Tír Na HiFi

nige2000 wrote: what made jplay stand out for me even in single mode over audivarna was the increase in sound stage, audivarna was more restricted for me.
the worse thing is i really wanted jplay to be not as good im none too fond of windows, i have a licence for both and i will continue to use audivarna on the macbook and headphones and till i get the jplay set up simplified.

what pc spec did u do your testing on as jplay is hungry for ram in single mode mine uses 4.6 gigabytes in single and yould want to give it some room as well. tried a mediocre pc last night with 4 gb it was very unimpressive needed more ram.

nige

Nige, Try Amarra HiFi & let us know as I suggested to Mark - it may well be the Mac equivalent of Jplay?
My standalone Jplay was run on a modest HP Pavilion nettop 1.6GHz AMD processor but I have the max RAM of 8GB in there!

jkeny wrote:

nige2000 wrote: what made jplay stand out for me even in single mode over audivarna was the increase in sound stage, audivarna was more restricted for me.
the worse thing is i really wanted jplay to be not as good im none too fond of windows, i have a licence for both and i will continue to use audivarna on the macbook and headphones and till i get the jplay set up simplified.

what pc spec did u do your testing on as jplay is hungry for ram in single mode mine uses 4.6 gigabytes in single and yould want to give it some room as well. tried a mediocre pc last night with 4 gb it was very unimpressive needed more ram.

nige

Nige, Try Amarra HiFi & let us know as I suggested to Mark - it may well be the Mac equivalent of Jplay?
My standalone Jplay was run on a modest HP Pavilion nettop 1.6GHz AMD processor but I have the max RAM of 8GB in there!

will do

will your stanalone let you use a web browser at the same time as jplay without affecting performance, it might be able to but it would be close to the edge.

john have you any idea why jplay sounds so much better in streamer mode i just dont understand it, as i thought my main pc would have been well able to give optimum performance jplay only uses a quarter of its resources.

nige

nige2000 wrote: will do

Cool

will your stanalone let you use a web browser at the same time as jplay without affecting performance, it might be able to but it would be close to the edge.

Yes, I have no problems browsing when playing

john have you any idea why jplay sounds so much better in streamer mode i just dont understand it, as i thought my main pc would have been well able to give optimum performance jplay only uses a quarter of its resources.

nige

No, I've no idea why its better but I was looking at the lights on my router & the network resources while using Jplay streamer. Interestingly, there is a burst of traffic every second or so. I thought that the file being played was streamed in full to the audio PC before playback started so I'm not sure what this bursty network traffic is about? I also assumed that the streaming Jplay allowed more resources to be closed on the audiPC but this doesn't make sense as networking is needed. However, Jplay's workings are not all about just closing down processes - I remember their talk about using a memory handling approach which is seldom used in Windows & involves using large memory chunks - forget the exact name for it now - large-page memory or something? I reckoned it was to do with having contiguous memory rather than fractured memory. So maybe there is some other area involving networking which allows more of this contiguous memory usage? Which leads me to the tentative conclusion that maybe how memory is used is the most important for SQ rather than no. of processes - in fact why reducing processes improves SQ is because it frees up more memory for contiguous usage & therefore less dispersed memory? Just an off-the-top of my head idea!

John, Jplay V4.3 used large amounts of memory in the single AudioPC and it was preferable to store a whole album,even a hires 24/192 one, in RAM and then proceed to play it. Jplay 5 streams packets of info to the AudioPC from the streamer pc and it uses smaller amounts of RAM in the AudioPC. The key is PacketSize(adjustable in REGEDIT). If you select e.g. 4 you will get a large packet sent after a correspondingly large interval. If you select PS=0 you will get a continuous stream. Watch Wifi in TaskManager/ Performance .

KM

/quote]
must say though i had a look at building a zuma type pc (its a beautiful case the streacom fanless)

would be able to build a starter kit from about 710 euro
http://www.komplett.ie/komplett/product ... tails.aspx
http://www.komplett.ie/komplett/product ... tails.aspx
http://www.komplett.ie/komplett/product ... tails.aspx
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/160w-pic ... acom-cases
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/streacom ... -atx-black
http://www.komplett.ie/komplett/product ... tails.aspx

you wont need all the ram if using as an audio pc, but two sticks is only 30 euro more than one
of course you'll need a copy of win 8 and a keyboard and monitor for set up then you get worry about these:

http://shop.smallgreencomputer.com/SOtM ... USBexp.htm
http://shop.smallgreencomputer.com/SOtM ... TMSATA.htm

it would sit nicely on a shelf, but i have a lot of parts lying around i can use[/quote]

Thanks for that Nigel. Will file it away as one to go back to. Unlike some of the guys I came late to laptops hence both of mine are recent vintage. i3 6g and i5 6g. Will need to get some mileage out of them before looking at a build pc. Bloody case is expensive.I didn't check the specs of it. That package would very soon build up towards the zuma price. For the moment I am putting my faith in hearing a shoot out between laptops and zuma/laptop and fingers crossed the zuma is just hot air. I might buy some more ram for the i5 (can only upgrade from 6 to 8) and a few turbo stickers to see if that helps.

John's info about memory use might explain the logic of going for large memory when using jplay. In task manager from what I can see John there is a spike when playback starts initially but it tapers off to virtually nothing during playback.

Ken Moreland wrote:John, Jplay V4.3 used large amounts of memory in the single AudioPC and it was preferable to store a whole album,even a hires 24/192 one, in RAM and then proceed to play it. Jplay 5 streams packets of info to the AudioPC from the streamer pc and it uses smaller amounts of RAM in the AudioPC. The key is PacketSize(adjustable in REGEDIT). If you select e.g. 4 you will get a large packet sent after a correspondingly large interval. If you select PS=0 you will get a continuous stream. Watch Wifi in TaskManager/ Performance .

KM

Thanks Ken,
Yes, so my theory or something like it might apply - something buried in the bowels of Windows - maybe contiguous memory - it would be easier to guarantee this in smaller chunks as is done in V5

Thanks Tony,
BTW, have you looked at ItemAudio in the UK - he's big into computer audio & claims the Zuma design was originally their design & badly copied from them. Worth checking out.

jkeny wrote:Thanks Tony,
BTW, have you looked at ItemAudio in the UK - he's big into computer audio & claims the Zuma design was originally their design & badly copied from them. Worth checking out.

Will do but if I garner funds this year it will be for another dac the pc thing will be a slow burner for me.

tony wrote:

jkeny wrote:Thanks Tony,
BTW, have you looked at ItemAudio in the UK - he's big into computer audio & claims the Zuma design was originally their design & badly copied from them. Worth checking out.

Will do but if I garner funds this year it will be for another dac the pc thing will be a slow burner for me.

That's good to hear - I expect a shoot-out coming on :)

jkeny wrote:Thanks Tony,
BTW, have you looked at ItemAudio in the UK - he's big into computer audio & claims the Zuma design was originally their design & badly copied from them. Worth checking out.

looked at that too interesting website but jplay on 2gb ram cant see it working as a standalone unit, as an audio pc im sure it would be fine and the cheaper case isn't as pretty.
these motherboards will have built in cpus and maybe ram, and will only be upgradable by replacing mother board cpu and ram together

downloading amarra now bloody slow download for a small file