Subjective comparison of Software Music Player

[AnotherSpin]

4 hours ago, manueljenkin said:

Has anyone here tried the new audirvana with kernel streaming? My trial is over the previous time I tried (older version without kernel streaming) and I am interested to know about the new version changes.

 

Ask for a trial from alternate e-mail account.

[dongi]

Can you use Tidal with WTFPLAY or Hysolid?

[manueljenkin]

2 hours ago, dongi said:

Can you use Tidal with WTFPLAY or Hysolid?

I don't think you could do that with wtfplay. Hysolid hasn't been updated in a long time so doubtful on that aspect too.

 

You can try audirvana studio, it should support it I think. Also outputs kernel streaming, which in my experience with other players have given wonderful results.

 

If you want the full system optimization, then the option would be to run xxhighend or audiophile optimizer in the background to reduce system noise and run the tidal app on top of it! In android you can use usb audio player Pro, it supports tidal streaming and MQA core decode. The MQA core decore plugin is 7$ I think, in case you plan on using it with a MQA renderer.

[Pavol]

Guys, what about Volumio 3 beta for PC? I have compared it to wtfplay and for me its almost identical, wtfplay maybe slightly better...I was using Daphile but on my system it sounds very analytical, bright and after some listening time tiring...Volumio link below if interested:

 

https://community.volumio.org/t/volumio-3-buster-beta-for-x86/45242

[seeteeyou]

http://jplay.eu/forum/index.php?/topic/4410-windows-11-pe-audiophile-creation-guide/?p=57836

Quote

Win10XPE is VERY SUPERIOR TO WTFPlay.

 

http://jplay.eu/forum/index.php?/topic/4410-windows-11-pe-audiophile-creation-guide/?p=57778

Quote

Still, the SQ impact of killing lsass.exe back then and now is VERY noticeable, and I would not necessarily say it is always good… you reach a very high level of detail and transparency, but god help you if you’re listening to a poorly recorded track, as everything will be shown in excruciating detail, warts and all. It also can cause even good recordings to sound harsh. Anyway, play with this at your own risk both SQ-wise and functionality-wise, but if you killed lsass.exe, the two svchost instances for AudioSrv and AudioEndpointBuilder, AND the instance for CryptSvc, as well as killing shell processes and the other processes I've detailed earlier in this post, you would be left with a whopping low of 14 processes running!

 

Quote

The SQ boost is just amazing in WinPE. It is, hands down, the biggest audio OS-based boost in SQ I have ever experienced with any solution, and I have tried quite a few beyond RAMdisk. The clarity is really, really something, just insane amounts of detail retrieval and noise floor reduction.

 

http://jplay.eu/forum/index.php?/topic/4410-windows-11-pe-audiophile-creation-guide/?p=57899

Quote

If you did all this it would be down to 12 processes, ha! Could be too much, but only one way to find out, I suppose…

[airguitar]

Hi all - I'm just glossing over this topic and feel pressed to ask - generally speaking if you are using a dedicated streamer with dedicated music software for that particular 'audiophile' streamer - surely it's more than up to the task of producing the best sound because the manufacturer has optimised the software for the hardware. Example Auralic.

 

OK it's fun to play with PC software players but, if you didn't want to mess about and just cut to the chase check out someone like Auralic.

 

I dunno - am I missing the point here?

 

 

[airguitar]

I guess that put a stopper on the subject :)

[AudioDoctor]

On 5/3/2020 at 10:39 AM, manueljenkin said:

I did further investigation on this topic earlier. Hqplayer lets you choose the bit depth it sends to the dac. Winyl sounds closer to hqplayer configured to have same bit depth as the music file. Which means winyl is not doing any unnecessary padding. I have actually found padding to reduce detail in my system, making it artificially soft. I can for sure confirm that padding actually reduces detail, in my system and not improve. Custom upsampling using HQplayer is a completely different story altogether, I have tried a few and have been able to see how they "change" the sound but on a pure performance level it was on par with winyl, and worse when additional functionality was being used. Also my system was not up to snuff to try the high precision improvements. There's not much way zero padding can bring in such an amount of difference as heard through the players. Also if all of them do the same thing they should all sound the same which they clearly don't.

