But the way I come to conclusions like one version (player) is better than the other is as follows.
I listen music at work as a background. You can call me
but I simply get paranoid when the sound is not right. I experience anxiety attacks. And after an hour of listening to a bad player (and I blame it all on jitter I get in the end) I get an urge to get the phones off my head and runaway.
So I cannot describe it in terms of soundstage, sorry, I just don't have the systems most of you, audiophiles, have.
So the less discomfort I feel the better player is for me. And also I remember how my vinyl records sounded back in 80-90's. I spent so much time listening to it in the evenings before going to sleep and enjoying it very much. So the closer the player to that the better.
About five years ago I started to recollect my music collection I had back then. And of course in mp3
. Then bought an entry level hi fi system. Played around with interconnects and cables. Realized that cd player is very dependant on the CD print quality while the data on it is the same, and I found out that here is jitter. Then I realized that I need lossless from off PC to my system.
Then my sound card was not the best one. Then not every player sounds good and everything in OS influences the SQ. Then tried Linux with its ALSA and mplayer and xmmplayer and jack. And actually the fact that there are too many variables on the PC made me sad
. But I did not want to return to a CD player.
Then I read somewhere a forum post that somebody (it was you Peter) stripped down linux and ran his own very light player and that irregularities in supplying data to the sound card dac is as important as (results in more) jitter. Then I thought to myself that's a way to go. But did not have time to go there myself.
And now I see that You finally found a way how to overcome all those variables that influence the SQ on the PC side.
Congratulations on that!
The last thing I tried was Slim devices SB3 and it does not compare to 0.9d. BTW I did some blind tests with SB (which I shared to slimdevices forum members) where I could tell flac codec was working inside SB or a pure wav stream was playing. So I think I can hear something even without a great analog tract. I did the tests in my shure 210 earplugs
It was all to show how I tell a better player (to me) form worse.
Thank you
And I hope I did not give you a headache with this post