Jump to content

jrling

  • Posts

    80
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Country

    country-ZZ

Retained

  • Member Title
    Freshman Member
  1. 1 Chinese Yuan equals 0.15 US Dollar so I reckon 1,500 Yuan is US$225 (Plus my commission!)
  2. I have had that thought exactly for some time. Actually, since John Swenson made that suggestion a while back and if memory serves, said that he had already done most of the work to achieve it for another project? I am sure it is not quite as simple as that, but in principle I think it has a lot going for it.
  3. Chord are a highly responsible and professional company with a proper "bricks and mortar" factory in the UK. I like the fact that I can return my 11 year old DAC64 to the same factory where it was built, for an overhaul. I like the fact they are then prepared to offer a guarantee on a 11 year old product and even for that guarantee to be transferred to a new owner. I'd say they were the epitome of a trustworthy company, in the market for the long term. Spot on. I have a DAC 64 MKII several years old (with Balanced and RCA outputs BTW) and I took it for an upgrade to their factory in Kent, SE England. They let me into their workshops and everyone I spoke to were friendly and were clearly enthusiasts for good engineering and long lasting service. They did the work whilst I waited. How many DAC suppliers do you know who offer such service? Zenpmd - I suggest that you listen to their DACS before making ill-informed criticisms about Chord Electronics. Their DACs are very good indeed and have Balanced Outputs.
  4. Many thanks. I am listening critically on a high-end system and the quality is excellent.
  5. The Albéniz Iberia was beautifully recorded and most enjoyable. Many thanks. My only other observation was that on my rig the volume was noticeably lower compared to most other recordings I have, which admittedly are mainly 16/44.1. That is not a criticism, as I hate the 'loudness wars' recordings, but an observation. It could also be hardware related of course.
  6. Totally agree. I am currently using a Dell Venue 11 Pro (7130) Tablet as my audio computer source. It is excellent. I have built several audio PCs with various components in the past and the Dell tablet is definitely the best source I have had. I think the reason for its good performance is a mixture of: Battery power (Li-Ion) Low power Haswell CPU (4030) - the whole tablet only draws 6-7 watts running the audio player Fan rarely comes on Screen turns off soon after starting play
  7. Any album by Patricia Barber get my vote. Beautifully recorded especially for female vocal, piano, double bass & percussion
  8. jrling

    JLP music player

    Erin - thanks for the most informative, polite and helpful reply. I can accept everything you say. At risk of spoiling it though (!), if one is using a 24 bit DAC chip which i guess most are these days, is it not the case that playing 16/44.1 recordings, there are 8 bits that are full of zeros padded out? if so, surely, the digital volume control is only removing the unused zero values for up to 8 bits - and that's assuming a 16 bit resolution is achieved by the DAC? That was my understanding and if correct, then a digital volume control would not cause loss of resolution. I continue to believe that there is a trade-off of convenience and ultimate SQ, and even Gordon agreed on one forum that the ability to easily explore one's music collection was probably the most important aspect of a player; my findings are that tracks on a CD and certainly between different CDs are not level matched and with my sensitive speakers anyhow, I have to keep on getting up to adjust volume which gets tedious. But I am 64!
  9. jrling

    JLP music player

    I thought that Triode said using large values in the -b setting had the effect of loading the complete track into memory before play? Well may be or perhaps that is the actual position with my rig. It is Atom-based and that might behave differently. Or I could lie if that would help!
  10. jrling

    JLP music player

    Sorry to hear that. What's the cause or don't you know? I know that I will get flak, but in my system, which is pretty resolving, I am not getting much noticeable changed SQ with the v30/31. I guess that Gordon will feel that most low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and the law of diminishing returns is beginning to kick in. The removal of streaming functionality, which I regard as totally consistent with a 'Local Player' application, will be the 'next big thing'. Jonathan
  11. jrling

