This is a really odd one: A friend of mine is using a Wandboard Quad as his server and player, feeding his receiver via the Wandboard's built-in optical S/PDIF output.
It plays DTS material just fine, which would seem to suggest that the output is, as expected, bit-perfect.
But...standard PCM material has a very obvious muffling/rolloff of the highs. I don't mean some kind of we-had-to-strain-to-hear-the-difference self-proclaimed audiophile nonsense, but in fact a very obvious and non-subtle rolloff. We tried multiple tests to make sure we weren't nuts including syncing two players (the other a Pi via HDMI) and switching back and forth. The difference was blatant.
Thinking there may have been some odd setting going on in his receiver, we played a CD on a standard CD player and, via the Wandboard, a rip of the same CD with no alteration (i.e., ReplayGain turned off). We moved the same optical cable back and forth between the Wandboard and the CD player and again the difference was quite obvious.
How is this even *possible*? I can understand how maybe the optical output of the Wandboard could go bad, though in that case I'd expect the incredibly delicate DTS stream to just produce noise. Certainly neither LMS nor Squeezelite would even know the difference between PCM and DTS, so they wouldn't be doing something different with the output depending on what was getting played.
I've got multiple Wandboards myself and have never experienced anything like this. When he told me about it over the phone I smugly thought either he was crazy or his receiver was doing something, but after the CD player test I'm convinced that there really is a problem...I just can't figure out what it could possibly be!
Any ideas?
It plays DTS material just fine, which would seem to suggest that the output is, as expected, bit-perfect.
But...standard PCM material has a very obvious muffling/rolloff of the highs. I don't mean some kind of we-had-to-strain-to-hear-the-difference self-proclaimed audiophile nonsense, but in fact a very obvious and non-subtle rolloff. We tried multiple tests to make sure we weren't nuts including syncing two players (the other a Pi via HDMI) and switching back and forth. The difference was blatant.
Thinking there may have been some odd setting going on in his receiver, we played a CD on a standard CD player and, via the Wandboard, a rip of the same CD with no alteration (i.e., ReplayGain turned off). We moved the same optical cable back and forth between the Wandboard and the CD player and again the difference was quite obvious.
How is this even *possible*? I can understand how maybe the optical output of the Wandboard could go bad, though in that case I'd expect the incredibly delicate DTS stream to just produce noise. Certainly neither LMS nor Squeezelite would even know the difference between PCM and DTS, so they wouldn't be doing something different with the output depending on what was getting played.
I've got multiple Wandboards myself and have never experienced anything like this. When he told me about it over the phone I smugly thought either he was crazy or his receiver was doing something, but after the CD player test I'm convinced that there really is a problem...I just can't figure out what it could possibly be!
Any ideas?