{"id":4457,"date":"2015-02-01T23:50:51","date_gmt":"2015-02-01T12:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=4457"},"modified":"2015-02-01T23:50:51","modified_gmt":"2015-02-01T12:50:51","slug":"youre-never-quite-sure-what-youre-going-to-get","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=4457","title":{"rendered":"You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year I reviewed the Western Digital TV Live media box for Sound+Image, along with a bunch of other media boxes, and I gave it high marks, not the least because of its ability to handle high resolution audio. For that test I used the HDMI output only.<\/p>\n

The thing is still sitting around here, so I thought I’d give the analogue output a whirl, just for fun. This is a 3.5mm socket for left and right audio plus composite video. I tested it on 44.1kHz stuff and got a mediocre-ish result. Noise floor around -94dBA , frequency response down 1.1dB at 20kHz. The kind of result that we would have killed for back in the 1970s, but a bit ho-hum by today’s standards.<\/p>\n

Then I checked out 24 bit, 96kHz performance. Noise a touch better at slightly over 95dBA, but still pretty poor. The frequency response was down by 0.5dB at 20kHz, and then dropped away as though hitting a brick wall filter. This clearly wasn’t 96kHz output. So I figured I’d plug the WD TV Live’s optical output into a good quality DAC for comparison. I used the low cost, decent enough Silverstone EB01-E. It delivered a much better noise performance, consonant with 24 bit audio. Its output was down by only a quarter of a dB at 20kHz, but fell away as though hitting the same brick wall. Could it be that the WD was downsampling 96kHz? I plugged its HDMI output into a home theatre receiver that reports the audio sampling frequency, and it reported 96kHz. I plugged the optical output into a different DAC <\/p>\n

antibiotika-online.com<\/a><\/div>\n

, one with sampling frequency indicators, and it showed 48kHz, not 96kHz.<\/p>\n

So it seems that the WD TV Live can do high resolution audio output via HDMI, but not via analogue or optical out.<\/p>\n

Here’s the response of the analogue output, the optical (via Silverstone) and for comparison the Silverstone being fed 24 bit, 96kHz directly from a computer:<\/p>\n

\"WD<\/a><\/p>\n

You may be wondering why the Silverstone delivers a higher output at 20kHz when being fed the downsampled signal via optical than when it is receiving the full 96kHz via USB. With 44.1\/48kHz signals they’ve gone for a sharp filter , but with 96kHz and higher they seem to have settled on a slower, gentler one.<\/p>\n

When it came to noise, the WD TV Live to Silverstone delivered a much, much better result that the device’s own analogue output:<\/p>\n

\"WD<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year I reviewed the Western Digital TV Live media box for Sound+Image, along with a bunch of other media boxes, and I gave it high marks, not the least because of its ability to handle high resolution audio. For … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4457"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4463,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4457\/revisions\/4463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}