 

I am ridiculously late to this party, but are you saying here that you think HQPlayer is zero padding rather than upsampling? There is a pretty big difference between those two, and the developer may take issue with that assertion.

[Rexp]

On 1/5/2022 at 2:37 AM, airguitar said:

Hi all - I'm just glossing over this topic and feel pressed to ask - generally speaking if you are using a dedicated streamer with dedicated music software for that particular 'audiophile' streamer - surely it's more than up to the task of producing the best sound because the manufacturer has optimised the software for the hardware. Example Auralic.

 

OK it's fun to play with PC software players but, if you didn't want to mess about and just cut to the chase check out someone like Auralic.

 

I dunno - am I missing the point here?

 

 

Not sure Auralic is a good example, they make you worry that you need their external upsampler and clock..

 

[AnotherSpin]

On 1/4/2022 at 8:37 PM, airguitar said:

[..]

 

I dunno - am I missing the point here?

 

 

 

If you have an Auralic, you have an Auralic and that's it, you've arrived and you're not going anywhere else. By having a computer you have virtually unlimited opportunity for hardware upgrades and comparison between different software products with an incredibly diverse range of settings. The former is not commensurable with the latter. What is best for you, arrive and settle at fixed point, or constantly move on, is a matter of personal comfort.

[stefano_mbp]

On 1/4/2022 at 7:37 PM, airguitar said:

I dunno - am I missing the point here

The topic is Software Music Player … you’re not missing something, you have really lost it …

[One and a half]

On 1/5/2022 at 4:37 AM, airguitar said:

Hi all - I'm just glossing over this topic and feel pressed to ask - generally speaking if you are using a dedicated streamer with dedicated music software for that particular 'audiophile' streamer - surely it's more than up to the task of producing the best sound because the manufacturer has optimised the software for the hardware. Example Auralic.

 

OK it's fun to play with PC software players but, if you didn't want to mess about and just cut to the chase check out someone like Auralic.

 

I dunno - am I missing the point here?

 

 

How the files are stored and transmitted to the streamer make a  considerable difference. The player has a great deal of influence, or the server/client software impacts as well, but the client/control point, less of an influence on SQ.

[jackfabbri]

Hi all ...

Has anyone ever tried Pure Asio Player?

Works with ASIO drivers. It is a minimal player without GUI.

 

https://sites.google.com/site/pureasioplayer/Home

[yamamoto2002]

On 1/6/2022 at 4:36 AM, AudioDoctor said:

 

I am ridiculously late to this party, but are you saying here that you think HQPlayer is zero padding rather than upsampling? There is a pretty big difference between those two, and the developer may take issue with that assertion.

 

No, the text is difficult to read but it is about the method of bit-depth expansion of sample value (such as 16bit to 24bit or 16bit to 32bit) and not about sample point interpolation of temporal direction. I'm not sure about further details. BUT Generally speaking, zero padding is often used in the first stage of software upsampling, before performing low pass filtering. Zero-order hold is also used but its frequency response is not flat and it needs extra HF roll-off compensation

 

zero-padding (periodic impulse train) upsampling → low pass filtering

 

or

 

zero-order hold upsampling → low pass filtering → high frequency roll-off compensation

 

[jackfabbri]

On 5/3/2020 at 5:39 PM, manueljenkin said:

A comparison of music players on windows, linux, android I have done.

 

Note: Most of these software are free so you can try and check for yourself. This is only relating to USB dac connected to PC directly and using a general asio/uac2 driver. If you have a network streamer or signal regenerator/reclocker or any other protocol, the inferences may not carry over. Your mileage may vary on protocol support.

 

For all of the tests/analysis, I have tried my best to make sure there is no additional zero padding, upsampling/oversampling etc is in play within the server system. I almost always used ASIO with proper buffer configurations wherever supported (almost all of them do except strawberry, mediamonkey etc). More on the technical breakdowns at the end of the analysis.

