Tír Na HiFi

tony wrote: ...

Aleg then comes in with Accourate software which I don't get. It costs nearly as much as the dac I currently have. But it interests me more than the paper as I feel it might deliver something tangible. When I have time I will download the trial version.

...

Tony

Where do you get lost regarding the Acourate software? Can I enlighten you?

It is software that does room corrections in a digital way. So instead of placing bass traps, diffusors and messing about with speaker position, you digitally record the sound at your listening position. The software does a complete frequency sweep, say from 10 Hz to 28 kHz, and measures how that sweep is received at your listening position.
Because it knows at what time and with what amplitude each frequency was sent, it can analyse what your room does with the sound that is leaving your speakers. It will detect amplitude changes due to intermodulation of waves and reflections, it detects phase shifts, it detects pulse responses which show how long it takes for a signal to die down. It measures the acoustic response of your room.

What it does next is some psycho-acoustic analysis, which details are beyond me, but which determines how our brains are interpreting that measured acoustic response.
After that you determine what your target response curve would idealy look like (there are some easy guidelines to determine that and you can experiment with it yourself).
Finaly it calculates a filter which contains the digital correction that need to be applied to digital music to obtain the optimal target response.

A few caveats:
1. You can only apply it to DIGiTAL music. Either realtime with an ASIO-based interface to a realtime convolver, which will introduce additional cpu activity. Or off line whereby you create copies of your music files which have the correction applied to them.
2. For best results you NEED 24-bit playback(regardless of the bit-depth of the original music files). All digital corrections are done with 64-bit wordlength and those 64-bits need to be dithered back to idealy 24-bits but can be done to 16-bits. I find 24-bits significantly better though. So if using MQn you need to have (at this moment) a DAC-driver that supports Gordon's "24-bits in a 32-bit container".

Regarding costs, I agree it is not really cheap stuff, but it appears it is (one of) the best DRC-software available. Put into perspective of MY digital chain (Naim DAC + XPS-2 + SonicWeld Diverter HR2 + GISO GB + highend digital cables for ethernet, USB and SPDIF) it is not that expensive and brought me large gains in an area I could/would not have addressed with other means.

You can always ask for a free trial conversion, you need to be able to make a sweep recording though, so a microphone and an ASIO compatible recording soundcard is the minimum required. Uli Brueggemann will make a converted version of a few tracks so you can hear the effects and judge for yourself.

If there are any questions, feel free to ask ...

Cheers

Aleg

Many thanks Aleg for the detailed reply. It is the notion of digitally altering the sound that would concern me as in my head I have a preference for there to be no interfering in the signal. It sounds very worthwhile and I will try and drag myself into the 21st century and test it at some point.

Also the fact I have a loan of a microphone here since well before xmas and am still waiting for the owner to come and do the testing as I have been too lazy to check it out.

I have bass traps and due to get some more. Think my wife would prefer accourate to look at rather than the traps but the price would floor her.

tony wrote:.... It is the notion of digitally altering the sound that would concern me as in my head I have a preference for there to be no interfering in the signal....

Tony

That was indeed something I had to get over myself as I'm very much a purist.
But I convinced myself, that it is what I'm hearing that should be good and not just the digital datastream itself that produces the sound. But that said, I have made sure I kept safety copies of all original tracks.

I noticed afterwards, I had some strange room effects that got cleared very nicely now.
And with SWMBO I would never have been able to go the road of bass traps, diffusors etc, even if I would have known what to do to create the required corrections by physical means.

But I agree it is something we audiophiles not easily do.

Cheers

Aleg

Tony, download REW from http://www.hometheatershack.com/roomeq/ , into your laptop, hook it up to your system , plug the microphone into your laptop also and place it at head height(seated). You'll see the irregular waveform you are getting back for your smooth sweep. You may be able to improve the results with treatments and then see what the Acourate can do. The mike is only cheap sh1t from Maplins.
KM

Hi Gordon

Since you brought it up - I have been using Daphile now for a few weeks. I no longer use Windows or MQN or JPLAY or JRMC.

Now, I am not claiming that there is any superiority in the audio performance of Daphile. TBH, as far as I have bothered testing it sounds identical to any of the above listed Windows players. I was surprised to see you characterise it as "strident" - certainly not the case here on my linear/pico powered i5 fanless pc running into WaveIO/Buffalo set up. It sounds very good, is all I will say.

My experience with Windows flatlined with the introduction of W8.1. After "upgrading" to that I found no discernible difference between audio playback softwares.

So I have, for a variety of reasons, stepped back from the debate on playback quality and settled on Daphile as it is a closed package, denies me the "opportunity" to fiddle and tweak, provides music bits to my dac and I can choose which ones from an android phone, sat in my fave chair. No computer screen, no keyboard, no hassle.

It seems pretty stable, the "developer" seems up for supporting it and it is based on proven code (bit of linux, bit of Squeezeserver, nothing radical). Job done.

Interestingly, I tried it when it first came out, against JPLAY and MQN and dismissed Daphile at that time as a bit "baggy" sounding. OK but nothing special. The MQN phase of activity for me drove me to make improvements to PC, dac and powersupplies for various elements in the chain. When I returned to Daphile a few weeks ago it sounded on par, so I am sticking with it (at least whilst other things keep me busy).

