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jacobacci

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  1. @David Craff I am still confused. Some Albums have two versions, one with 'E' and one without. Are the explicit bits covered with beeps in the 'non E' version? See the sttached examples:
  2. Not really feature request but a question. I noticed that some albums and tracks on Qobuz have a small E symbol in a circle. What does this symbol mean? Searching for E has not really yielded anything.
  3. I know it has been discussed forever that BBC Radio 3 is streamed in the UK @320kbps and outside the UK @96kbps. I can very well understand the reasons why the BBC is imposing this limitation. It’s servers would implode if suddenly the whole world would stream the proms at 320kbps. Now what if Qobuz were to offer a 48kHz (derived from the original 320kbps AAC BBC stream) live stream of BBC Radio 3 to its customers? With a Qobuz stream, the situation would be completely different. BBC would have one link to Qobuz, providing the live signal. Whether that one link is 320kbps or 96kbps makes no difference server capacity (or cost) wise to BBC. Qobuz could really stand out from the crowd if it negotiated a deal with the BBC allowing it to redistribute the 320kbps original signal to its (paying) customers outside the UK. The fact that the 320kbps signal is available in DVB-C MPEG2 via cable networks outside the UK (Switzerland in my case) proves that this is possible. BBC does enter into agreements like this.
  4. Disclaimer: I am not a native English speaker, so please give me some slack if a word is not absolutely correct. I find that both the article and the many comments about the article completely miss the issue that is really at hand here. In my view this is about the fundamental question of access to (audio or video) material in different qualities. It becomes contentious in the context of the current trend to move away from physical media. This is a (for the retailers) totally understandable and economically reasonable move. I expect that in 5 years there will be no more physical BluRay discs available. This basically means that access to audio down the road will be exclusively through streaming, which again makes total economic sense for the content owners from several perspectives (bandwidth for distribution, customer lock in, control). For the consumer this means that he can only get access to the quality that the streaming service choses to deliver. Quote form the article: "Our MP4 version of Atmos is identical to Apple Music's version, at 768kbps. Our Dolby TrueHD bitrates average around 6000kbps with peak data rates up to a maximum of 18,000kbps for high sampling rate multichannel content." "For comparison, stereo 24/192 uncompressed has a bitrate of about 9000kbps, so that's a lot of data." The point whether there is an audible difference between Apple Music Dolby Atmos and TrueHD Dolby Atmos is somewhat besides the point. Quite surely the mastering of the material was done at 24/48kHz, so as a customer I would like to own the material in the quality it was mastered in. I am ready to pay for this privilege, but I would like to have the choice. Besides the quality issue I am extremely bothered by the fact that content owners are moving away from ownership models to streaming / rental models. Should the content owner decide to pull a release, it is no longer available to me. An real life example to the point. At high end 2019, PMC presented a Dolby Atmos remaster of Miles Davis 'Kind of Blue', done by Steve Genwick. I had met Steve at the Sheer Pleasure of Sound Event in Basel that same year and we discussed extensively about the project and how the legacy of Kind of Blue had been meticulously transferred into the immersive era. The demo of the Dolby Atmos mix at high end 2019 was as expected very impressive. After this it became very quiet about this project and it was never released on physical media for whatever reasons. It did surface on Apple Music some time later, as did many of Steve's Dolby Atmos mixes. Next episode in the saga. Yesterday I attended a demo at SE Musiclab (created by Jürgen Strauss, Swiss sound engineer) in Bern. The BluRay demo was really impressive. I then asked the operator to find 'Kind of Blue' on Apple Music, which he did. I don't have an Atmos Setup at home (I hope this does not disqualify me from making my points), so this was my first reencounter with the remix since 2019. I really enjoyed it. Lossy Apple Music does sound good, no doubt. Would it have sounded even better in TrueHD? I will never know how Steve's mix really sounds, unfortunately, unless someone publishes it in TrueHD. In the end this whole issue is one of control by the content owner, what quality we have access to, be it in streaming or in physical media form. All of this is deja vu of course (I won't go into the MQA debate, that one has been done to death). There are loads of CDs from 20 years ago that carry the moniker 'remastered in 24/96kHz). Why was the 24/96kHz remaster never published as a download. I would like to hear what the remastering engineer intended. I would simply like to have the choice, to have access to the source. And by the way it does not have to be at the same price as the lossy version.
  5. Today I saw that my Qobuz favorite albums from the last 6 week had disappeared. I was able to reconstruct the list from a recent Roon Backup and re-favorite the respective albums. So far so good. I have now 'saved' the list of favorite albums and playlists in soundiiz. Not sure how helpful that will be if this should happen again The event does leave me with a few questions: Have others had similar issues? Is there any way to find out when the favorite albums got unfavorited? via qobuz support? Is there any reliable way to make a backup of the list of favorite albums and playlists?
  6. These are a real Swiss gem. More information here. AFAIK, the bare metal finish is not standard. Absolute Sound seems to love them. They gave the FIVE SE a product of the year award. I know, I'm a bit biased, I have the smaller THREE SE. Greetings from Switzerland
  7. I use foobar2k with the HDCD plugin. foobar will show you in the statusbar what HDCD is doing (see my second post). dbPoweramp should work fine too. Don't be surprised if the volume of the decoded file is lower. It will be 24bit, but wil 6db lower volume.
  8. I have just bought https://open.qobuz.com/album/0030911108823 Playing it back in foobar, I see that the stream is indeed HDCD encoded (Peak extension active): Looks like Qobuz should do something about this
  9. @David Craff Recently I played some Reference Recordings which are HDCD encoded CD quality, e.g. https://open.qobuz.com/album/0030911108229 I used to have a Berkeley Alpha DAC, which would decode HDCD and turn on its blue LED while doing that. Today's DACs do not have HDCD decoding. Decoding needs to be done after ripping a CD using foobar with the HDCD plugin or other software solutions. Undecoded HDCD content sometimes sounds below par. I suppose Qobuz streams the HDCD version of HDCD encoded files. For maximum quaity, Reference Recording albums should be streamed in decoded 20bit or 24bit form. RR should be able to offer streaming services decoded HDCD files. They must have the unencoded originals in their archives. I anything planned in this direction at Qobuz?
  10. I have gone to option 17 and am now looking at this. Grateful for a hint what to do from here, thanks.
  11. I have a follow on question. I am using an SMSL m500 MkIII DAC which has an XMOS 316 chipset. When I start audiolinux, I get the following error message: When I look in the status page for the audio card, I see that the SMSL m500 is "stopped"
  12. Thanks @hifi25nl I forgot to mention that I am using headless, so 8GB should be ok according to the audiolinux website. What would the settings be for headless and 8GB RAM?
  13. Linux noob here. I have a question re ramroot configuration. I have 8GB of RAM in my system and I am using Roon bridge. What are the optimal values to input in the ramroot config menu for RAM and zram? This information is probably somewhere in this 59 page thread, so excuse if I asked the obvious.
  14. My Melco behaves the same. I have taken a different approach to manage music on the Melco. I keep my music on an external HD (which I call 'Melco Shuttle'). I keep a backup of this HD on my NAS. I then import the Melco Shuttle into the Melco. In my experience, backup, tagging etc. are best handled outside the Melco
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