Spotify at full CD resolution

[Jud]

So, and I hate to use a 3-letter word here, I wonder if it's going to be normal FLAC or similar, or MQA.

[Jud]

I don't particularly care if some bits of MQA content sneak in. I'm far more concerned if there would be plans to use it exclusively. In that respect, I choose to see as a hopeful sign @asdf1000's point that they'd probably refer to MQA as "better than CD."

[Jud]

On 3/19/2021 at 11:54 AM, Samuel T Cogley said:

I love Qobuz, I really do.  BUT, their catalog always disappoints in comparison to Spotify or Apple Music, so I have two audio streaming subscriptions.

 

But the $64,000 question: will Spotify ever have a cross-platform way to deliver bit perfect output to a DAC a la Roon?  If it's a mobile-only solution, I'll stick with Qobuz and Apple Music.

 

I don't have a Spotify subscription. What artists/albums do you listen to that they have and Qobuz doesn't?

[Jud]

8 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

Umm ... the players deliver the bits to the DAC, which does the DA conversion.  Players that do not mangle the bits, i.e. that deliver a bit-perfect stream, all "sound" the same.

 

I suppose, unless there is some difference in the player processing with regard to noise delivered to the DAC, for instance differences in the ways various players utilize memory. I believe something like this may have been the subject of @manisandher's "Red or Blue Pill" thread, where he was able to get 9 of 10 trials correct for one difference. (I didn't read the entire thread, just isolated snippets, so I'm not totally sure.)

 

But in any case, you have at least a couple of alternatives: Have the player "mangle" the bits and deliver them to the DAC's final analog filter as they came from the player; or have the DAC's internal digital filtering "mangle" them before delivering them to the DAC's final analog filter.

[Jud]

6 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Bit identical can sound different when jitter is large enough or noise is large enough, there's no doubt. The red/blue pill test was predicated on an obscure software setting in XXHighEnd configured to an extreme value that even the author didn't recommend using. That, at least in theory, could have had an effect on jitter which wasn't measured.

 

Was the "obscure software setting" SFS?

[Jud]

4 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Don't recall the details, I assume @manisandher does. I remember Peter trying to explain it, but failing. It seemed to have something do with chunking of data in memory, sizes of blocks read from disk, or sizes of blocks being output to audio, or something like that. At least on the surface this sounded like it could affect timing/jitter where the DAC depends on the input from the PC to derive sample clock.

 

 

Yep, sounds like SFS.  There have been many, many quite long threads on Peter's forum devoted to that "obscure" setting.

 

The hypothesis is that different noise profiles are created by the app fetching smaller chunks of data more often, versus bigger chunks less often.  There was a discussion several years ago between Gordon Rankin and John Swenson on Computer Audio Asylum about this.

 

Whether there's anything to it I don't know. I do note the DAC Mani used in the test had an async USB input.

[Jud]

Though as the OP I started this tangent in my own thread 😊, I think further posts along these lines probably belong in the following thread, where Paul and Mani, among others, are tracking down variations in frequency response in a DAC->ADC chain caused by two different memory handling settings (and only that change) in a single software player: