quad

A big thanks to ted_b. Ripped my first SACD with my new BDP-80FD, purchased just for this purpose. Excellent work, sir.

I want one, but can't justify the cost. Sorry for the noise.

According to Linn, DSD is a dead format....Why DSD is a terrible idea in 2013

I use MPD + ALSA on a minimal barebones Linux server. No GUI wanted or required. No other audio related rubbish on the system. No pulseaudio, phonon, gstreamer or Jack. I have used several flavours of Linux including Debian, Arch, Ubuntu & Fedora (Vortexbox), but I'm currently using Ubuntu 12.04. I particularly liked Arch as it gives you best control over absolutely everything, but it's not for beginners. I went back to Ubuntu for reasons not relevant to this thread. I use my iPad as a remote (MPaD), or sometimes my Android phone (MPDroid). I also have clients on my desktop PC (ncmpcpp & mpc). If you don't want to 'build your own', I can think of three distros that are worth a look: Vortexbox, mpdPup & Voyage Linux.

Well, I've hit a snag in that mpd.git has gone to v0.18 which has mostly had the code converted to C++. My patch as it currently stands will not work in 0.18 as it's not compatible. I'm having trouble in the conversion due to the fact that I can't get a vanilla verison of 0.18 to run (compiles OK but segfaults when adding songs), so no testing on my end as yet. If you want to try my patch, you can clone it (0.17.4) from: http://git://git.musicpd.org/quad/mpd.git The patch exports the rate, channels & bits as variables to the pipe sub-shell, so: $rate $channels $bits It will work with any version of mpd 0.17. I'm using 0.17.3

Will do. I've just requested an account on git.musicpd.org, so will push once I've got access.

Actually it can. I've been using a patched version of the pipe output plugin to do exactly that, passing channels, format & rate to stdout to a sox/aplay script for resampling and remixing. The patch was written originally by someone calling themselves 'Ciaby' on the old MPD forum. It was written for an older (v0.13??) version, and I have since modified it slightly for the current version. The original patch modified the output format as well, but I always output in S32_LE, so my adaptation is a bit of a kludge, but it works. I stumbled across this thread while trying to eliminate xruns after moving from a Tenor based usb device to an XMOS based device. I've tweaked my settings after checking out some of the links posted here, and my xruns are gone. Cheers, Mark

A presumptious & ignorant statement given you know nothing of how the subs may be connected.

Passive mains + identical rears for quadraphonic joy A/B amps (separate) for fronts/rears Pre/pro with digitally controlled analogue volume (music in fully analogue domain) Dual active subs (front) Digital EQ/room correction/DSP + DAC

Jesus, I've sent it to you just now.

You do need to write a specific asound.conf to use the ALSA 'multi' plugin. It's not that difficult. I've been using two stereo USB DACs utilizing the 'multi' plugin full-time for about 4 months now, and couldn't be happier. I initially set it up as my own 'proof of concept' test to confirm I could live with it. It's PCM only, currently, but with DoP now supported by mpd, I may upgrade in the future. Mark