Is Masking Bad?
The danger of masking any observations you made prior may no longer apply after a component change. Because the variables that introduce all these different sonic signatures were not addressed - you are merely masking away the bad and the masking effect may no longer work with a new component in the chain.
Thus when you are changing a component you are introducing additional variables into the audio system. Somewhat un-intuitively, you’d be better able to decide what needs to be changed when you are confident what is the cause of the ‘bad’. And conversely knowing what is good will stop you from trading/selling gear you’d regret in the future.
Obviously you don’t have to do native playback all the time. Why spend all the money on expensive gear, only to listen to music when you’re not enjoying it? Just saying it is a good idea to do so once in a while.
Think of it as a raw re-calibration of what your system can and cannot do.
So how to do native playback? My playback of choice is Logitech Media Server (LMS) and Squeezelite v1.6.4-test. LMS by default don’t do native playback (something I’d addressed in the future). Here are the steps to configure native playback for your Snakeoil computer.
Gave it a try with LMS / Squeezelite 1.6.4. A favourite album would not play. The file type was Apple Lossless MPEG-4 in 88.2/24. Reverting settings in LMS for Apple Lossless-FLAC back to faad/sox fixed the problem. Reverting settings for MPEG-4 in LMS did not fix it and was not necessary.
I guess this means that LMS/Squeezelite cannot play Apple Lossles files natively?
SQ is great anyway.
Cheers, JD