    JLP music player

    Well I certainly got a lot of bang for my buck in your reply! As you know, I am a dim Accountant and so the code means nothing to me. I can see loads of commenting out, but also loads of it seem to relate to removal of DSD (good), ReplayGain (good) and CrossFade (good) and not per se the little ole Volume Slider. Perhaps I was not clear. I am not criticising removal of redundant code - I applaud it; but when it starts to impinge on Squeezelite base functionality, then I do question it - if one is modifying Squeezelite. Particularly, since Triode/Logitech with LMS 7.8, provide disabling settings for Volume ('Set at Fixed 100%"), Disable CrossFade and ReplayGain check boxes. Do they not have the same effect for the majority of users it appears who willingly sacrifice those facilities in Squeezelite? I think I can guess your answer! Bet noone has tested that though with their ears. BTW, anyone who says losing 1 bit of 16 bits resolution (playing 16/44.1) by using Volume Control is going to compromise SQ detectably, has a different technical understanding of how DAC technology works to me. I read that most DACS at best get 12 bits of actual usable resolution and that's a really good DAC. But I bet noone will agree with me on that either. Hey Ho. Where is everyone else? Jonathan
  12. jrling

    JLP music player

    Totally agree that life is a compromise, but my point was that it is possible to have both, if SBGK is good enough (when dev has been finalised) to compile versions of JLP that do and do not have full Squeezelite functionality. Also surely if you are aiming 100% for SQ at the expense of any functionality, then you will go for MQn? SBGK is after all only playing with SqueezeLite to learn how Portaudio does KS and will at some stage move to generating MQn code using KS (with or without PA). Or at least that is what I understand is his plan one day. Jonathan
  13. jrling

    JLP music player

    I certainly don't feel that way and appreciate, as always, the results of your obviously intensive time spent on development for us to enjoy. I suspect that many others do as well, even if they don't say so. My personal feedback is that what you have done with SqueeezeLite, is to turn it into the best player that I have experienced and a truly amazing result. For me, the only regret is the gradual deprecation of various SqueezeLite functionality such as Volume, Progress Bar & and now Pause; all in the cause of SQ of course, but IMHO that approach takes away from the experience of why I turned to SqueezeLite in the first place from MQn. I also suspect that those removals do not make material difference to SQ. I would like to suggest that these SqueezeLite features are restored at some future point, or there is a second build that includes them, and that the 'hair shirt' approach to a minimal player (with KS) is taken forward on MQn. Well that's my position. What do others think? Thanks Jonathan
  14. jrling

    JLP music player

    Well I tried -b 100000:100000 and wow. It was as though everything snaps into focus. Lovely taut bass and beautifully relaxed but detailed. Full harmonic richness brought out. Definitely the best yet for me. Using -a 10. I am guessing that this setting does mean it is a full memory load before play, as the SSD red light did not come on once during the track. Of course YMMV. I have a low powered Atom PC, so it may not be the same for others. Would be interested if others have tried that setting and their findings. Thanks again Gordon.
  15. jrling

    JLP music player

    For others' benefit - here is Triode's helpful clarification of the -b buffer settings, although he was talking about the Linux version of Squeezelite and not Windows - There are two buffers - the first one stores the raw stream (compressed) audio, the second the decode audio. PCM is a special case as the process of decoding is just unpacking samples into the second buffer so they are in 32bit format which is used in the output thread, but this is only a special case of decoding. The decode process thread runs whenever there is enough data in the first buffer and enough free space in the second one. So if you want to stream the whole file at the start then probably make the first one big and keep the second one smaller (defaults at 10 seconds). If you want to stream and decode the whole file at the start then make the second one big. The second buffer is really only needed to allow crossfade to happen and to separate the high priority output thread from the rest of the processing. Note that it uses 8 bytes per sample (2x32bits) whereas the first buffer uses the native sample rate and so will use less memory for the same amount of audio. It does however raise a number of questions that I cannot answer. First off, I think JLP is basically Local Player based and so streaming is not being processed. Secondly, the settings could easily need to be quite different depending on whether one is playing PCM (WAV files) or FLAC (being decoded by JLP). Thirdly, I doubt that many JLP users are using Crossfade and I doubt Gordon would let them in his code! Plenty for me to experiment with then. I play WAV files mostly. I would be happy to load the whole track before playing (Memory Player) even if it delays play slightly, as I guess that is going to give better SQ than loading the buffer continuously. Lastly, I suppose that having very large -b settings, and assuming one has sufficient RAM to hold the data in memory, might place more strain on the CPU, but if that is only taking place once before play commences, then that's fine if it reduces CPU activity during actual play itself. I will try.
×
×
  • Create New...