Regards

Mark

LowOrbit wrote:Hi Gordon

Since you brought it up - I have been using Daphile now for a few weeks. I no longer use Windows or MQN or JPLAY or JRMC.

Now, I am not claiming that there is any superiority in the audio performance of Daphile. TBH, as far as I have bothered testing it sounds identical to any of the above listed Windows players. I was surprised to see you characterise it as "strident" - certainly not the case here on my linear/pico powered i5 fanless pc running into WaveIO/Buffalo set up. It sounds very good, is all I will say.

My experience with Windows flatlined with the introduction of W8.1. After "upgrading" to that I found no discernible difference between audio playback softwares.

So I have, for a variety of reasons, stepped back from the debate on playback quality and settled on Daphile as it is a closed package, denies me the "opportunity" to fiddle and tweak, provides music bits to my dac and I can choose which ones from an android phone, sat in my fave chair. No computer screen, no keyboard, no hassle.

It seems pretty stable, the "developer" seems up for supporting it and it is based on proven code (bit of linux, bit of Squeezeserver, nothing radical). Job done.

Interestingly, I tried it when it first came out, against JPLAY and MQN and dismissed Daphile at that time as a bit "baggy" sounding. OK but nothing special. The MQN phase of activity for me drove me to make improvements to PC, dac and powersupplies for various elements in the chain. When I returned to Daphile a few weeks ago it sounded on par, so I am sticking with it (at least whilst other things keep me busy).

Regards

Mark

I installed it last night, but I didn't have enough time to make it work. On my brief look, I couldn't figure out how you can connect existing library to it or you have to built it from scratch?
I have my music in two copies, one on W8.1 lap top, and the same copy on WDmyBookLiveDuo.
How have you done it?

Snap....Ditto and all that Mark as I had a similar experience when all the power and optimisation took root on the audio PC.

The only real difference i heard recently between players was at a listening session where there was a PC unoptimised with MQN compared to my Zuma with all the works using JPLay.
We both instantly heard the better sound from my Zuma so for me the power, hardware and OS improvements provide the bulk of the gains.

Another interesting difference I heard which previously was difficult to determine was in changing USB cables, changed the PPA red against a wireworld cable and again both of us heard the difference....guess you already know which sounded better!!

Cheers, Pearse.

try MS VGA driver vs intel HD driver. you will hear definite difference. 5-10% difference. that's how much "unrelated" software "randomly" affects SQ. hehe (nothing software player can do about it, as long as it is using CPU for audio processing)

LowOrbit wrote:Hi Gordon

Since you brought it up - I have been using Daphile now for a few weeks. I no longer use Windows or MQN or JPLAY or JRMC.

Now, I am not claiming that there is any superiority in the audio performance of Daphile. TBH, as far as I have bothered testing it sounds identical to any of the above listed Windows players. I was surprised to see you characterise it as "strident" - certainly not the case here on my linear/pico powered i5 fanless pc running into WaveIO/Buffalo set up. It sounds very good, is all I will say.

My experience with Windows flatlined with the introduction of W8.1. After "upgrading" to that I found no discernible difference between audio playback softwares.

So I have, for a variety of reasons, stepped back from the debate on playback quality and settled on Daphile as it is a closed package, denies me the "opportunity" to fiddle and tweak, provides music bits to my dac and I can choose which ones from an android phone, sat in my fave chair. No computer screen, no keyboard, no hassle.

It seems pretty stable, the "developer" seems up for supporting it and it is based on proven code (bit of linux, bit of Squeezeserver, nothing radical). Job done.

Interestingly, I tried it when it first came out, against JPLAY and MQN and dismissed Daphile at that time as a bit "baggy" sounding. OK but nothing special. The MQN phase of activity for me drove me to make improvements to PC, dac and powersupplies for various elements in the chain. When I returned to Daphile a few weeks ago it sounded on par, so I am sticking with it (at least whilst other things keep me busy).

Regards

Mark

Hi LowOrbit
I am 'the MQn Tester'! I second everything you say. The convenience of control from my Android tablet and the fact that it just works (booting at present off a USB stick) won me over.

I only tried it out when Gordon told me how good his NAD M50 streamer (based on Linux) was: having run Squeezelite on a Windows 7 laptop and having been very impressed, better than MQn dare I say, decided I should give it a run on Linux, which does have a better chance of not being interfered with by the OS.

Have to say that having been on board with MQn pretty much from the start, I was sceptical that Daphile would better it, but IMHO it does. No sign of stridency, in fact the opposite being mellow and smooth but still very detailed and clean. I am running it all on the PC (local storage) so no network streaming to get in the way, but I am sure that it will work well streaming too. I prefer Squeezelite as the player and you can use that with Daphile.

Kpeta the Finnish developer provides an excellent service, almost on a par with SBGK (!) and is certainly working hard to move it on. See here http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/pc-based ... er-os.html for some more detail.

Please note that the Squeezelite option in Daphile was a preview release and not yet available publically, so please wait for the official release. The default player in Daphile is SqueezePlay.

BTW I am committing the sin that I pointed out a while back of hijacking this thread away from MQn! Perhaps we should start a Daphile thread separately?