A novel way to massively improve the SQ of computer audio streaming

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So,  it seems the USPCB is really the holy grail of USB connection for the microR and Regens. Right now I have the UltraR on order, and the USPCB won't fit it. Are we already allowed to speculate what would be the ideal topology for the UltraRendu?

 

I don't currently own any networked source, therefore I don't have much to contribute to this thread so far. 

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17 hours ago, kennyb123 said:

 

It appears that the 90 degree USPCB might stand a chance of working, particularly if it runs directly to an ISO REGEN.  I'll be looking forward to the reports.

 

My microRendu made it to the post office today.  I got home a few minutes ago, plopped myself in my chair and started playback.  Within seconds I stopped playback.  I'd rather sit in silence.  

 

 

I'm not planning to get a Regen since it doesn't seem to me that it would benefit my setup in any way with the UR + DAC in asynchronous mode. The LAN and USB connectors are also quite close, so it would be a tight fit in the best case scenario. Still curious about the potential results...

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9 minutes ago, BigAlMc said:

 

@Superdad - If my LPS-1 needs a clean power supply then I want a refund! 

 

I'm joking of course Alex. I appreciate the quality and value of your products and will undoubtedly buy more. 

 

But if the Linear PSUs need a better PSU then perhaps its time for a new hobby. Time to dust down the twin cassette player and find the old mixtapes... 

 

I hope that you just typed this from a notebook which was charged by a LPS charged by a LPS 

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57 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

Well if you guys really want an LPS (to energize your UltraCap LPS-1s) that kicks nothing back in to the wall, then the choke-filtered, power-factor corrected JS-2 is about the best you can do.  

The big choke in series after the Schottky diodes and snubbered R-core trans make it so the JS-2 conducts current over 97% of the AC wave cycle--versus 50% for most traditional trans>diodes>caps>regulator LPS units.  SMPS units have super high frequency harmonics, but standard LPS's kick back harmonics of 50/60Hz.

(Of course the real evil of the SMPS is its massive leakage current--but that is cut off by the LPS-1 since they are just a "disconnected from output" charger.)

 

I cringe at the idea of our beautiful JS-2 being used just to charge a bunch of LPS-1s.  Where the JS-2 really shines is in powering a real audio device. (Have been selling lots of them to Brooklyn DAC owners lately--and they are VERY happy.)  

 

But since the JS-2 can produce 7.2 amps at 12V all day long, you could set both outputs to 12V, use 2 'Y' cables, and power 4 LPS-1s.  

My assistant just finished building another 14 units.  I'll be testing/burning in over the weekend, yet only 11 of the 14 are pre-sold and slated for shipment on Tuesday.  Are you tempted Rajiv? 

 

I get the idea of the choke-filtered harmonics feeding forward and backwards the line frequency (50 Hz for me). I also accept the fact that the LPS-1 will not feed forward those frequencies. However, is there any real life effect other than hum that the LPS-1 would cause to other choke-filtered power supplies connected to the same rail? 

 

Also, if I understand you correctly from the isolation and grounding thread, it would be better to not connect the digital components (computer, router) to the same PS as the renderer, right? 

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I have a Lampizator USB cable at home to try, sadly I only have generic USB cables to compare it with. Those polish guys use to know their business, therefore I'm curious to hook up it to the UltraRendu and try. Anyone listened to Lampis cables yet?

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@austinpop PC mod shops carry heatsinks. In US you can look at FrozenCPU for example, they have hundreds of heatsinks of all sizes.

 

I would use a thermal pad. Thermal paste would be even better but it is messy and doesn't hold the heatsink in place.

 

 @Ciukas  - thermal pads do increase the thermal conductivity. Simply placing the heatsink on top of a surface is not efficient. Thermal pads are actually quite efficient conductors and their conductivity increases with temperature. In order to get good conductivity only by contact, the surface finish must be very good and joined with pressure. Thermal paste is even better. 

 

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6 hours ago, Ciukas said:

@unbalanced output  Again, I mentioned thermal pads are useful if a heatsink does not sit perfectly flush w a component as you've also reiterated in your post. I do not think the LPS-1's scenario requires such extreme measures. Thermal paste is not applicable in this scenario as well so point moot. Why not include liquid metal while we're at it?

 

Thermal pad efficiency increases as temperature rises, yes, but the best commercial pads only have thermal ratings up to 17w/mK (the 17s gets brittle and dry after a while). In contrast, aluminum has a rating of 250w/mK. There is no contest. Anyway, I do not wish to harp on this any further as this is an audio forum and not a overclocker's sanctuary. 

 

You cannot get the same thermal conductivity of pure aluminium in an interface. Since on top of that the surface is anodised, you have to divide that number by 20 or 30 depending on the thickness, then reduce it again by a factor due to surface finish. So yeah, just sitting the heat sink on top of a device is pretty much a waste, best case scenario you're getting half of the heat transfer a cheap thermal pad would give. Sitting the LPS1 on its side will probably be more efficient than that (good suggestion by Superdad btw).

