Support and General Use > Audio Playback, Database and Playlists
FLAC sound on Sansa Clip+
Yard-Ape:
Greetings,
After some fatigue a minute into a FLAC track ("Snake As Road Sign" by Evan Parker on the album "Atlanta"), I experimented, and discovered that the Sansa stock firmware plays the track with much greater clarity and much less upper-mid distortion than Rockbox does. The staging and lower end resonance is also superior with the stock firmware. I flattened out the EQ and defaulted all the other settings I could find. I tested with and without amplification. I'm using Rockbox 3.9.
I was surprised at this, and I expect some incredulity here, but I trust my ears on this occasion at least (I've been a musician for 30 years and my hearing is at least not very poor). All things being equal I can't normally tell the difference between FLAC and 320kbps Lame mp3 files with the kind of hardware I use; anything lower than 192kbps usually hurts a bit. But the difference in this case between the two FLAC implementations was so great as to be undeniable. The particular track I was playing is very demanding in the upper-mid range and I'm sure any of you would have been able to hear it.
Should this be expected? Is there anything I can do to remedy it?
(PS. I was particularly surprised that this could be a software issue given the fact that the stock firmware eats through battery life very quickly when playing FLAC. I take that to mean that Sandisk's implementation of the decoder is at least not very efficient. Maybe the software difference is further upstream than the decoder?)
Thanks in advance!
saratoga:
The Rockbox flac decoder is lossless. If it sounds different then you have enabled some DSP effects or are comparing it to something with DSP effects.
Yard-Ape:
Okay. Thank you.
amayer:
--- Quote from: Yard-Ape on October 04, 2012, 04:08:27 PM ---I'm using Rockbox 3.9.
--- End quote ---
I dont have a sansa clip+ and im not sure when the last time the FLAC codec was updated but i would recomend upgrading to version 3.11 and seeing if that makes a difference.
Julian67:
I'm not sure this is relevant but it might be:
What isn't obvious on a first install or without exploring the settings and reading the manual is that the setting "Track Gain If Shuffling" is on by default, and would perhaps be better described as "Replay Gain Album Mode On Unless Shuffling". This means the new or uninformed user may think they are running RB with no processing but in fact they are running RG with no pre-amp modifier or clipping protection. There can sometimes be a very significant volume boost without any clipping protection. I wonder if some of the recent posts about unexpected audio quality arise from increased levels without clipping protection. The typical expected use case of RG seems to be for recordings that need attenuation (much popular music) and which have negative album RG values, but lots of instrumental and vocal recordings (much non-orchestral classical and pre-classical music) have surprisingly high positive album RG values (+4 dB is not unusual and I think somewhere I even have an album that is +8 or +9).
I recall that I didn't realise that RockBox ran with RG by default until I experienced several tracks clipping, which prompted me to investigate and to Read The Fine Manual.
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