It is too early to conclude the causation of these changes but a look into USB audio protocol (asynch) gives better clue. It works more like UDP than TCP in that it doesn't guarantee a failure when packets go missing or get corrupted during transmission. There is a possibility they could just get concealed, either by any logic/fsm in the usb receiver, or the fact that a delta Sigma dac can behave as a natural packet loss concealer. I have done experiments and I have found that the more constrained and the more buffer underruns the harsher/grainer the sound gets to and extent and past that I get serious crackle noises. So yep I have experienced till there, on a system that would be shown bitperfect by any software analysis inside the computer. The key to this is to be able to probe at the i2s pins of the usb to i2s.

Gear used - surface book 2015, apogee groove, supra usb cable, burson fun, sparkos ss3601 opamps, shure srh1540, OnePlus 3. Few other headphones, dac and amp were also used to ensure coverage on other parameters, and they fit well with the same descriptions.

 

1. Windows groove player - really low fidelity. You got a pig fat low pass applied on top of the digital stream (no clue why) and very bad in overall implementation. When you scroll and play back instead of playing from start, you lose details (the only player that I've come across that does this).

 

2. Windows media player - not as terrible as groove but forgettable.

 

3. Foobar2000 - has lots of plugins and features etc. General "I'm an audio enthusiast" circle tries to push this forward but unfortunately sound isn't the best. Its quite poor to be honest, and even music players in android sound better. Outdated asio and wasapi plugins, measurable distortion and just overall sloppy implementation. Quite softened and smooth but in a very artificial and dry manner. A far cry from the best kind of fidelity you can get from windows. Nice tool for streaming from internet though, thanks to variable buffer on the input side of the player.

 

4. Winyl - the first music player software that had decent fidelity on my tries. You can hear the different textures of bass instruments and the detail/depth/resolution is insane. As my friend calls it, it is DAW level audio quality. A bit artificially sharp sounding due to some buffer management issues. Not the smoothest with bad with low res music, you want that, don't look at this. You can hear a sheen of dither noise (i assume, don't quote me) on top of voices in 16bit music as well. Not quite perfect and not ultimate resolution. I had a short trial with certain background task cleaners/audio enhancers and it did show improvements in sustain detail and left right coherency. Don't know how it uses ram but I wish it could flush the full song to ram and play back from there with high system priority. Peers to winyl are xmplay, musicbee and hqplayer both of which sound almost identical at identical settings.

 

5. Hqplayer - it's as good as winyl in equivalent settings. But it's a lot more feature rich. Lets you try custom upsampling PCM or DSD conversion options and can help get a better stream to your dac than the internal digital filters which can sometimes be low fidelity in the DACs. Also lets you try high precision fir filter convolution for a usable high precision eq.

 

6. Musicbee - the best competition to winyl. It's from the same audio library so sounds similar for the most part. But winyl has a more robust port configuration setting afaik and has less artefacts on that front. However winyl let's down in its buffer, while musicbee takes lead there. It doesn't have the winyl characteristic harshness once the buffer is set to load full song to RAM. Has almost all features of foobar, but built in and usable from the get go and actually sounds good. For some reason the player volume is at 50% by default which I recommend you to set to 100% and use the dac control panel to control the volume. Software volume control is most often poor on any player software, unless it's super sophisticated with 64bit precision and stuff like those (roon has those options).

 

7. Jriver - not as good as winyl not as bad as foobar. It sounds a bit compressed and loud in comparison to winyl. Quite clean otherwise. If you loved the geek out you may like this but it doesn't sound "correct" with usb dacs. People have had better luck with jriver sending data to network streamers.

8. Albumplayer - It was promising as it was coded from scratch and gave me options to prioritise it. I set it up at the best possible settings - asio, full song to ram, high system priority. It sounds a bit softened but not bad like foobar - this thing has depth. I don't know if this is what people call as analog. It sounds very different from winyl but very hard to compare which is better. The general opinion from my side is albumplayer is a little too midrangey and slightly muffled for the most part but with a bass punch somewhere (could just be distortion). On one song it just sounds softened and dull but on another it carries a lot of bass weight. Midrange detail is typically more visible on albumplayer but winyl produces the same with a tiny bit more edge. Most of the time albumplayer is softer but sometimes it can sound exceedingly bright or hard hitting. One thing i like though is that it can bring back that tactile feel in bass in certain songs which i mostly lost with winyl. It sounds weightier and more natural which i like but i just can't get over the resolution winyl offers typically. I wouldn't be doing further testing since I have heard players that outperform both winyl and album player by a significant margin. If the formers are a bit contrasty, edgy and in my face, album player is a bit soft and nice to listen with a different presentation of detail. Idk if it's distortion or just another way to present it or even better accuracy.

