Tír Na HiFi

OK it is about time to dedicate a thread to what for me is now the best piece of Audio playback software out there and available FREE!

Originally called Bug Head Emperor it has been causing a stir around the world for over a year now I think with a big uptake in Russia of all places initially but now breaking down borders across the rest of the world as it continues to improve at an alarming rate much like MQN in the early days.

I have been listening to the latest version 4.76 for the past 2 days and it is an amazing piece of work by a guy with self professed mental illness from pushing himself too hard but doses of vitamin C seems to have him back in control of his world.
Whatever is true or untrue about this guy he certainly seems to have got a serious handle on the windows operating system, intel hardware, drivers and audio decoding technologies, and obviously has an amazing talent for listening and recognising the finer details in music.

He has some broken English and it seems to be getting better at explaining his software and development philosophy but it still takes some work to figure out his Bug Head Player. Its worth the effort though to work with it and figure it out from what I have heard so far.

I have had no issues with the installer in Windows server 2012 R2 in core mode so I expect anyone with Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2 should have no issues installing the software. To allow the player to see your DAC you should also install ASIO4ALL as well and once again the installer worked flawlessly here on 2 different systems.

His Facebook website is here and you will need Google Translate to read it if you are interested. https://ja-jp.facebook.com/pages/Bug-he ... 4151338856

There is a Onedrive link on the Facebook page to the latest software and older versions and a video on the software by the man himself, it is already a little outdated but it gives you a snapshot of his work. https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=95b15e62 ... 211D%21105

ASIO4ALL can be downloaded from here: http://www.asio4all.com/

Install Asio4all first then Bug Head software.

Once you install you should see the buttons on you desktop or go to Program Files on you C Drive and you should see a folder called "Bug head" so open it and inside double click on IninityBlade_SQ.

You should see ASIO4ALL option at least and possibly more if you have other Asio players available on your PC.
For me I click on ASIO4ALL as it is all I have available in my slimmed down installation and in the options available in the left window try and turn as many of these blue colour bars red by clicking on them.

For Option 7 click on Setup Dimm below this and try allocating 2Gb in each of the 4 Dimm window drop down boxes, then click enable this mode and set.
The options available for Dimm depends on available memory and hopefully others with more experience of Bug Head will row in here and provide better advice.

The key with turning as many of these 10 options red is that you will see the "Sound Quality Degradation" percentage drop in the top right area.
Best I can get to with my driver and memory is 30% but if you get to see professional pop up there then you are in good shape.

Click start in the bottom right and you are now ready to select and play music.

There are many options here but these will be for another day.
I use the files button at the bottom to browse to music files and select and play.
If you want to play DSD then go to the little "PCM" block next to LIST and click on it and you should see an option for DSD DOP, select it and if your DAC is capable you can play DSD files.

It takes several seconds for the first of your tracks to load with all the rewriting and memory work and optimisation but once playing enjoy your track or tracks with hopefully the best playback experience ever!!!!
Cheers, Pearse.

Got it running in a few minutes and so far very impressed. Not sure if I've everything set up optimally but it sure sounds good on 24/96 and 24/192. I'm using the Chord Asio driver and all seems good. I had been using his Rewrite program so the built-in Rewrite is a bonus.

As I understand its workings, it operates as a kind of equalizer software that changes certain frequency spectra to make it more pleasing.
It is very heavily processed data. Other people have 'complained' about the heavy compression and loss of dynamics.
It may sound nice, but isn't the recorded music itself.

Aleg wrote:It is very heavily processed data. Other people have 'complained' about the heavy compression and loss of dynamics.
It may sound nice, but isn't the recorded music itself.

Hi,

my last testing has been last December/January with AO 1.30 in Core including Online Convolving, fully optimized, only WMI on as needed for Acourate; my normal setup. It was tested in RAMOS as well. The highest quality of BHE allthough could not be tested in RAM as it needed 16Gb RAM at least to start and I had only 6GB left of my 16GB. The actual version needs only 4GB, I might try that one in future if I find the time. You can find more detailled reports of my testing in other BHE threads.

Undoubtfull a great player but as Aleg said I understand that it uses sounding. Be aware the Infinity Blade HQ is the highest sophisticated Version of BHE. Next there is a hidden menue to get access to some of the possibilities.

Finally MQn had still the best SQ on my system, in addition with the intransparent handling of the files I decided to stop more testing with BHE. You will recognize that there is huge activity with CPU and Memory while using BHE, another reason why I have not been convinced.

