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Somsak

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  1. Comparing the MFSL SACD to the 192/24 download of the first Cars album, I prefer the MFSL.
  2. I can't comment on older versions of UAPP but the present version is the bee's knees. Since I switch from the Squeezebox Touch to a NVIDIA Shield with UAPP it's been hard to stop listening to my stereo. User friendliness is low but I can live with that.
  3. UAPP has three Bit Perfect settings: “Off” “On” and “When Possible”. I’ve been using “When Possible” because my DAC cannot support bitrates over 96KHz via its USB input but I’m not sure how that differs from “Off”. It seems like when you select “Off” it only resamples to a different bitrate than in the original file when your DAC doesn’t support the bitrate that’s in the file, but that’s the same thing that the documentation says that “When Possible” does. Maybe the difference is just that it disables any volume and EQ adjustments. When set to “On” it will out at the same bitrate as in the original file regardless of whether your DAC can handle that bitrate, which I guess would be useful in cases where the software is unable to detect what bitrates the DAC can support.
  4. I haven’t tried Tidal (yet). This whole exercise has been a nice surprise for me. I bought the Shield because it was supposed to be the gold standard for streaming video and it didn’t even occur to me to try using it as a Squeezebox replacement until I read in the manual that its USB supported up to 192/24 audio. And while I’ve always been satisfied with the Benchmark DAC1 HDR via its SPDIF inputs, I previously thought that with USB input it was poor. So I was surprised and excited when I wound up with an improvement in my system on par with getting new speakers. Someone like Stereophile really should write a review of Android audio and all the ins and outs of it. I think that it would be a popular article, especially considering how cheap Android TV boxes are and the level of sound that's achievable. But without documentation you need to have some time on your hands to get the most out of it. From playing with it for a few days, I found that while NVIDIA has native highres support over USB in the Shield but it is poorly implemented, so you really need UAPP to bypass that. And I briefly tried UAPP on other devices (a Huawaei tablet, a Samsung View 18.4, and a cheap Chinese AndroidTV box) and found that it worked but that the first two (but not the Chinese box) but the sound, while still arguably better than my Squeezebox , wasn’t as good as from the Shield. So from my limited fiddling around, I’m thinking that the key is to use UAPP plus a powerful android device is the key.
  5. I think that it’s superb, far better than any other digital source that I’ve used in my system, but I no longer have an analogue source to which to compare it.
  6. With the help of the developer, it seems as though the source of the issue has been isolated. It turns out that the culprit was (or all things) the Shield’s remote control unit. Disable the remote by taking the batteries out and the problem goes away. Though I can’t be sure of the reason why, I suspect that it’s because the remote has a built-in microphone to listen to voice commands such as “OK Google, stop the music” and it was picking up ambient noise that caused it to send a “pause” signal to UAPP.
  7. Reviving an ancient thread --- I recently got a NVIDIA Shield and I am finding that I get a big improvement in sound quality using the USB output of the Shield as a digital source (feeding into a Benchmark DAC1 HDR) versus using the SPDIF output from my Squeezebox or using a USB connection to a Windows PC. That's the good news. The bad news is that I only get that improvement in sound quality when using UAPP (USB Audio Player Pro) on the Shield and I'm having stability issues with that. What I'm encountering is that every few minutes the music will pause (as if someone had pressed the pause button) and then you need to hit "play" again to make it continue. The unwanted pausing happens with FLAC files and with WAV files, with the files on local storage and on networked drives, and happens even when no DAC is connected to the Shield. And there seems to be no pattern to it - it seems to be random on which songs it will happen and where in the song it happens. So what I'm is whether this is a problem inherent in the Shield or if my experience an aberration. Have you been using the Shield with UAPP successfully?
  8. Is it necessary that it be a "modern" recording? If not, the RCA SACD of Arthur Fiedler & Earl Wild's 1959 recording is a very nice sounding disc and a good performance to boot. Amazon sells the original RCA SACD for only $9.99 and Acoustic Sounds has a (differently remastered) DSD download of it for $18.98. https://www.amazon.com/Rhapsody-Blue-American-Paris-Earl/dp/B0002XNLTW http://store.acousticsounds.com/d/110038/Arthur_Fiedler-Gershwin_An_American_In_Paris__Rhapsody_In_Blue-DSD_Single_Rate_28MHz64fs_Download
  9. Though this new HDTracks release uses "Steven Wilson" mixes, as did the 2 CD 40th anniversary set that was released in 2011, IMO the sound of the 2011 CDs is far superior to this new HDTracks version.
  10. I wondered that too. Lou Reed died in 2013 and it seems like that article is referring to remastering that was done in 2010. If these new releases are the same as those, that would seem like an unusually long period of time between remastering and release. And on top of that, by 2010 Lou would have been almost 70 years old and would have done about 100 years of drugs, so his judgment about sound quality might not have been as keen as it was when those albums were first released.
  11. Which version had DR=13? I have an early West German RCA CD of Transformer that is DR12; sounds miles better than this new HighRes release but in the grand scheme of thing is just a good sounding CD, not an amazing sounding one.
  12. Bought the new 96/24 version and queued it up on my Squeezebox Touch along with a few other versions downloaded from wherever or ripped from CD. The new 96/24 does have a hot topend but I think that if I hadn’t heard any other versions I would have been well satisfied with it. However on my system I think that the winner is a needledrop of the Classic Records vinyl. I also find that the new 96/24’s are quite a lot better sounding than rips of the new CDs when using a NAD D3020 as a DAC.
  13. That's shame and hard for me to understand why. Granted the master tapes were brand new when the first LPs were pressed, but there are "vinyl rips" of the original LP floating that sound better than any of the official digital releases, including the Diament CD. I would have thought that a big record company with all it's resources would have been able to easily beat a hobbyist's dub of an old LP.
  14. I’m bowled over by this set, can’t believe how much I’ve been enjoying listening to these albums for the past few days. I was in High School during the 70’s and never much liked Springsteen, I pretty much put him in the same category as Billy Joel. But these HDTracks are really breathing new life into the music, allowing me to hear the music with new ears, almost like discovering a major artist for the first time. I had most of Springsteen’s albums before just because I collect stuff but now they are actually getting played.
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