 

9. Aimp: I wanted it to sound identical. But unfortunately it didnt. Couldn't find anything bad but the winyl/musicbee kind of players have a sense of texture and aimp has a different texture and imo aimp texture is smoothed off and wrong. Lacks depth. Can't be sure if it is volume or the volume control or anything of that sort. Not a particularly bad player but I'm not particularly impressed.

 

10. Mediamonkey: didn't have an asio output so used wasapi. Didn't like it. Sounded like a low pass filter or bass boost was applied. The liveliness was missing. Can't say i noticed a difference between wasapi and asio in other players but will return to testing media monkey in asio if it improves.

 

11. Audirvana. Not bad. I like it. But winyl still better texture retrieval/detail. Winyl shows the texture and depth noticeably better. Audirvana is a little softer. Bass is even less tactile than winyl on audirvana. (Yep I did try changing settings on audirvana). It was created by an UCLA graduate I think, can't be bad (and it's not), but then again winyl is super lightweight with no bloat, runs on a rock solid audio library, and has multiple other checks to ensure better detail. I'd rate audirvana above jriver (and of course we are well beyond foobar at this point). Didn't sound like it had any compression or anything of that sort. Just not fast enough/transparent enough.

 

12. Roon: to be honest the settings I described above is sub optimal for roon. They recommend you to use your pc as a roon source and another endpoint device like raspberry Pi or ethernet streamer. I can see why. With the same pc acting as both source and endpoint fidelity suffers significantly. It sounds as if I input clipped my amplifier. Doesn't have as muddy artefacts as foobar but I don't like it since it doesn't sound transparent and has a clearly audible aberration. However if your system uses ethernet receiver or roon supported endpoints, I assume it'll be very good owing to the custom roon protocol and compliance control.

 

13. **Hysolid**: My first ever OMG moment. The difference from foobar to winyl was a little bit more than the difference between DACs I tried. The difference from winyl to hysolid was more than the difference between multiple tiers of headphones. If you had said that a year ago, I'd have laughed at you, but now that I have heard, I cannot unhear this. If I have to describe it's sound concisely, I'd say saturated and detailed. It is not the most transparent and has an obvious character that is fairly borderline warmish but without the Treble suffering anything. In fact, Treble texture was the biggest improvement from winyl - finally all the hf noise is gone but without being gooey unresolving mud like foobar. Started to hear a million shades of cymbals and digital hi hat synths (listening to mausam and escape right now). And everything else follows, vocal textures (whispers and so forth), bass instruments. Inter channel integrity still not perfect (I guess maybe coz due to it being 32 bit) but otherwise Sounds stellar. The difference in decay texture and detail with hysolid. The sound of water drops, the sound of claps, vocal textures. Feels like the first time I upgraded from hd598 to vsonic gr07. However it got a serious catch/dealbreaker. It's buggy. the architecture is in such a way that you need to have a separate control system. Android app didn't work (it broke after android 6 and never got an update I guess) so I had to use it on iOS. Running through asio to my computer.

 

14. Regarding android. Where do I even begin. What a forcibly gronked system is all I can say. A forced resampler makes every headphone sound like a hd598 <<sigh>>. Just overall low fi and I rather prefer it sending the stream as bluetooth signal and listen than to use stock android stuff. The only instance where I could get decent sound out of android is when using uapp or hiby music (and an external dac coz the internal dacs also mostly suck). I envy lg users coz lg has a reworked kernel and music player that apparently doesn't screw these things too much, apart from actually having a usable sound chip.