 

The LPS1 runs just warm for me since my dac uses its own power supply. 

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I have a liquid cooled PC, and the pumps with all their controllers are eletrically noisy, same goes to the PWM fans. However, it is a pity that I can hear the computer from my listening position - acoustically is quiet but not silent. HQPlayer upsampling using the GPU was very interesting indeed, it is quite surprising to me that some of you did not hear a difference - makes me wonder why since I could hear a difference on every filter I've tried. 

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54 minutes ago, ElviaCaprice said:

Not all noise is clear and perceivable to the listener until once removed.  Thus your comparison is impossible to equate with mine without having both systems at hand for direct comparison.

As to why I would not hear a difference from bit perfect to upsampled/filtered via HQP?  The inherent noise gained was a wash to the benefit from filtering on the mobo.  Also the DAC might play a difference in it's ability to filter better both streams to make the stream basically equivalent, i.e.  Chord DAC's.

 

Regarding noise - I was referring to both acoustic and electrical noise. It's the acoustic noise that is the first no-go for me, even if it is just a whisper. Are you referring to electrical noise from the PC? Indeed there was a qualitative change when I switched from the PC to the ultraRendu, and that was more significant than the differences between similar  filters.

 

Funny that you mentioned Chord DACs and upsampler. Just earlier this evening I tried for fun the Mojo (from my office system) in my home stereo with some upsampling and I was quite impressed with the rather unexpected difference in detail, tonality and deeper soundstage that it brought. Paul Desmond's sax on Strange Meadow Lark was a completely different instrument, the timbre of the piano was more natural and the drums were more spatially coherent (in the the non-upsampled listening the drums come from two distinct places, which was very strange - upsampled they do have more of a real drum set image placed to my middle right). I switched the non upsampled source to a different one and again there was some change. Much more subtle, I would need more listening time but  soundstage definitely  became even flatter, and I had the iimpression that mids and highs were brighter. Chord swears that sources don't matter for them but that is not the case definitely. Worth some more research definitely.

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8 hours ago, ElviaCaprice said:

Chord is definitely wrong about sources don't matter as shown over and over in this thread alone.  I think manufacturers all like to sell their components under such claims, especially DAC.

Agreed. Just wanted to add another voice to the choir

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9 hours ago, austinpop said:

Darn it, @lmitche and @unbalanced output, now you've got me thinking.

 

The last time I tried HQPlayer was before the clock chains, when I was on the sMS-200. I should try it again, to confirm for myself what I'm hearing now. But before I do, a couple of questions.

 

What percent of your listening is Redbook content? In my case, I may be atypical. While my library is about 70% Redbook, my actual listening tends to be <50% Redbook. I gather the benefits are most pronounced with lower-res tracks?

 

Also, Larry, regarding this:

 

 

Last time I tried it, I remember 4 parameters (none, none, none, none) that you had to manually tweak via pull-downs to vary the settings. Can you tell me how (maybe via PM) one can set up HQP to auto-detect PCM or DSD tracks, and conditionally upsample PCM tracks to 384, and DSD tracks to 128, without intervention?

 

I'm not sure I can download another trial version of HQP, without having to buy it.

 

To be fair, in the end I haven't bought hqp either since I use Roon on Rock and hqp is not compatible with the setup. That's why I was using my pc while I waited for the ultra rendu to be available. Honestly the change in the source was more significant in terms of sound than playing with similar filters, however I'm curious about what would be the combined effect.

 

Onthe positive side, not having hqp keeps me away from experimenting to much and enjoy some more music, however hqp is very fun to play with.

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Testing HQP on the Mojo is easy. Difficult is to get hold of a Dave and a Blu...

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1 hour ago, austinpop said:

 

This is kind of what I heard with the M-scaler and DAVE at RMAF. Of course, I have no point of reference at 352/384. Would a SW upsampler like HQP, upsampling to the same 705.6/768 come close to, or even match, the M-scaler? 

 

I know Rob Watts would say no, but have any DAVE/M-scaler owners tried this comparison? Just to prove the point for themselves?

 

When I first read about Blu, that's the exact thought that came to my mind. Chord is funny at times. It is not entirely on topic, but a Chord representative actually wrote this on Head-Fi when it was suggested that an ultraRendu or SOTM Ultra would make very fine nice sources for the Mojo "and by the way the SOTM can even be paired with a master clock if you fancy one". 

 

(and I quote)

At the risk of sounding arrogant the team that developed Poly are actually the best on the planet of course we use top notch well designed circuitry throughout and to suggest it’s comprmised because we aren’t clocking it externally is ridiculous. Most good engineers understand that external clocks may have a good long term timed signal say accurate to second in a year but they are often absolute rubbish because they have horrendous short term jitter due to there poorly designed frequency reduction and buffer circuitry. Far better to have good control of the accurate crystal clocking inside the design.

