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Beolab 18 Sound quality

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eprokos
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eprokos Posted: Mon, Jan 9 2017 7:23 AM

Hello

It is my first post in this forum after reading almost everything for about a month :)

Thanx for all the infos posted. Solved a lot of questions.

After a lot of products from B&O I just purchased a Beolab 18. I have a question about the sound quality as far the inputs.

I might purchase a Moment sometime in 2017. Until then I am thinking of streaming from my ipad through AE or Apple TV TOSLINK. My question is if there is a difference in the quality between TOSLINK from AE or WISA through Moment?

Both protocols are Digital so I think it will be the same?

 

Thank you!!

 

Sandyb
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Sandyb replied on Mon, Jan 9 2017 7:54 PM

guessing they should be similar (or similar enough).....if you are using an Apple TV, you can of course use the music app on the TV screen.....generally from my testing, pulling music from the cloud using the Music app (on the Apple TV interface) directly seems to sound more dynamic than streaming it from an iOS / MBP device......i think a few others have noticed something similar........cant explain why, or what the technical difference is.....

in the end try both out, everyone has different use-cases and sensitivities.........are you streaming FLAC files?

davidr
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davidr replied on Mon, Jan 9 2017 8:38 PM

eprokos:
Until then I am thinking of streaming from my ipad through AE or Apple TV TOSLINK. My question is if there is a difference in the quality between TOSLINK from AE or WISA through Moment?

Both protocols are Digital so I think it will be the same?

Yes and no. WISA itself is digital lossless as is Toslink. However, streaming from a idevice the final conversion in that set up is done on the BL18. So in theory from a Moment or a idevice should be basically the same. Probably your source music is lossy MP3 or AAC files yes?

Now the AE via AirPlay can play lossless audio but only in ALAC format, which if you're interested in the technicals is fixed 16bit 48k 2-channel regardless of the original. So a CD rip of 16/44k in ALAC will still be at sample rate 16bit /48k, even 128kbps MP3. For whatever reason AirPlay playback is fixed to 48k/16bit. WISA supports higher bit rates, depths and channel counts but honestly that is more a marketing point anyway. If this is over you, never mind, you've got the best connection as is, Moment or not.

I stream using AppleTV & DAC. Works perfectly.

eprokos
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eprokos replied on Tue, Jan 10 2017 6:30 AM

I will be streaming from iOs device through Spotify or Deezer. I got subscription on both. So streaming from Deezer on my ipad to AE and then TOSLINK to Beolab 18 should be the same as streaming Deezer from Moment through WISA. Correct??

eprokos
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eprokos replied on Thu, Jan 12 2017 2:53 PM

I finally got them connected temporarily to an Apple Tv through optical out

I can control the volume from my iOs device

It it just that even in the lowest volume they are quite loud. Is this normal? Will this be happening even in AE?

 

Thank you

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