 

15. After all these, I tried my attempt at linux distros. First tried ubuntu without setting up alsa, just pulse audio. As expected disappointment. Then I tried ap-linux, a fork of arch Linux with audio optimizations and kernels built in. The installation process was a pain and unfortunately it didn't support my network card. I couldn't do further updates and sound quality wasn't anything to write home about in that config. I thought I had hit a dead end and had to resort to battling windows.. until.....

 

16. WTFPLAY: this sounds amaaaaazing. All sorts of good adjectives - transparency, detail, effortlessness. There is no character I can attribute to this other than those of the recordings themselves, and maybe minor effect changes by changing buffer settings or some BIOS settings (and apparently changing RAM changes sound, since different RAM will have different memory refresh properties and response times). It is a live cd, so no need to install. Just burn to pendrive, boot from the drive. It'll load to RAM and run from the RAM. When you play a song it'll be decoded and loaded to RAM and played from there, instead of buffers from storage drives. It is super focused in audio tasks and has very minimal daemons. Doesn't have any instruction cycle stealing process - no network, no mouse/mouse polling, not even a battery probe. This is what makes it great since it can respond back to the data request from the dac in a timely fashion, and also there is no sudden noise spike in USB bus owing to noise from CPU interrupts/power state shifts. It sounds great and has been my reference for the last 4 months. Haven't had the chance to compare to ethernet streamers, but within system software, this is leagues above everything available on windows, with hysolid being the only thing that can even be compared, and even that is not as transparent. Highly recommend this player.

 

Continuing some technical analysis from top.

 

ASIO communicates both the bit depth and sample rate along with volume control info in the control frames, as per my understanding. It for sure communicates sample rate that way and I can see it even in my DAC control panel. If you send something with 32khz sample rate via asio to my dac it will refuse to pick it up and throw an error. In other operating system like mac os, we have other data structure for sending the data,including left justified 8-24 inputs. 

 

I did further investigation on this topic earlier. Hqplayer lets you choose the bit depth it sends to the dac. Winyl sounds closer to hqplayer configured to have same bit depth as the music file. Which means winyl is not doing any unnecessary padding. I have actually found padding to reduce detail in my system, making it artificially soft. I can for sure confirm that padding actually reduces detail, in my system and not improve. Custom upsampling using HQplayer is a completely different story altogether, I have tried a few and have been able to see how they "change" the sound but on a pure performance level it was on par with winyl, and worse when additional functionality was being used. Also my system was not up to snuff to try the high precision improvements. There's not much way zero padding can bring in such an amount of difference as heard through the players. Also if all of them do the same thing they should all sound the same which they clearly don't.

 

Most of these improvements can be correlated to how the softwares handle the music playback at the instruction level. Which means libraries used, the stability of plugins used, memory consumption, buffering etc. I have made some investigations on what makes winyl superior to peers in bass audio library and also its one pitfall compared to its peers. It does perform optimizations with regards to usb root control as well. I was trying to see if I can make it play full song from RAM like I can do on musicbee, but after I tried hysolid, i've stopped that approach. I am 100% certain the way a library, the instruction set and features are implemented make an insane level of difference. Changing buffer and load to ram changes things. So many small changes changes things. The way their instructions are structured and the way they behave with other io has a correlatable effect on sound. In a normal music player, you need handles for i/o, trying to see where the user wants to scrub to which means your instructions will have structure in a way it keeps asking for memory pointers. The better ones do a more streamlined getting it closer to just store in a register and keep shifting it, and using it. And as I mentioned above, in my device stack the differences are bigger than different tiers of headphones.

