Bitperfect streaming of DTS and AC3/DD at last!

[JensPH]

After having surrendered to the fact that I am the only one in the family who likes my customized Foobar and MonkeyMote solution I have done some testing of the Sonos Connect, the Heos Link and finally the Bluesound Node, and to my surprise I have at last found peace :-)

 

Both Sonos and Heos apparently resamples everything internally regardless of settings (fixed output, Volume and tone controls of, no compression and so forth...) but the Bluesound not only plays the few 24/96 and 24/192 recordings I own but also plays my more numerous 5.1. DTS recordings absolutelse flawlessly. Finally I can let everybody play anything without risking my precious tweeters being killed by the white noise made by corrupted DTS. I have a lot of DTS music demuxed to .dts, then wrapped in a Wav container and finally compressed and stored for convenience and adding of metadata as lossless FLAC. All made with the python script available at the old SlimDevices forum.

 

The sound when it plays ordinary stereo, btw, is noticeably superior to not only Sonos and Heos, but also to my Win 8.1 with Foobar2000 and WASAPI output via HDMI. Both Heos and Bluesound streams the local library without any glitches, whereas Sonos quite frequently made small cutouts when my 60/20 Mbps line was busy. Why Sonos requires internet connection to the outside world to play content on my LAN is beyond me...

 

Not sure about the perceived differences in sound either as i.e. Foobar is playing bitperfect at fixed 100% volume, so it is not due to resampling. But perhaps the HDMI output is plaqued with jitter. Was it not for two people unaware of the switch between the sources commenting on the difference I would perhaps attribute it to "placebo effect" but the calmness in the space on some old recordings does feel quite differently - though I must admit that I have not yet made any blind a/b testing.

 

If anybody has any experiences with Bluesound or has made a successful attempt to make Heos stream bitperfect please let me know.

 

BR/Jens