Tír Na HiFi

Aleg, thanks for the tip above.
KM

Hi everyone,

After lurking here for a few weeks, I finally found some time to register and post something. I'm afraid it's going to be a long story, so feel free to skip it, but I think it might be of interest. :-)

First of all, thank you Gordon, for creating such an amazing music player. I cannot express enough appreciation for all the work you've done so far. And everyone else, thanks for your contributions in this thread. After I found it 3 weeks ago, I've been reading and catching up while experimenting with my work-in-progress audio set-up. But... first things first... some background...

I've been into HiFi music reproduction since I was 7 and got my first little transistor radio. :-) I don't know if there's anyone here of my generation, but I still remember that day, and when I got my top-loading cassette recorder, with which I could actually record the songs they played on the radio (by holding the in-built microphone close to the speaker of the radio. What a miracle! :-)

Yes, times have changed! Fast forward to my own hard earned record player, cassettedeck, amplifier and speakers. Skip a few years and the cd-player appeared, and I got my first job as a HiFi salesman. After a while I was department head at one of the largest shops in Holland (my country of birth). I went to trade shows and brand presentations, could listen to most available High End equipment, Mark Levinson, Wadio, Wilson, the works. That was in the 90's.

My life went through a lot of changes in the first years of the new millennium and I travelled a lot. For a decade or so I didn't listen to music at all, not even on a portable device. About five years ago I settled again, but circumstances made it impossible to listen to a speaker system. I discovered Head-Fi and started to build myself a headphone system, got various second hand cans, discovering that my all time favourite is a 30 year old AKG K240 Sextett. I heavily modified a Chinese tube amp and hooked up my old Aura CD player, which I still had in storage. When that broke down I did some research and started experimenting with computer audio. I used the I2S output of a TeraLink USB converter to circumvent its SPDIF and feed Doede's DDDAC that I built myself with audiophile components. I used Foobar with the Dolby Headphone plug-in to create the illusion of listening to speakers and for a while I was happy.

As you all know, this journey is never-ending, so I kept looking for possible improvements. I discovered and tried JPLAY, then in a 3.xx version and was impressed enough to buy it. That kept me going for a while. I then lost interest for a year or so, until we recently moved house and I found myself in the position to be able to listen to speakers again. That re-ignited my dormant passions and I gave myself a limited budget to build a new system. I got a pair of Celestion DL6-II bookshelf speakers off eBay and some good stands. I researched amps and finally decided to order the HiFimeDIY UD20 full digital amp. Even in stock form, it's really amazing what this little box can do! I run it on some SLA batteries. I ordered anti-cables to put between amp and speakers.

Around the same time I started gathering and assembling all of the above, I stumbled upon MQn on the JPLAY forum. I was intrigued by something that you guys claimed was better than JPLAY. Every minute of my free time these past weeks I have spent testing and experimenting with both the hardware and software side of the whole chain and today I've reached its conclusion. Other than even better versions of MQN (unimaginable), I feel that this is as far as I can go based on a PC. (There are other things afoot with a Linux based Beaglebone Black and the Volumio player, but that's something for the future :-)

I have a laptop, a netbook and a desktop PC. JPLAY always sounded the best on my netbook, but after some experimenting found that my main PC in fact betters both laptop and netbook, even when they are not plugged into the grid and the PC is. I put Windows Server 2012 R2 on a bootable partition, and got Audiophil's Optimizer. I tested all of its 16 sound signature combinations and found B2 to be the best. I tested and optimized all possible BIOS settings, reduced my 8-core AMD FX8120 to 4 cores, set the CPU to a fixed 1600 Mhz, RAM at 800 Mhz, FSB/NB at 1200 Mhz and Vcore at about 1V. As the UD20 has a native sampling rate of 96/24, I convert the music I'm about to play to that format with Foobar/SOX. This also may give me the proper medium to play around with DRC in the future. (I've heard some great stuff about Acourate.) Oh, and I use MQNload and because I couldn't get Taggert's tasker to work, I installed a piece of software called CPUcontrol that at least enables me to set affinity profiles, which does improve the sound substantially.