 

Now coming to the topic of foobar sounding objectively worse. This player showed a measurable worse performance across multiple independent tests. (https://imgur.com/gallery/50P4hRJ). All the above topics, we have few players like hysolid sounding objectively better on all fronts, and other players with custom libraries like winyl,hqplayer,musicbee, etc are give an take between them but all sound better than foobar under any parameter. An accurate player will have more depth and separation for almost any song, and that foobar sorely lacks. There is some processing/added distortion happening without a hint of doubt and that is the reason for lack of detail, not accuracy. The player sounds different across different versions as well as per a report from my friend. The issue has also been reliably measured with different input tones. The aberration is closer to how a limiter/compressor would perform, and guess what, windows volume control has built in limiter and compressors. These were measured in ASIO, in WASAPI and still showed the same aberration both audibly and measurably. What does this tell? It just tells that foobar is broken,and has some processing happening even though it claims not to with the plugins. This is one huge flaw which makes it sound worse than even normal players like aimp, and apart from this, memory handling and other issues are also abundant, which as I said winyl and other BASS library based players do better and completely smack foobar out. I have tried my best to "fix" foobar. Have tried 2-3 different asio/wasapi plugins and all had different issues. Case's asio plugin literally distorted annoyingly at 100%. I'm not moving away from my conclusion at all. I've tried revisiting foobar multiple times (whenever I change something in my chain) in an attempt to see and have always been disappointed. Winyl sounds closer to professional DAWs.

 

Tl:dr: WTFPLAY >> Hysolid >>>> Winyl = Musicbee = Hqplayer = xmplay > Audirvana >> jriver = roon > Aimp > uapp on android > foobar2000 > any bundled music player with windows or non asio supported players.

Pure Asio Player does not appear in the list of listed Players, which is certainly the most performing of all the players tested in this thread.

https://sites.google.com/site/pureasioplayer/Home

[ArnaudA]

Hello all,

and 

I have a question adressed to Peter for his excellence concerning what i consider to be the toppest "Hi-Res" player of all time and due to its longevity and the date of its conception i'am flabbergasted that nobody had the idea to mention that XXhighend player again. Perhaps superior to WTFPlay (just broke the stick). Let's get then to the core of the problem, my little prob is that i correctly installed both the files on the desktop, renamed it into XXhighendplayer and created a shortcut for starting the exe. Everything is great: H script goes by, the program is correctly opened and thanks to Manuel and his excellence devotion concerning well.. his manual i have set XX up prefectly, but i do have a serious problem concerning Windows 10, i have got a simple family 10 version (19044.1586 V) and i think that causes all of my trouble, i can play all the formats choising my bit/resolution and frequencies and my 24 Dac ( THE STU essence one) in Ks mOdE without any problems, the only problem is seemingly the tray: how does it work for you all people ? When i start to play the song, i do have a measure of rigourous treatment occuring, producing a series of requested approbation about resolution to click on, Dac is in 24 (apprently rare) and then i do have a blank white page and then the music is played beautifully but the real problem is that i only can play one song at the time, i cannot go back to library it is stuck even if i use ALT S. The page with sleeve cover and the indication are stuck. (Sending you attached files)

 

Please i you got a solution my computer is well adjusted rather powerful without being exceptionnal all the points of indication by Manual and his precision were respected and of course i set Dotnet 35 to the sys. Thank you if you can respond you or Manuel that also seems to know a lot about your own work. 

[Rexp]

Currently using Bubble on Android to play files from Google Drive to Foobar upnp on my pc. Nice fast, pure sound.

[bodiebill]

On 1/27/2022 at 9:24 AM, jackfabbri said:

Pure Asio Player does not appear in the list of listed Players, which is certainly the most performing of all the players tested in this thread.

https://sites.google.com/site/pureasioplayer/Home

 

Can PureASIOPlayer be used with Diretta ASIO? Anyone doing this?

 

WTFPlay and XXHighendPlayer are wonderful players indeed, however I am looking for players that can apply my Acourate correction files on-the-fly and preferably do DSD.

 

JRiver is my database manager of choice. I never used it as a player, but its SQ has come closer to my favorites, especially after using Diretta.