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When you guys say that you are upsampling with low power computers, I assume you're using the -2s algorithms? My i7/gtx was not capable of upsampling to dsd256 with some of the single step filters.

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7 hours ago, romaz said:

"PC's are very restricted in what they can do for real time signals. You simply can't replicate the processing that Dave does in a PC - simply because PC processors are sequential serial devices with a very limited number of cores. When you are doing a doing a FIR filter (a tap) you need to read from memory the audio data; read from memory the coefficient data; multiply the numbers together;then read the accumulated data and add that to the previous multiplication; then save the result. Lots of things to do in sequence. With an FPGA you can do all of these things in parallel at once, so a single FIR tap can be accomplished within a single clock cycle (obviously pipelined) - you are not forced to do things in sequence.

 

That's what a beginner programmer would do - FIR filters can actually be implemented in efficient ways even without considering paralellisation. That said, FPGAs are neat...

 

7 hours ago, romaz said:

But the problem we have with DSD is that the timing of transients is non-linear with respect to signal level - and unlike PCM you are completely stuck as the error is on the recording and its impossible to remove. So when I hear DSD, it sounds flat in depth, and it has relatively poor ability to perceive the starting and stopping of notes (using Hugo/Dave against PCM). Acoustic guitar sounds quite pleasant, but there is a lack of focus when the string is initially struck - it sounds all unnaturally soft with an inability to properly perceive the starting and stopping. Also the timbre of the instrument is compressed, and its down to the substantial timing non-linearity with signal level.

 

I totally agree that DSD sounds flat... on the Mojo. In reality, it sounds very very similar if not the same as PCM. Switch to a native DSD DAC like the Lampizator and two or three new dimensions immediately jump from the speakers. 

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17 hours ago, romaz said:

 

You are confusing air with depth.  As I've stated, DSD has a very expansive sound but accurate spatial localization is not as good as PCM.  This means a piano that is 5 feet away actually sounds like its 5 feet away.  I have done these careful listening tests with a variety of DACs using both DSD and PCM rips from an analog master and PCM is better.  With even a simple Mojo, if a recording is flat (as most studio recordings are), then it will sound flat and when there is depth in the recording, it will portray it much more faithfully.

 

I enjoy the Lampizators very much.  They premiered their new flagship at RMAF this past weekend and it was one of the few rooms playing digital that did not sound fatiguing.  Yes, you get that dimensionality that DSD provides but this also comes from the Lampi's tube stage.  There are other ways to create dimension, such as adding reverb effects via DSP but then everything sounds deep and unnaturally dimensional, including close-mic'd studio recordings.

 

There are those that look for their DACs to make everything sound pleasing and this can be useful to cover up for harsh electronics or to make bad recordings sound better but this often comes at a compromise of resolution and transparency.  If this is your cup of tea, that's fine.  What I have found is that as I have improved my source with better power supplies, better clocks, better cabling, etc., I no longer find it necessary to cover anything up.  At this point, my only priority is truth and accuracy.

 

Hi Romaz, I'm not confusing depth with airiness. I do really mean that with the Mojo with DSD the sound seems to be coming from a single plane close to the speakers an not from a musician located somewhere in front of you. Playing the same track in PCM or DSD the Mojo sounds very similar, and not too different from the Atlantic in PCM actually. However, the Lampi in DSD is a completely different that I could describe as taking a big screen off the front of the speakers. It's something completely different and cannot be due to do with the output stage - this is the same regardless of PCM or DSD. Actually I don't think that the Lampi has this property of making everything sound pleasant - on the contrary, bad recordings never sounded so bad and good recordings never sounded so good to my ears. I can believe that the tube rectified versions may colour the sound, however I don't have a rectified PS on mine. 

 

I'm working on some comparisons between different formats and DACs on the Lampi and the Mojo. Unfortunately time is very scarce for me these days, however I have some interesting (and somewhat) results that I'm planning to share here at CA when I have time, but I'm not quite done yet. 

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10 hours ago, tedwoods said:

I agree.

What I gathered from listening through a wide variety of systems was that the format/player/DAC  topology has to be viewed as a chain of sorts.

DSD through the chipless Lampi has an uncanny ability to present things in a most natural and intuitive way.

With the SOtM chain this trait has been elevated to almost frightening yet utterly exciting levels of palpability.

 

It is something quite special indeed. I would very much like to listen to other similar DACs, it's so much more interesting than listening to vynil. I have listened very few times to magnetic tapes when I was a kid, however the difference from PCM is like going from an early CD on the garage stereo to the fancy multitrack reel tape that used to be so rarely used.