Skeptic

PerfectTUNES says that my rip is accurate and the Disc ID is: 011-001864e3-00d67783-a10e380b

It is not about "lost precision".Increasing the sample rate allows you to use noise shaping to move the dither noise into higher (inaudible) frequencies, thus increasing the SNR in the audible range and allowing you to reduce the volume further before the noise becomes audible. Even with TPDF dither and no upsampling/noise shaping, you have to make significant reductions in the volume level before this noise becomes audible. As long as it is being processed with sufficient precision and the output is dithered correctly, you should not "lose precision" with a digital volume control. But it is always better to reduce the gain in the amplifier before you start to attenuate the volume, no matter what you are using for volume control. The less attenuation required, the better things should sound.

I'm very aware of that. However when you're that low on the volume control, you're probably going to be introducing audible noise (hiss) during playback.Reducing the gain on the amplifier so that you don't need as much attenuation can make a big difference. The point is that a player which has R128-compliant Volume Leveling automatically adjusts the volume of the albums for you, so that all albums should play at an equal loudness.Instead of you reaching for the volume control and reducing the level of one album by 12dB or raising the level of another by 8dB the player does it automatically in the background. Then the user-controlled volume adjusts the target level that all albums play at. Some stand-alone media players support the old ReplayGain standard, which did a reasonable job of volume leveling, but it's nowhere near as good as R128 leveling. (and I believe the ReplayGain v2 spec is based on this) With ReplayGain I still found myself reaching for the volume control to adjust the playback level, with R128 I can have music playing all day without touching the volume control. If you ask questions, instead of stating "I'm confused", we can probably help.

I think you've misunderstood the basic concept here.You're not going to open up the amplifier to make small adjustments to the gain every time you play a new album. Most amplifiers have an excessive amount of gain - to the point that their maximum volume level would be deafeningly loud, or damaging to your speakers. So if you have an integrated amplifier you might turn the volume control all the way down and live in say the lower 20% of the range, or you do the same thing with a pre-amp or digital volume control if you have a power amplifier without a built in control. And being in the lower 20% of a digital volume control is probably going to harm audio quality. What you want to do is set up the amplifier so that it is not applying as much gain to begin with, so that your normal listening range maybe has your volume control of choice running at say 80%. That way it can still go much louder if you ever wanted it to, but most of your listening is now in the upper range of the volume control where the signal-to-noise ratio is higher - particularly if you are using a digital volume control. And if you set this up using a player like JRiver which conforms to the R128 specifications then you should rarely ever have to touch the volume control, other than setting it to a comfortable level at the start of playback. Volume Leveling in an R128-compliant player is extremely good at matching the perceived loudness of most albums across most genres of music, regardless of mastering quality. Edit: Looks like Miska has already explained this. I had typed up my reply and returned to the computer only to find that it had not been submitted. You shouldn't really think of digital volume control as "losing precision" - at least not when it's properly implemented (and it was not with JRiver until a very recent v21 update) so long as you're using reasonable levels of attenuation.Dither really works - and so can noise shaping if you're upsampling.

It's not practical to pop the top off the amplifier and move a couple of jumpers?It was a two minute job to set the gain to -20dB for the headphone amplifier in my Benchmark DAC2. With Volume Leveling enabled in JRiver, I rarely ever have to touch the volume control on the DAC itself - but I can do if I need to adjust it.

As I said, it's the other way around.The disk is currently formatted as MBR. MBR is the legacy mode. Since the installer is complaining that it cannot be used on this disk because it's formatted as MBR, the installer must have booted in the EFI mode since that requires GPT-formatted disks. If the installer had booted in legacy mode, it wouldn't be complaining about the MBR partition table. The reason that his system is not booting is because he was previously running in the legacy mode (we know this because the disk is formatted with an MBR partition table) but the BIOS has been reset or he has changed some setting which has switched it into either hybrid or EFI mode. Switching it back to legacy mode should allow the system to boot again without requiring Windows to be reinstalled or any other modifications. If he plans on reinstalling Windows even if he gets things booting from the disk again, I would recommend changing everything over to EFI/AHCI and reformatting the disk because there's no reason to be using the legacy boot mode with new hardware.