Now, finally... :-) let me tell you about my experience with MQn. When I first downloaded it and compared it to the latest JPLAY 5.2 on my netbook, there was no mistaking the fact that it sounded much better. I immediately removed JPLAY from the system. That was with version 2.71 448 and 16-bit, the only one that worked on it. While all the hardware changes were evolving, I kept testing the various MQn versions that were released. After I had switched to my desktop PC, it pretty much played everything, all SSE2, SSE4 and AVX versions in 24/96 and 16/44. I will spare you all the iterations, but whenever I was sure one version was better than another, I kept it and threw the losing version out. Today all my hardware has been sufficiently burned in and configured and I finally managed to test the latest MQn candidates.

Competing were MQNplay SSE4 and AVX in 4 versions 1.2, 3.6, 2.20 and 2.26 and MQNcontrol 100000, 1.0 and 1.1, all in all 24 combinations. (FYI, AVX 100000 was only recently replaced.) All of these version I would be really happy with, even the one I liked least. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, on my system this is the result:

AVX 2.26 > AVX 2.20 > AVX 3.6 > AVX 1.2 > SSE 2.20 > SSE 2.26 > SSE 3.6 > SSE 1.2
Control 1.1 > 1.0 > 100000

The combination of control 1.1 and play AVX 2.26 gives the best detail, resolution, timing, sound stage, punch, tonality, timbre, you name it, and as always this is in my system with my ears. :-)

Okay, I'll leave it at that. I've taken up way too much space already.

To be continued... maybe.... :-)

Hi Satshanti

A warm welcome from a fellow Dutchman ;-)

Great you also found the better sound quality in MQn.

It was nice reading about your experiences.

Regarding your preferences I fully agree with your outcome, except .......... the control version.

I have a preference for the avx v1 100000 as I find the R1.1 becoming somewhat bass heavy too much weight on the bass and on my setup that drags down the music a bit. I prefer the more lightfooted character and airyness of avx v1 100000.

Everyone has got his preference and that is just fine.

Welcome again

Cheers

Aleg

Torn between control 1.1 and 100000
1.1 has best detail Which is great for some tracks
But we've lost something that 100000 had

Also think there's a little extra noise in 2.6 up other things better bass is going a little wrong bloated in places

Need to do more listening to be sure

Welcome satshanti
Always good to have more experience on board

Welcome aboard Satshanti sure lot's of us can relate to parts of that story in one way or the other.

No success with avx for me. Tried a variety of controls and locations but no joy. SSE4 and SSE2 working fine.

Tony , try the same thing Nige recommended. Open a folder in C called MQNplayer and paste in all the usual stuff, worked perfectly for me.
KM

Works for me too, but not when I use mqnload.

Thank you Nige for the new folder recommendation! I tried it getting avx to work (but made a an error), avx didn't run but there was a file open as a result which meant I couldn't delete the directory. I rebooted, deleted the directory, created a new one and avx R2.26 finally works. Probably all I needed to do was reboot.

avx not working for some of us seems to be to do with a file being left open when it fails in some combination of mqnplay and mqncontrol.

sse2/avx R2.30 versions work best with control 1.1

revisited decisions made for control 1.0 where the issue was to reduce sibilance. Can't get avx to work, but like the sound of sse2 - seems to have everything.

Hi Satshanti,

this was my first audio device

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/itt_sl53_automatic.html

eventually wired it into the valve amp stage of my Dad's old Philips turntable and listened to recordings of Tommy Vance's Friday night rock show, been searching for that sound ever since. Also liked playing about with loadspeakers, until I got the ATC's.

satshanti, very interesting to read about you findings. Thanks!

satshanti wrote:The combination of control 1.1 and play AVX 2.26 gives the best detail, resolution, timing, sound stage, punch, tonality, timbre, you name it, and as always this is in my system with my ears. :-)

Same here, but I'm still switching between Control 1.1 and Control 100000.