Greywind

Hey Chris,<br /> <br /> Excellent write up, thanks for the hard work. This stuff is so helpful to us tinkerers.<br /> <br /> I was curious why the Berkeley guys in the Alpha Converter manual suggest that kernal streaming mode is still experimental. I find it to sound better than Wasapi in my experiments, which are of course not exactly scientific, done on a Zalman Win7 machine. I tried playing KS mode through the Alpha usb into my Alpha dac and couldn't get it to work. No sound.<br /> <br /> I went back to the standard Wasapi driver and thought the sound was great, very high resolution, but perhaps too much for my ears (on my system). I also preferred the spdif sound to the preferred aes, again because it sounded more natural to my ears, less digital.<br /> <br /> Has anyone else had any success with kernal streaming using the Alpha usb--> Alpha Dac setup? Is it possible? Any chance the Berkeley guys might consider a KS driver for Win7?<br /> <br /> I also played with the Sotm usb interface but got too many FIFO errors (using XXHighEnd) in the control panel. The onboard usb2 bus worked better. Not sure why.<br /> <br /> Am now comparing a Phasure NOS1 (usb) dac and hope to come up with some findings to report. <br /> <br /> /Lee

Mark,<br /> <br /> I find Amarra to be pretty rock solid. Perhaps you tried it years ago? I just don't see the merit in that accusation. Yes, it's more expensive. Why is it that people will spend 5k on a dac, but insist on only $39 or so on software?<br /> <br /> XXHighend isn't the easiest app to setup, although my recent install of 9z6.1 was seamless. But let's face it, this is a struggle (for some of us) to get analog sound from a computer, a relatively new development. You need to be willing to get into these computers and understand some of what's going on. If you're not up for that, I'd recommend iTunes or Media Monkey... These apps have never sounded that great to me, very digital. But the interface is easy and they seem to instal easily.<br /> <br /> Could there be an inverse relationship between sound quality and well designed gui? I think so. It's all about streamlining operations inside the computer. Getting good sound takes some tweaking and requires a bit of experimentation. <br /> <br /> The technology has gotten way better in the last two years though.<br /> <br /> /LM

Joey,<br /> <br /> There are several great players out there. Why the focus on J River? I've heard it on many computers. The sound is ok. Hardly good enough to get upset about. Pick another player for W7 and move on.<br /> <br /> If you're into sonics, like me, and don't worry all that much about beautifully designed interface (sorry Peter!), try XXHighend. I've tried most players out there for Mac and W7 and the latest version of XXHighend sounds amazing. Support is solid too. <br /> <br /> There are other players, Foobar, Jplay... Try them all and see what you like best. Or if you're not technically advanced, try a mac and Amarra or PM.<br /> <br /> Time to let J River flow on by.<br /> <br /> /LM

Hey, Actually I felt like the sound in the Q3 room (Ted Denny) was very similar to the Q5 room in many ways. Both were large, well treated rooms with speakers spread way apart, with huge soundstage. A bit too huge for me, but great nevertheless. Both offered nothing but the sound, just the music with little coloration. Q3's were playing a Flamenco track with tapping heals really defining the space beautifully. Very fast attack. I did get up to hear the EAR tube amp driving the Martens. These are some of my fav (dream) speakers and they're as gorgeous as they are great sounding. The EAR amp was sporting 8 6550 tubes, much like my MB450's, but seemed more powerful. If you could get past the room boom, I think the music was really good. Another room that I felt was similar was the fat sound in the Gamut/Triangle room. Very bass-boomy but with huge spl and great rhythm: just so engaging and fun. We cranked Stevie Ray and Albert King for some time with no ear fatigue. I was impressed by the Gamuts, in spite of that dramatic placement right along the side walls and toed at 45 degrees. Hope I'll be seeing you in Burlingame. Let me know if you need a place to crash! /LM

