MQN

[jesuscheung]

m50 is basically linux though. DAC built-in to the mobo? the CPU is also a cheap Cortex A8. can't imagine it has good ram. but that doesn't matter. compensated by clean power less noise. absence of GPU is also good news.

does it sound better than a CD player of similar price?

don't give up.

[nige2000]

Tried out 2.66 last night. SSE4 version and still works well for me. Has Gordon eaten too much pudding or is he working away like a good Father Xmas on pressies for the troops?

Tony

Gordon has said if he would like the NAD51 very much, he might stop working on MQn altogether. He said last week he thought the NAD51 as good as his best MQn player.

So I hope that's not the case :-( and he will continue, because I think MQn by far the best sounding player.

Cheers and merry xmass

Aleg

the m51 is the dac, m50 is the player.

Having heard it I've got to question where I am going with MQn and what the best version is, the m50 had great separation and 3d sound and mqn sounded congested, so have I been steered away from the best sounding versions by some of the testing comments.

I think using windows for high end audio playback is a dreadful idea and I just don't have the time to continue with it as before.

the best solution seems to be a device close to or in the dac that has a minimal o/s that just controls the loading of data to the dac, an ipad type device can control it. Rendering from a pc has too many issues as far as I can see.

are you stacking up
mqn + haswell laptop vs nad m50 (coz that doesnt sound fair)

which version sounded most like the nad m50?

think it would be a shame to cease development of your mqn player,

windows pc isnt a great platform for high end audio, no doubt but weve done alot of noise and interrupt limitation and i dont think its too shabby

[Aleg]

Tried out 2.66 last night. SSE4 version and still works well for me. Has Gordon eaten too much pudding or is he working away like a good Father Xmas on pressies for the troops?

Tony

Gordon has said if he would like the NAD51 very much, he might stop working on MQn altogether. He said last week he thought the NAD51 as good as his best MQn player.

So I hope that's not the case :-( and he will continue, because I think MQn by far the best sounding player.

Cheers and merry xmass

Aleg

the m51 is the dac, m50 is the player.

Having heard it I've got to question where I am going with MQn and what the best version is, the m50 had great separation and 3d sound and mqn sounded congested, so have I been steered away from the best sounding versions by some of the testing comments.

I think using windows for high end audio playback is a dreadful idea and I just don't have the time to continue with it as before.

the best solution seems to be a device close to or in the dac that has a minimal o/s that just controls the loading of data to the dac, an ipad type device can control it. Rendering from a pc has too many issues as far as I can see.

Gordon

I cannot but disagree with you here. At the moment I have by far and wide the best sounding system I ever heared.

Besides your fantastic player (now using the 2.71 1024 rb intel sw because of the 24-bit playback I need) I have started to use Acourate DRC (digital room correction) software from AudioVero of Dr. Ulrich Brueggemann.

That has improved my soundstage wonderfully and really opened it up and corrected some anomalies I had there (like a diagonal presentation of instruments). Furthermore the acuracy and amount of detail has very much improved as well. The attack of keystrokes and striking movement of bow movements as well as lots of instrumental vibrations have started to come through a lot more and more consistently. This all due to room issues with reflections and phase shifts that are now being corrected.

But all of this would be to no avail if your software wasn't capable of creating this sound and amount of details and clarity in the first place.

I'm sure many hardware based streaming solution would have a hard time to come even close to what I am hearing now.

So please reconsider, even if you won't have as much time as you did, I'm sure you were approaching the climax of this journey.

