A toast to PGGB, a heady brew of math and magic

[One and a half]

First of all, a thank you for the developer @Zaphod Beeblebrox to work out a unique development of computer audio processing. He found a problem with the processing of the Chord DAVE and decided to do something about it, hats off to you. When reading through the FAQ and the guides, let's get to the gist of things: 

 

i)   How much will it cost 
ii)  What work do I need to do to setup PGGB 
iii) Could there be any benefits to SQ

 

Cost

a) Purchase another 32GB ECC RAM
b) Purchase another 10 TB HDD to store the processed WAV files
c) purchase another 10 TB backup drive to backup the processed wav files
d) Buy the PGGB license

 

That's close to USD1500,  one mortgage payment or a month's rental. 

 

Work involved

 

Adding another Hard drive, replacing RAM is less than a morning's activities, procuring often takes 3 times as long, since I can't usually buy all items from the one place at an optimised price. This results in more freight charges. Internationally, that's a big deal, but over a certain weight, the additional items are trivial.

The wait to process some 125,000 tracks, Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be the intro to the complete books of Game of Thrones.

 

SQ Benefits

From reading the responses so far, owners of Chord DACs have the greatest benefit. I don't usually bag other user's DACs since that's their choice to buy, freedom and enjoyment is what its all about, huh. Does this mean then the algorithms in the Chord devices are 'not optimised' to begin with? The Ayre QX-5 20 has marginal effect with PGGB. So far a range of DACs the effect can be marginal or massive. I suppose in time there will be a list of more DACs as users take up PGGB, so the choice of implementation is easier to make.

 

As noted from a long time ago, some DACs are great at Redbook and if you have one of these, higher up natural rates including DSD also will sound great. Seems that the internal high upsampling rates to PCM DACs and then using their filtering is technique that can be bettered. I don't own an NOS DAC, so cannot comment.

 

I also have doubt that increased processing will make the PC any quieter as far as conducting noise emissions is concerned. Forget the wasted hours in trimming processes on Windows, PGGB makes up for that processing noise and then some.

PGGB needs to convert to PCM always, I understand the complexity.  It will also mean direct DSD conversion by the DAC is bypassed. Boo, hiss. 

 

Upsampling

 

The reason I gave up on HQPlayer long ago now, there's a great difficulty in finding the 'right' filter and upsampling rate to DSD or high rate PCM, when the source material can vary so considerably. From the PGGB Guide notes:

"Choose ‘Moderate’ or ‘Dense’ when you need more body. This is especially useful for genres such as classic rock, big band jazz or CDs that may not have the best downsampled quality."

 

I listen to a wide variety of music, so would I need to change the filtering to suit, if I could ever find that medium. That means constant fiddling and tweaking, sorry there's a major negative. For at least three years or more, I gave up on upsampling processing within the software, since the DACs I've owned take care of all that elegantly and let the player software play, as is.

 

Conclusion 

 

The final analysis is the USD1500 could be better spent on noise reduction from the Music Server, like the XE JCAT NET Femto, fanless designs, mechanical isolation, that kind of optimisation is 'real and tangible'.
The added drive for backups and drive replacements is tedious. 
I don't use direct streaming from Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, those that do will be disappointed (especially with Chord DACs)

 

PGGB based on what's written above, is not for me, sorry about that.

[One and a half]

@Zaphod Beeblebrox, cool the component for foobar is available, can't recall many people running Foobar2000, perhaps in 2009, but haven't listened to it since. Looking through the notes on PGGB-RT, mentions that it can't decode DSD on the fly, the offline version is better for that, that's fine, but playback is then only PCM, that's kind of sad.

 

Today I listened to Marian McPartland "Silent Pool". There's two versions in the library, a 88.2 PCM from HD Tracks and the SACD as an iso ripped to 2.8 DSF. The PCM was OK to listen to was kind of tired the first few tracks, the DSF on the other hand was real piano wide space, a real pleasure to listen to and stayed with the album all the way through. If PCCB can only play PCM at high rates, then whatever conversion from DSD, won't there be losses and not sound the same?  If the Pros can't get it right, won't extra processing cause the same drama? Surely if the original track is garbage, even with sopper dooper processing it could never sound better, GIGO concept surely.

 

You say, high PCM rates are better for the DAC, and that all processing should be completed by the PC with PGGB, with millions of taps and it all sounds good, but I have trouble with this concept, since the DAC is quite capable of high rates, as well as plain ol redbook and DSD. The true mark of a good DAC is how it converts redbook, some DACs are good others not so. By upsampling to stratospheric rates, that intense processing can't be heard?  

 

Getting back to the -RT version, I see a panel where there are adjustments for filtering, transparency and so on. Very much like HQPlayer's filters, they are to me, meaningless numbers to learn. Does one set of numbers only to apply to classical, or jazz, or 70's bad bass EQ? What if (example) a setting is 4.3, and while listening should it be 4.7, or to agonise over another type of filter or number? This to me is not listening, but tinkering, and endless dissatisfaction and distraction. 

 

I must admit I haven't followed the thread that closely on how file sizes can come down, but on the fly processing is a good start, but worry about the startup time. This is a trap, like most software, it's prone to fall over if the play button does nothing audibly for 10 (?) seconds, is this a fail or just processing. More tinkering to find out why, just play the song!