If you have not tried to format the drive, nothing is "broken" here, and no data should be lost. Switching to the correct SATA and/or Boot Mode should let Windows boot again. It is the other way around, since the disk is currently formatted as MBR and the installer wants to use GPT.

Check page 49 in the manual. There are options there for the CSM (compatibility support module) which allows you to boot in UEFI or Legacy Mode. And page 58 shows you where to switch the SATA mode from AHCI/RAID to IDE. I would start by switching the SATA mode and see if that lets you boot. If that doesn't fix it, try changing the boot mode selection. If you have given up on fixing this (it should be fixable if you haven't made any modifications to the boot drive) you should boot in the UEFI mode with AHCI selected if you are going to reinstall Windows.

I don't know what motherboard you're using, but I think you may have switched the SATA mode in the BIOS. Since your drives are formatted as MBR disks and it was previously booting up, you were probably set to IDE mode rather than AHCI mode. Now this means that your system was not configured correctly to begin with: IDE mode is the "legacy" mode, and modern systems should be booting from GPT-formatted disks in AHCI mode. But the only way to switch that now would be to completely reinstall Windows. Hopefully switching it back to IDE mode will let you boot again.

That's not true at all. The BT.2020 gamut (black triangle) still falls inside the visible range for humans. (the colored background) The current BT.709 gamut is considerably smaller than the new BT.2020 standard, so this is going to be a big change. (note: these being CIE xy plots will exaggerate the difference compared to a perceptually uniform uv plot) And there are reasons why you might want to use a colorspace with a gamut which exceeds that of human vision. The ProPhoto colorspace has primaries outside of the range that humans can see because it still allows the capture and display of more colors that fall inside the visible range. Until we move beyond devices which only use three color primaries, we are always going to have those limitations with reproducing blue-green colors - though BT.2020 should cover 99.9% of Pointer's Gamut: the range of visible surface colors the human eye can perceive. There are still some advantages to CRT displays which flat panels have yet to match: Being analog devices there is effectively zero latency. Bit-depth is only limited by the video DAC in use. For scientific applications, there are devices with 16-bit video DACs. Current flat panels are limited to 10-bit. They handle variable resolutions far better than flat panels, which are visibly degraded when displaying an image rendered at their native resolution - though it could be argued that this is because the CRT image is only ever as sharp as a scaled image on a flat panel. The flicker inherent to CRTs is actually a good thing as far as motion clarity is concerned. CRT phosphors respond far quicker than any of the current flat panel technologies. (with OLED getting very close) They have a very high on/off contrast ratio. (very dark black level) They have excellent viewing angles. They generally have good uniformity across the screen. There is an equally big list of reasons why people avoid using CRTs today. I have never seen anyone claim that infra red or ultra violet light output somehow improves color reproduction or anything of the sort.

Applying any form of DSP - which could be as simple as using a digital volume control during playback.Ripping should be a 1:1 copy of the data on the disc, and should be stored in a FLAC file or similar lossless format, so there is no DSP being applied, and no need to dither.

Netflix shut down their public API. JRiver did not "ditch" it. YouTube still works, but JRiver does not support Media Source Extensions and thus is limited to 720p, and won't play certain videos. (mainly music videos) I download the videos with youtube-dl and watch in JRiver that way.

You should have the High Precision Event Timer enabled in the BIOS if your system supports it. You should not force it on in Windows. Windows will make use of it where appropriate. Run this command to restore the default functionality: bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock

Well it's possible that something else is the cause, but having memory playback enabled leaves DSD to PCM playback in a vulnerable state - especially with 6ch since that triples the memory and CPU usage compared to 2ch.I hope that it does fix your playback issues.

Right-click "Playing Now" and add a new zone. Select an existing zone from the list in the zone creation window to duplicate it. Change the output device for the new zone. Now you have a zone set up for each device that you can send music to.