i have a xbox running xbmc and a xbox 360 hooked up to a mce pc. i can't make my mind up which is better for playing music from my pc. the xbox seems deeper but produces distortion on some cds, whereas the 360 seems clearer but the sound is quite muted and can sound flat sometimes.
is there a technical answer to my question or do i have to rely on my ears?
read twistedsymphonys comment. makes sense:
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=489474
jmarshall
2006-03-28, 00:40
the xbox (and i presume xbox360 - don't have one, and as no xdk is out for it anyway, the info probably isn't available) can only output digital sound at 48khz.
the internal sound processor normally handles the sound conversion, which includes upsampling from 44.1khz to 48khz and possibly encoding to 5.1 ac3 in realtime.
as you can probably appreciate, this isn't something that has quality written all over it.
xbmc does not do this. it does the upsampling in software, using the popular ssrc method which is more accurate than the hardware method. once it has the 48khz audio, it doesn't encode it to ac3 unless you have "output to all speakers" enabled. thus, you will get better sound using xbmc than using the ms dash. any distortion you get will be on the cd itself. with cd playback it is near impossible to get distortion via the audio chain we run through. the only place distortion can enter is in the upsampling process.
hope this helps.
there's further info about the audio chain that xbmc employs in the online manual (link in my sig.)
cheers,
jonathan
thanks jonathan - that was very helpful.