plz,

as oedipus says, the server decompresses the flacs to wavs and then sends these to the squeezebox. wharease with mp3's the mp3 data is sent to the squeezebox and decoded locally.

although the 'problem' is not really that huge, it does point out that an improvement (although how large i don;t know) is possible.

there are a number of things that could cure this problem. originally i thought it may be due to me using the squeezebox in wireless mode however i'm now using it wired and there was no improvement. i've also upgraded to the latest version of the server software and sbox firmware and this didn;t improve matters - although it did cause some other unrelated problems with dropouts which took a while to find a fix for.

i'm guessing that there are 2 remaining areas to try to fix the problem

1) improving the interface between squeezebox and dac. to this end i'm looking into jitter reduction devices (a monarchy dip initially) which also converts to aes / ebu digital. hopefully i should be borrowing one of these in the near future to see if it fixes my 'problem'. if it doesn;t i may try to source a genesis digital lens and see what that does - or i just might say fcuk it and buy some more music.

2) the pc itself may not be powerful enough. this is really a last ditch hope and quite unlikely as having looked into the processor load it's peaking at around 30% every 10 seconds or so whilst averaging around 5% for the rest of the time - even though it's a lowly p2 400. memory is the big thing for this application and i've recently upped the memory from 64mb to 320mb so this doesn't seem to be an issue any more.

as i say the problem is more an irritation of my audiophool sensibilities - i.e. knowing that i'm perhaps not eaking the last iota of performance from my kit however flacs still sound far better than the mp3's i have crystal lock or no and still sound better than the majority of cdp's i listened to when searching for a replacement to my cd5/hicap.

cheers

julian