Is it me? SN2 sound

Posted by: Arnaud on 29 August 2016

Coming from a system composed of CD5/FC2/112/150 with Kudos C20, I upgraded to NDX/SN2 with the same speakers. 

Well, although the sound is now much punchier, with excellent dynamics and far better extension of bass and especially treble, and tons of details, I feel the overall sound is a bit "flat" or, "matter of fact", perhaps lacking a bit of lush or of emotion.

Is it just me or do you have similar experiences?

Posted on: 01 September 2016 by Patu

When I recently experimented with NDX, I couldn't hear any difference between FLAC and over the air WAV conversion. But great if this has solved the problem!

Posted on: 01 September 2016 by Huge

I believe it depends on the person as to how noticeable one finds that the difference is.

Different people listen for different aspects of a musical experience and so notice different things to a greater or lesser extent.

Posted on: 01 September 2016 by Mike-B

To back up Arnaud's sound difference with WAV & FLAC.    I had a play around when I first started streaming & found I heard a small/subtle difference in sound between WAV & FLAC with my NDX streaming from NAS.  I concluded at the time that the NDX prefers WAV - maybe an internal process function.  All this was nothing more than to satisfy in my mind I was doing the right thing storing my audio in WAV.  

Posted on: 01 September 2016 by Frank Abela

I read a very interesting article in HIFICRITIC recently where they (researchers, not the 'critic staff) ran some tests to try to identify why flac and wav could sound different given that both are lossless formats. You could probably argue about the test methodologies etc., but in their tests they found that the sound was most affected by how and when in the production process the METADATA was added to the flac file. Removing the metadata restored some 80-90% of the difference in sound quality. The most weird thing was that they found that adding metadata at different stages could alleviate the problem. I don't pretend to understand how that can happen unless the metadata is stored in a different place in the file, or a different way. It's a pretty fascinating read and the full article may be downloaded from HIFICRITIC's site I believe.

Frank.

Posted on: 01 September 2016 by ChrisSU

So maybe Naim knew something about this when they chose to have their CD rippers store metadata outside the WAV files? Just idle speculation on my part..........

Posted on: 03 September 2016 by Mike-B
Frank Abela posted:

I read a very interesting article in HIFICRITIC recently where they (researchers, not the 'critic staff) ran some tests to try to identify why flac and wav could sound different given that both are lossless formats.

I think this post is the same article but in another www magazine.  https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...s-flac-magazine-test     .........  interesting replies question the test methods & conclusions