How nice to read this thread. I haven’t noticed this until a few days ago and finally found this topic here.
While listening some choral classical music FLAC files using a cheap earbud style (but with the head band) Sony headphones I started to hear some strange noises during certain passages of the music, especially when the music was very busy, combining choirs and instruments. I would say that the sound was "pixelated" for a lack of a better description. Initially I thought perhaps the file had some encoding problem or the headphones were faulty.
I tried the same files on a Oppo BD-105 with a pair of Samson headphones and, the strange distortion was there, albeit much less noticeable. If I turned the volume higher I could notice it more. Next I tried one of the original CD where the FLAC file was extracted from and there were no differences, so the FLAC file was not the problem.
I normally don’t listen classical music with headphones so perhaps that is the reason I didn’t notice this issue before. If I played the music from the Oppo through my amp to my speakers it was more difficult to hear it, but with the right volume and being very close to them I could hear it.
After these initial tests I suppose the problem is related to the DACs at work here. At this time I am not willing to spend large sum of money on a new DAC, so any suggestion of a budget one, but which is capable to overcome this problem, is very welcome.
As a side note, I connected a pair of Jabra USB headphones that I use for work and these sounded much more muffled than the others, but they also didn’t revealed the "pixelated" sound.
