog problems.”

This is the primary reason that digital audio has taken so many decades to come close to the sound of analog.

Gordon Rankin: "But since digital audio is a streaming system, the timing of the bits is critical. If the bit changes to the correct state but at the wrong time, this is equivalent to changing to the wrong level at the correct time.

Another area to tackle is what is referred to as signal integrity. The signal leaves a transistor or IC chip and it has to make its way across the PC board, component-by-component so that the signal is degraded as little as possible. When you are talking about what makes one transport a “good sounding” one, again we are talking about treating so-called “digital” products as very high speed analog circuits. The clock frequencies in these units are typically between 10 and 100 MHz. When considering a square wave, a convenient rule of thumb is that the bandwidth must extend in both direction (higher and lower frequencies) by a factor of at least 10x to preserve the waveform fidelity.
So designing a high performance digital circuit means that you are essentially designing high performance analog circuits that have a bandwidth extending up to at least 100 MHz, and in some cases all the way to 1 GHz. The traditional rules of PCB layout connectors, signal routing, ground planes, solder joints, PCB materials, and even PCB coatings break down at these high frequencies."

Amir wrote:

it seems digital design is harder than analog design. good Q&A Charles Hansen, Gordon Rankin: http://www.audiostream.com/content/draft#Jwd0w77ZLMYORVJa.97 http://www.audiostream.com/content/theres-no-such-thing-digital-conversation-charles-hansen-gordon-rankin-and-steve-silberman-p#HKAQvHqIkeqmVDhM.97 Charlie Hansen: "All of this can be boiled down to a simple phrase. “All of the problems with digital are analog problems.” This is the primary reason that digital audio has taken so many decades to come close to the sound of analog. The thing to remember is that digital systems are not immune to degradation due to noise. They tend to be much more highly resistant to noise than analog systems, but noise in any system will cause performance degradations." Gordon Rankin: "But since digital audio is a streaming system, the timing of the bits is critical. If the bit changes to the correct state but at the wrong time, this is equivalent to changing to the wrong level at the correct time. Another area to tackle is what is referred to as signal integrity. The signal leaves a transistor or IC chip and it has to make its way across the PC board, component-by-component so that the signal is degraded as little as possible. When you are talking about what makes one transport a “good sounding” one, again we are talking about treating so-called “digital” products as very high speed analog circuits. The clock frequencies in these units are typically between 10 and 100 MHz. When considering a square wave, a convenient rule of thumb is that the bandwidth must extend in both direction (higher and lower frequencies) by a factor of at least 10x to preserve the waveform fidelity. So designing a high performance digital circuit means that you are essentially designing high performance analog circuits that have a bandwidth extending up to at least 100 MHz, and in some cases all the way to 1 GHz. The traditional rules of PCB layout connectors, signal routing, ground planes, solder joints, PCB materials, and even PCB coatings break down at these high frequencies."

rowuk wrote:

It seems that brainlessness knows no limits. Both Mr. Hansen and Mr. Rankin speak nonsense. Wasting time on text like this is like reading the brochures from extreme audio equipment. All the things that "audiophiles" expect someone to say, get said with absolutely no indication that they understand what they are talking about.

martinshorn wrote:

hi Amir Ive been experimenting for long with this till i discovered it can be so easy and cheap.  Just get a isolation transformator and an HF blocker. In this order respectively, for the pc only. Available for small money from industrial purpose, 2nd hand.  Got plenty of DC and scam in my industry city as well as routers and chinese switching supplies at home. Running the worst and the most sensitive devices isolated like above, its 100% clean (in relevant dimensions).  CheersJosh

Max Shatsky wrote:

Amir, You can try to connect Toslink cable to your MacBook headphone jack, if your model supports this. In my case, it made a huge difference vs the USB interface. And then you can compare it to Toslink output from your CEC. Unfortunately, different software players sound different.  Max.