Wondering if anyone has any feedback on the T.H.E. Show in Newport so far. I thought the event was well planned this year and have a few initial thoughts to relay for those interested. All the usuals were there this year and it was great to see everyone and hear great sound. Chris was present in relaxed form and seemed to be enjoying himself. Both of us agreed immediately that the sound in the Q5 room (Audio Salon) was, once again, most impressive driven by all Spectral equipment. No surprises there. I listened to the entire Eric Clapton Unplugged album in front of what my brain perceived as a live stage. The Q5's excelled at so many things, but perhaps most important to me was their ability to accurately reproduce the instruments being played, with no coloration and a live-sounding presentation. This is some speaker. Overall, I was really surprised at the lack of music servers this year. There were lots of CD players instead and a great many vinyl enthusiasts. I saw a few Bryston (BDP-1) music players and thought the sound was excellent from this source. Thanks to GTT Audio for making my thumb drive work and playing some spectacular hirez files for me that sounded great on their YG Acoustics/Tenor system. Sound was very tight and smooth. One demo that I found pleasantly surprising was the Synergistics Research room. I walked in this room along with two skeptics and sat down to a great talk by Ted Denny. His room consisted of Esoteric digital front end, Opus monos and the Magico Q3s, with all Tesla cabling I believe. Ted ran through a series of A/B comparisons of his system with and without his strange acoustic resonators, some placed on the floor in front of the woofers, several other sets suspended on the walls behind the Q3s. I have to admit I actually (think) I heard a difference on a few of these demos. Very cool and great sound there. Another experience that I enjoyed was the Lotus room. These new speakers by Lotus (the Grenada II?) are large and expensive and sport a great-looking new paint job. Thanks to a great digital room correction, the sound was amazing, very resolving yet smooth and the bass extension was crushing. At one point the guys turned the volume way up on some fun material by Rage Against the Machine (I think) and my iPhone registered 98dB! Another room, Andrew Jone's of TAD, was a lot of fun and worth the two hours I spent there. He demo'd the very fast R1 and elegant mini monitors with a digital front end and also via Tape Project material, which sounded elegant. But the real treat was when Bill Schnee of Bravurarecords.com discussed the soon to be released high rez recordings he is currently making in 24/192. These tracks sounded fantastic, with incredible percussion and dynamics, smooth yet revealing highs and accurate midrange. One could almost see the piano hanging in the air. I can't wait for the release of this promising material. These were just a few of my initial highlights from what I think was a great show. I look forward to seeing these and more at the Dagogo Cal Audio show coming up in July. /LM

I've heard this question asked a thousand times in the last couple years and to me, the answer has changed a bit. In older builds of many music players, from Amarra to PM to XXHighEnd, an SS drive would definitely make the sound smoother and more "analog" sounding. The spinning drive creates power demands on the psu and emits both physical and electrical noise. Many of us attending the great Computer Audio Symposium awhile back heard a direct comparison of spinning vs SSD, and the difference was not subtle. However, recent builds of these popular music player apps include memory mode/player, where the entire track is pulled into memory buffer from the HD. Some engineers claim that the advantages of SSD are now minimal as a result. Peter at XXHighEnd makes an excellent argument that "everything" matters when building these music servers: minimizing system calls to the cpu, bus activity, unnecessary power drain on the PSU, eliminating fans, etc. All this reduces system noise, lowers jitter and smooths out the sound, which at past CES rooms has been shown in well setup systems to come very close to the sound of vinyl, even besting it in terms of resolution and dynamics (all purely subjective of course ;-). But seriously, creating the ideal digital music server means competing not with other digital systems, but with the smooth, rich sound from vinyl or analog tape. So why not go the extra mile and report back? The Matan server I understand is an all out assault on the perfect music server (at $$$) and takes these measures to the nth extreme. I understand the server has no HD at all: the OS is a tiny version of Linux that is stored on a chip as firmware, has no video, no usb, and really only does one thing: plays externally stored tracks via a memory buffer. And that is just the beginning of his efforts at extreme. So I think that, depending on how deep into this you want to get, Peter's words are accurate: everything matters. If you're going to build one of these things, why not go the extra mile and dedicate/tweak your machine for superb music playback? Anyone building an Alix-board/Linux server lately? /LM

Bypassing the preamp is the way to go, unless you like the color your particular preamp adds. I started with the BADA running to a BAT VK-51SE tube preamp, but eventually preferred just driving my tube monos directly with the Berekeley, via long run XLRs, and am happy as can be now, sold the BAT long ago. The tube monos are a nice complement to the very articulate signal coming from the dac. /LM

Hello all, Regarding issues with Amarra tripping on long file names and strange characters, I thought I'd fill you in on how Sonic Studio is addressing the issues. 1) Long Names - Currently and name (soundfile or folder) needs to be less than 30 characters (32 max). If the name is longer then it is "modified" by adding #XXXX (the finder changes the name). This is all a result of "old" code in the file management. We are just about to start testing the fixes for long file names in Amarra. This would be a 1.2 release (in 2 months or so). 2) Non-Latin Character Sets. This is support for "unicode" or two-byte characters. It was this change after 3162 that broke things for Clay. To do this right is a Major change and will take us into next year to fully fix. 3) For Now - Non-Latin - meaning japanese / chinese languages may have problems. For this purpose there is a Menu Command in 3182. If a customer has lots of files with Non-Latin then they may want to enable this and report back. File => Extras => Enable Extended Character Sets 4) There are some characters like "/" and " " cause problems as they represent the folder "/" and the escape character. I hope this helps some out there and apologize for the issues. Please know that we are working hard to resolve these issues and to make Amarra even better. Regards, Lee Mincy Sonic Studio, LLC