#Head fi bitperfect driver#
#Head fi bitperfect full#
#Head fi bitperfect software#
#Head fi bitperfect Pc#
#Head fi bitperfect windows#

To handicap iTunes even further, I'm going to play these AIFF files for measurement off a comparatively slow Patriot Rage XT USB stick rather than copying them over to the SSD.

Just like with the OS X tests, I've converted the test audio to play as AIFF files, volume at 100%, all plug-ins turned off. It bears repeating - the lack of native FLAC makes iTunes essentially useless for me since I refuse to use ALAC (which doesn't compress as well by default) and there's no way I'm going to leave lossless files uncompressed as WAV or AIFF - ridiculous waste of HD space. Tested with ASIO, Kernel Streaming, and DSD playback.ģ.

#Head fi bitperfect full#

I've used this program to easily play DSD64 and DSD128 to the TEAC DAC with DoP including DST decoding and have since registered the full version.

#Head fi bitperfect Pc#

This is of course the 'original' version since the PC release came first and only recently ported over to OS X.

#Head fi bitperfect windows#

JRiver Media Center for Windows - I previously looked at this player for Mac. Furthermore, I installed the SACD Decoder plug-in for DSD playback - works great (remember to run the ASIOProxy plugin, configure the ASIO settings, and go to Tools -> SACD to make sure it's not transcoding to PCM).Ģ.

#Head fi bitperfect driver#

Tested with the ASIO driver and WASAPI (event style). For this test, I ran version 1.2.6 with ASIO plugin version 2.1.2. It makes no pretensions about sounding 'better' than anything else - just bit-perfect - nothing more, nothing less. In terms of sound 'quality', foobar intends to 'just work'. ABX comparator is great for controlled evaluation of sound quality. I generally use the ASIO plugin for most of my DAC's to ensure bit-perfect data transfer. The dynamic range (DR) plug-in comes in very useful to check for severity of dynamic range compression among different 'pressings'. foobar2000 - Free, highly configurable, fully functional, a myriad of plug-ins including support for all major file formats, this is my daily workhorse for playback on my Windows machines. Here then are the candidates for the test:ġ. This week, I turned my attention over to the Windows platform.

#Head fi bitperfect software#

Since my hardware was already set-up with the Mac, I did the software measurements with that platform first ( results here).

The fact is, there is so much going on the in the hardware level such as OS and USB buffering, DAC buffering, driver-interface interactions that are just beyond the 'reach' of the player software that it really makes no sense IMO for any software developer to make such claims! Note that already there have been tests questioning these claims (here's a nice one from Mitch over on the Computer Audiophile between JPLAY vs.

For reference, my setup is Gentoo linux with gmusicbrowser 1.1.15.2, KDE Plasma 5, Pulseaudio 12.2 and ALSA 1.1.Close to a month back, after publishing my TEAC UD-501 results, someone E-mailed me about the use of JPLAY with this DAC.Īlthough I had not tried the program yet, it begs the question, how's it possible that JPLAY could sound any different? JPLAY is described as a bit-perfect player openly discussed in the FAQ but if you look at items 5 & 6, they seem to imply that 'timing is everything' and somehow, an optimized software player can make a difference.

it divides well for other common rates (except 44.1, natch). Pulseaudio defaults to 48kHz internally and will up- or down-sample all other streams to that rate in order to mix them. Instead, I configured gmusicbrowser according to Rizlaw's guide and ALSA does a perfect job of passing audio to the DAC without any further configuration. As per the current ALSA documentation, I do not have any ASLA configuration files at all no ~/.asoundrc nor /etc/nf file whatsoever. Volume is then managed only via the slider in gmusicbrowser.įor those who're on this path, here's a few other tidbits I've picked up along the way that are of interest: Whilst I'm not playing music, all sound is mixed via Pulseaudio, then when I want bitperfect playback I disable my USB DAC in Pulseaudio Volume Control, and gmusicbrowser can hog it and set any sampling rate the DAC can support. This was the last piece in the puzzle for me, because I wanted to retain the convenience of Pulseaudio for most stuff (web browsing, system sounds, watching movies in VLC etc.) whilst retaining pure ALSA-only bitperfect playback in gmusicbrowser. Thanks so much for the guide assumed that setting Pulseaudio autospawn to no (last step in your guide) would disable it entirely, however (on my setup at least), it simply prevents it spawning on KDE Plasma startup and hogging all the soundcards it still wakes up whenever an app specifically wants to use it.