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Native FLAC Player

Are there any receivers that can play FLAC natively? I feel that its a shame that the logitech Squeezebox Transporter is the only native (at least form what I can find) Flac player.

Am I too far ahead of the curve or does anyone else feel let down by Onkyo, Yamaha, Denon etc with the fact that none of their receivers can play FLAC naively?

Some of them will use uPNP to connect to "media servers" but the media server has to stream the FLAC so it down-converts as it transcodes (translates digital info to music) over the network for the receiver to play.

Even the highest high end Onkyo TX-NR906 does not support FLAC through its USB ports. This is particularly confusing because certain reviewers claim that it can play FLAC - well yes it "can" via the "media server" as described above.

Why haven't all the high end audio device makers not seized this opportunity? Is it because the true connoisseurs still listen to loss-less music on analog media (LP) ? What about the rest of us (ok ME) that can't afford the great analog equipment ?

Or... am I completely missing the boat on this? Are there good quality receivers in $2000 range that can play native FLAC?
anuruddhak

Showing 1 response by mnm

mnm
6 posts
 
Jclsels, you said that Asset transcodes flac into wav or pcm - only if you ask it to though. It will happily serve up flac files to your player, but if the player doesn't support flac, then Asset can transcode on the fly to a format the player does support.

Also, if the player can't handle a particular sample rate or bit depth, these could perhaps be transcoded by the UPnP server program (of which Asset is an example), to something the player can handle - but again this would be at the request of the user.

OP, Linn and dbpoweramp.com both have great forums, faqs and other resources to get you clued up.

May just be something lost in translation OP, but when you say 'receiver', I think multichannel. I've only looked into 2 channel, which Linn gives you, so don't know if that's what you're after. PS Audio Perfectwave looks like it may be giving Linn some competition (think it's 2 channel), and the 6 moons review of that is pending.
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