Give it a try, it is a great player. Some of my constraints may have been based on the missing translationen of BHE's background. I am sure the situation has improved in between. I know at least two folks which have a lot of background and seem to understand japanese as well ;)

My 2 cents
Thomas

Just tried 4.76 which is the latest release.
It has a zillion configuration options, so I don't know which should sound best, but with the settings I tried it wasn't within a mile of MQn.
Probably other settings would be better, but there is no guidance of finding those which are best.
But the approach with its highly processed rendering, is totally the opposite of MQn which I believe in more strongly.

High frequency sounds have intrinsically more energy than low frequencies. We actually lower the intensity of the highs to compensate. Basically, we hear white noise but our brains process it as pink noise. We also play music to reflect this. When you digitally sample something, the number of quantizations are in direct proportion to the amplitude. Less energy up top results in fewer quantizations in the highs in relation to the lows. So there is less fidelity coming from the tweeter as opposed to the woofer, because that's how it was recorded. To make it a level playing field, one converts the pink to white, resample it, then convert it back with algorithms. Mike Yee does this with FPGA in his MyDAC II which has been reviewed as organic sounding. So that may be what's going on here too, I don't know.

Bug Head still sounding great here, installed the latest 4.78 over the existing install with no issues.

Been testing both Xmos driver for the Meitner and the Amanero for the Lampizator.
Both install easily after resetting AO and after running AO again the Meitner control panel pops up OK when you select the Meitner Asio option.

The Meitner works well on my audio PC without any underclocking and works great with the minimum control panel settings for Xmos.
On the other heavily underclocked audio PC with tight memory timings I get loud pops in music whatever settings I use.

The Amanero driver with the Lampizator is much more accommodating on the heavily underclocked audio PC with tight memory timings.
I can go into the Asio4all panel and for the Amanero advanced settings I can use the lowest asio buffer at 64 samples, with 0 samples In and 0 samples Out, I have set kernel buffers to 4.

DSD sounds great with the above settings on the Lampizator and CPU is only at 27% with the CPU already underclocked to 800Mhz.

I get professional mode when I boot to the VHD but when I boot the same VHD into RamDisk the best I can get to is 30%, I suspect this is due to the RamDisk option confusing the Bug Head selection process.
I still prefer the RamDisk option even with 30% the best I can get in Bug Head.

I enable the Phase check option a which I assume checks phase and hopefully corrects any tracks which have reverse phase!!
I still have not got black screen working yet but that will be for another day.
Cheers, Pearse.

Sligolad wrote:I get professional mode when I boot to the VHD but when I boot the same VHD into RamDisk the best I can get to is 30%, I suspect this is due to the RamDisk option confusing the Bug Head selection process.

Hi Pearse,

It is about the RAM BHE is expecting: For every mode BHE expects a certain amount of RAM available. If BHE can't find this RAM the respective mode can't be choosed. That is somewhere documented but I don't remember where.

That was also my experience in December with the older versions, I could run the highest version not with RAMOS as it requested 16GB RAM. It was running well normally booted as I have 16GB in the system.

Take care
Thomas

Sligolad wrote:Bug Head still sounding great here, installed the latest 4.78 over the existing install with no issues.

Been testing both Xmos driver for the Meitner and the Amanero for the Lampizator.
Both install easily after resetting AO and after running AO again the Meitner control panel pops up OK when you select the Meitner Asio option.

The Meitner works well on my audio PC without any underclocking and works great with the minimum control panel settings for Xmos.
On the other heavily underclocked audio PC with tight memory timings I get loud pops in music whatever settings I use.

The Amanero driver with the Lampizator is much more accommodating on the heavily underclocked audio PC with tight memory timings.
I can go into the Asio4all panel and for the Amanero advanced settings I can use the lowest asio buffer at 64 samples, with 0 samples In and 0 samples Out, I have set kernel buffers to 4.

DSD sounds great with the above settings on the Lampizator and CPU is only at 27% with the CPU already underclocked to 800Mhz.

I get professional mode when I boot to the VHD but when I boot the same VHD into RamDisk the best I can get to is 30%, I suspect this is due to the RamDisk option confusing the Bug Head selection process.
I still prefer the RamDisk option even with 30% the best I can get in Bug Head.

I enable the Phase check option a which I assume checks phase and hopefully corrects any tracks which have reverse phase!!
I still have not got black screen working yet but that will be for another day.
Cheers, Pearse.

why do you need asio4all ?

I was wondering the same thing.