Tír Na HiFi

jkeny wrote:Tony,
You think my calling the bitheads "measurbators" was inadvertent??

Totally!

Hey guys, I've become a measurbator - I kept pulling my wire to make it longer & guess what, I enjoyed it :)

I'm getting some interesting results using a very sensitive test that I'm running which shows the differences in timing of the output samples being played through various software players. The results are consistent & repeatable. The results aren't ready yet for release as I need to collect a bank of results & analysis but I can tell you that JPlay shows a very different & near perfect results compared to JRiver, Media Monkey. Couldn't get Foobar results - there seems to be something non-standard in it's output upsetting the test routine.

Anyway, thought I'd break the news here first for a number of reasons but I also have a plea - I need a recorder so that I can perform some more accurate testing. At the moment I'm just using a laptop motherboard's sound chip for the proof-of-concept. I now need to run through a bank of tests using an external USB asynch DAC (guess which one) & record it's output for analysis.

I know Fran has a recorder which he will kindly lend me but he is away this weekend & later next week. I'm also away later next week. I started a thread yesterday asking if anyone has a recorder & if they would kindly lend it to me.

This test may well allow us to check our "tweaks" to our systems & confirm what we are hearing? So, if anyone wants to be part of this ( it's looking like it could be an exciting measuring technique) please lend me a recording device - one that records from line in (I won't be using a microphone)

Hi John,
Very interesting project and it would be great to finally get a solution to demonstrate differences between the playback engines, I checked my iRiver H120 and it only records up to 48, 16.

What tweaked my interest in your tests so far was the mention of Foobar.
At the weekend Seb came around with his new Eximus DAC and optimised Audio PC for a comparison run against my Meitner DAC and dual PC setup.

We set up both systems feeding in to separate Line in’s on my Preamplifier so we could each play the same track leading and lagging at various times to directly compare sound from both setups. We had a remote to quickly switch the Pre back and forth between playback systems on the same tracks which worked well. At times when we started both at the same time we could barely tell there had been a change in source except for the sound of the relay in the Pre.
The Eximus allowed us to level match the volume and after continuous tweaking we were both in agreement the levels were indistinguishable between both sources. Running 44k tracks I could hear little difference between the 2 sources but there was a feeling the Meitner sounded a bit softer/sweeter on top end and Seb was better at spotting this than me.

We then moved to high rez tracks and then we both agreed that we could not hear any difference that we could point to which says a lot for the Eximus. Seb noted that he was surprised that we managed to get the high rez tracks to play through his system as he could not get Jplay to run high rez previously on Direct Link.
Seb brought out his laptop and router to connect in to his Audio PC (headless and highly optimised) and discovered that all along we had been listening through Foobar on his audio PC which shocked me.

I had been running under the assumption that given all the improvements in Jplay that there would have been a very noticeable difference in playback against any other playback engine. Thinking about it now I can only assume either there is something wrong with my implementation of Jplay or more likely with all the recent optimisation of PC’s and power supplies this has brought more of an improvement to sound with the Jplay benefits of hibernate mode, shutting off devices and reducing noise has been offset by all this manual tweaking we have all been getting on with. The only other option is that both myself and Seb cannot hear for shit but I will argue my corner on that one.
Maybe Foobar will turn out to be nearer to Jplay in your tests but if not I need to go away and look at my setup again as I am still scratching my head a little on this one.

Anyway some food for thought there but the first big take away from the weekend was that the Eximus would be top of my shopping list if I was to make a choice between it and the Meitner today.
I did expect DAC technology to improve very quickly but this certainly proves that we will have interesting hardware to look forward to over the coming year or two at affordable prices.

Best of luck with the search and I look forward to the results.
Pearse.

Pearse, was it possible that Seb was using Foobar to play via Jplay (like Jriver/Jplay combination)or was it straight Foobar ?
KM

Hi Ken,
I will let Seb confirm as he is the computer meister but he was certain on the day that JPlay was not in action even through Foobar.

Hi Ken,

For the first half of our tests the foobar engine was playing the music. Once we realized that that was the case I switched it to jplay via Foobar (foobar acts as my front end for jplay).

Hope that helps :) - the difference was of crucial nature to me. On foobar highs and all dynamically standing out sounds were edgy and sharp, digital you can say. On jplay all that was gone making the listening more enjoyable and less fatiguing. There might have been more differences but we were not really looking for them (or at least I was not) on that day as we were comparing DACs mostly but this particular one was standing out to the extent it was very easy to notice.