 

General setup:

 

   (1) PC/Android server/control point >

      UPnP >

          (2) NUC Diretta host with GentooPlayer >

               Diretta >

                    (3) Afterdark Rosanna streamer (RPi4) Diretta target with GentooPlayer

                         USB >

                              Audio-GD DI-20HE >

                                   I2S >

                                        Holo Spring 3 L2 with preamp module

 

Possibilities:

• minimserver or JRiver (on 1) as server
• UPPlay, JRiver or BubbleUPnP (on 1) as control point
• minimserver, JRiver (on 1) or APlayer (Media Renderer) (on 2) as upsampler
• minimserver, JRiver (on 1), APlayer (Media Renderer), CamillaDSP (on 2) as convolver
• APlayer Media Renderer, gmediastreamer or mpd/upmpdcli (on 2) as renderer
• APlayer, gmediastreamer or mpd/upmpdcli (on 2, omitting 1) as player

Too early for a final verdict: I am still experimenting with the (too many) combinations and assessing the effects on SQ. I would expect that moving the heavier processes (resampling, convolution) to the PC rather than the NUC would be beneficial but that does not always seem the case.

[Rexp]

10 hours ago, bodiebill said:

 

Can PureASIOPlayer be used with Diretta ASIO? Anyone doing this?

 

WTFPlay and XXHighendPlayer are wonderful players indeed, however I am looking for players that can apply my Acourate correction files on-the-fly and preferably do DSD.

 

JRiver is my database manager of choice. I never used it as a player, but its SQ has come closer to my favorites, especially after using Diretta.

 

General setup:

 

   (1) PC/Android server/control point >

      UPnP >

          (2) NUC Diretta host with GentooPlayer >

               Diretta >

                    (3) Afterdark Rosanna streamer (RPi4) Diretta target with GentooPlayer

                         USB >

                              Audio-GD DI-20HE >

                                   I2S >

                                        Holo Spring 3 L2 with preamp module

 

Possibilities:

• minimserver or JRiver (on 1) as server
• UPPlay, JRiver or BubbleUPnP (on 1) as control point
• minimserver, JRiver (on 1) or APlayer (Media Renderer) (on 2) as upsampler
• minimserver, JRiver (on 1), APlayer (Media Renderer), CamillaDSP (on 2) as convolver
• APlayer Media Renderer, gmediastreamer or mpd/upmpdcli (on 2) as renderer
• APlayer, gmediastreamer or mpd/upmpdcli (on 2, omitting 1) as player

Too early for a final verdict: I am still experimenting with the (too many) combinations and assessing the effects on SQ. I would expect that moving the heavier processes (resampling, convolution) to the PC rather than the NUC would be beneficial but that does not always seem the case.

Which Aplayer? There seems to be a few on the play store. Thanks!

[bodiebill]

6 hours ago, Rexp said:

Which Aplayer? There seems to be a few on the play store. Thanks!

 

PM sent.

[bodiebill]

On 4/5/2022 at 5:38 PM, bodiebill said:

Can PureASIOPlayer be used with Diretta ASIO? Anyone doing this?

 

Now playing DSD256 with PureASIOPlayer (PAP) and Diretta. Great combination.

Rob Pap kindly customized my PAP version for Diretta.

I only use it for serious listening: files are corrected (convolution) and upsampled offline first.

Recommended!

[PeterSt]

On 4/4/2022 at 11:21 AM, ArnaudA said:

but i do have a serious problem concerning Windows 10, i have got a simple family 10 version (19044.1586 V) and i think that causes all of my trouble

 

Hello Arnoud,

 

Yes, that is indeed the problem; not all random W10 versions are suitable and as a matter of fact, the last one which is, is 14393.0.

This will sadly mean that you can't use a "family" computer for it, but eh ... one should not do that anyway because of the infringement of other processes which really influence SQ (e.g. a virus scanner).

 

I have 14393.0 available for you. Just drop me an email at sales phasure com.

 

It is to be emphasized that all the real stuff is happening in Minimized OS Mode (which is not what you can have attempted), which in real time strips the whole OS to an audio OS and/but which allows you to go back in one minute when required (it just takes a reboot). In that mode all is operative, but during playback in "Unattended mode" nothing is. This gets back as soon as you press Stop.

 

I guarantee you this is worth while, so any dedicated PC you may get for this, will have a best cause. But please make that not the smallest PC power wise (like a laptop would be the "smallest" and far from the best sounding). Meanwhile it (the 14393.0 OS) will free you of all the hassle because it just works flawlessly with XXHighEnd.

 

Peter