Maybe there are further improvements possible in other aspects of computer use (check out Kyrill's post today on JPlay forum regarding EMI/RFI treatment)


Please reconsider

Best wishes and merry Xmass

Aleg

[nige2000]

m50 is basically linux though. DAC built-in to the mobo? the CPU is also a cheap Cortex A8. can't imagine it has good ram. but that doesn't matter. compensated by clean power less noise. absence of GPU is also good news.

does it sound better than a CD player of similar price?

don't give up.

jkenny
posted about linux capable arm pc boards somewhere, its probably an area thats going to need exploration, along with a mqn for linux

maybe if we had mqn for linux then we can start testing these low power board types

[jesuscheung]

Having heard it I've got to question where I am going with MQn and what the best version is, the m50 had great separation and 3d sound and mqn sounded congested, so have I been steered away from the best sounding versions by some of the testing comments.

don't think it is possible to achieve good 3d sound with software player (mqn) along.

you need tweaks too. also good PC hardware. when you use win8/R2 etc, you are listening to everything. everything matters. i have done tried thousands of tweaks, every one of them affects SQ. many of tweaks degrade SQ. i feel that MQn contributes to 50% of the SQ only in digital audio. you have to work for the other 50% elsewhere.

that m50 has the other 50% well done as well. so, yes, the comparison isn't totally fair.

[jesuscheung]

imagine when you install windows. SQ is only 50% of maximum possible.

MQn improves 50% SQ. so that's 50*1.5=75% of maximum possible SQ.

you need to work for the rest of 25% elsewhere with correct tuning/tweaks.

[jkeny]

jkenny
posted about linux capable arm pc boards somewhere, its probably an area thats going to need exploration, along with a mqn for linux

maybe if we had mqn for linux then we can start testing these low power board types

Yes, I made this point privately to Gordon when he told me of his results Vs the NAD stack i.e that without all the PS & other mods on the PC it was probably not a fair comparison. But it does show up the weaknesses of the PC as an audio platform - we really do have to go to a lot of trouble to get a great sound out of it i.e a general purpose PC is probably not a great starting platform for audio?

As it seems that most of the SQ issues can be traced back to noise generation in the system (my current working hypothesis), it makes sense to try to come up with some base system that minimises this noise or is at least amenable to easy modification to minimise this noise. low power, minimum spec systems is one way to go - the systems on a chip or ARM based computers - along with minimum controlling OS.

Another way to go might be the networking approach where the audio rendering device is a minimum spec, low power, device with local memory storage for the audio files & specialised, minimum controlling software. However, there are many routes for noise intrusion into the audio rendering system & each connection point is a potential source i.e via the hardwired connection back to the streaming device (USB, network) or via wireless connection (WiFI, Bluetooth, optical).

One of the obvious ways to approach this is to use a standalone system which reads audio files off an SSD, render & transport the digital audio stream to a local DAC chip with minimum OS overhead & minimum PS noise issues. This might offer the best chance of SQ but storage & navigation of the audio libraries becomes one user issue.

There are lots of angles to consider in this whole can of worms most of which quickly leads to complexity & the need for something approaching an OS. Which kind of brings us back to where we started - if we need an OS then we need an PC (of some sort) which means we have to begin to deal with PS issues, anyway.

However, I do agree with Gordon, Windows is just too complex to get a good handle on the noise generation issues - his MQN software shows what can be done when focussing on a very small, probably crucial step in the audio chain but think about all the other elements that we have no control over in the OS which can give rise to noise generation. One approach to this dilemma is to make the PS so stable & imperturbable that these OS activities introduce no PS noise variation. I'm not sure we have fully achieved this yet & getting further along this route is becoming more & more difficult.

Anyway, Ignore me, I'm just rambling!!

[nige2000]

Without going for very specialised system
ie still using usb dac or similar and clean power
are we not heading for a minimalist linux pc system
Other options seem like a epic task

[sbgk]

the ideal is to use dma transfer rather than copying data through the cpu, using a usb/spdif convertor doesn't allow for this option. think you can do it with a soundcard or dedicated device. not sure if the m50 does this.

[Aleg]

the ideal is to use dma transfer rather than copying data through the cpu, using a usb/spdif convertor doesn't allow for this option. think you can do it with a soundcard or dedicated device. not sure if the m50 does this.

That's a bit like windows' WaveRT in the PortCls.

Don't know which/what sort of audio devices support this model.