Thinking of using a Matricom GBOX for Flac Playback....

[osd1]

I need a new digital player and I am looking at the GBOX from Matricom. All I need it to do is play 16/44 or 24/96. It has a coaxial out which is great. I spoke to matricom and they said that I can do that no problem with the GBOX, but I was not sure how it performed...I would like to hook up an external cd burner to it so I can rip cd's to an external hd, but if I can't its no big deal, I have a laptop I can use for that. The reason

 

Im thinking I am gonna pick one up with one of them WireWorld Chroma 7 coax's. After I get my speakers and audio cabinet built I will worry about upgrading the coax if the GBOX works out well.

[crisnee]

I don't think you'll find many folks that use the GBOX here. I've tried to start threads a couple of years ago about similar products which were also oriented toward audio and got very little response.

 

I did a little bit of reading about the GBOX and read a lot of reviews but didn't see any mention of its audio quality. For $100 or so it might just be worth trying it out and if it doesn't sound good enough perhaps it can be returned (if you get it at Amazon or the like).

 

Chris

[iago]

I spoke to matricom and they said that I can do that no problem with the GBOX, but I was not sure how it performed...

 

Performance as in audio quality or as in speed of computation?

 

This device is running XBMC and will definitely play audio files in multiple formats without glitches. I have seen XBMC builds on Raspberry Pi, which implements slower hardware. This device is using a SoC solution from Amlogic: AML8726-MX. XBMC ships enough codecs to handle nearly all audio formats; the audio engine has been rewritten and can pass high definition audio unchanged.

 

There is one catch: the XBMC implementations I used for a time (part of an embedded Linux by OpenELEC) initially resampled everything to 48/24. This is due to the standard configuration of ALSA (the Linux sound driver) and the way XBMC usually connects to it. It can be easily remedied by software configuration, but you need access to the machine (either physical by keyboard, or remote via ssh) to do this. I have no idea if you can reconfigure an out-of-the-box Android system.

 

Since you already contacted the manufacturer, ask them if you can create a custom .asoundrc file.

[osd1]

Performance as in audio quality or as in speed of computation?

 

This device is running XBMC and will definitely play audio files in multiple formats without glitches. I have seen XBMC builds on Raspberry Pi, which implements slower hardware. This device is using a SoC solution from Amlogic: AML8726-MX. XBMC ships enough codecs to handle nearly all audio formats; the audio engine has been rewritten and can pass high definition audio unchanged.

 

There is one catch: the XBMC implementations I used for a time (part of an embedded Linux by OpenELEC) initially resampled everything to 48/24. This is due to the standard configuration of ALSA (the Linux sound driver) and the way XBMC usually connects to it. It can be easily remedied by software configuration, but you need access to the machine (either physical by keyboard, or remote via ssh) to do this. I have no idea if you can reconfigure an out-of-the-box Android system.

 

Since you already contacted the manufacturer, ask them if you can create a custom .asoundrc file.

Ivery rarely go above 24/48 so that is not as problem for now.