MajorFubar said:
I thought that old 'FLAC sounds different to WAV' malarkey had been done to death. Any player which genuinely plays them differently has 'issues', and I'd change it. I really don't know why such nonsense persists in the HiFi community; it can only be because of a misunderstanding of how lossless compression works. EDIT: And before anyone says otherwise, this is not another case of WHF forum 'mob rule' shouting-down anyone who dares to speak-out against a consensus opinion, it's just a technical fact.
Major, yes this has been done to death, but while I don't dispute the actual rip as being bit-perfect, the fact that remains that lossless formats are still
compressed and require
decoding and that could affect results. It cannot be nonsense if major makers like Naim, Wadia, Cyrus and Linn themselves explicitly make their preferences known (Naim and Wadia->WAV, Cyrus->
uncompressed FLAC, Linn-> FLAC generally).
One thing that the CA751BD is atrocious at is browsing through a USB stick - it's dead slow. And I can see that possibly impacting performance as well. It's the same with Arcam's drDock - they don't officially support the iPod Classic, because I expensively discovered myself, it was dead slow and the dock clearly relies on the iDevice for browsing speed. And the sound while great, decidedly sounded a bit slow.
And when it comes to certain posters here it is, to quote you, 'another case of WHF forum 'mob rule' shouting-down anyone who dares to speak-out against a consensus opinion'.
A bit-perfect rip is one thing, playback is quite another, and that applies to digital and analogue.