Computer Audiophile Discussion (split from Gungnir Multibit Not Impressed thread)

Discussion in 'Computer Audiophile: Software, Configs, Tools' started by Madaboutaudio, Mar 2, 2016.

  1. bixby

    bixby Friend

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    Well, Winyl certainly does sound different in my setup.

    First played an Imogen Heap cut, Earth from Elipse, made the vocals sound quite wispy like some extra air or phasey stuff being added, but when background vocals came in sounded like there might be some distortion in these as well. Lower frequencies sounded set back or rolled a bit. A more intimate sound for sure on that cut.

    Then on to natural instruments like the Dobro in Alison Kraus Live cd "Boy who wouldn't hoe corn" track. wow, very soft attack, no body to the Dobro, male vocal did not have that male body, Hall ques, reverb trails and attack are way off. Lower midrange body seems missing and the speed of the dobro and guitars was not apparent.

    Maybe something is not set right, but I did set to wasapi in both this player and Foobar.

    This player will be uninstalled, not my cup of tea.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 4, 2016
  2. Friday

    Friday Friend

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    I have to say my experience was similar to bixby's, in that my music generally seemed less hard-hitting with Winyl.
     
  3. lm4der

    lm4der A very good sport - Friend

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    Tried out the Winyl; I like it. Seems like a relatively lightweight program. Full disclosure: I can't hear the difference between media players in WASAPI mode. I think that makes me player-deaf. Or... just deaf. Or you guys don't have all your cups in the cupboard :p
     
  4. Thad E Ginathom

    Thad E Ginathom Friend

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    Bit-Perfect is the order of the day for music being played from a computer.

    So a person listens to player A and says it's good. Was its output bit-perfect? Surely no respectable audiophile listens to music from their computer that is not bit-perfect? Then, our fictional person listens to player B and says how much better it is. Bit-perfect? Well, of course, we hope so. But so was the previous one. Sorry, but same bits means same sound. If the sound is different, someone has sneaked some DSP processing into the player., and that means that the bits are now different. We can't have it both ways.

    This doesn't include stuff that actually goes wrong and affects sound. It's real; it potentially exists, but mostly, stuff like processor overhead hasn't matter for nearly a decade. That thing on your desk is a supercomputer, and no, playing sound is not hard for it, Unless it has screwed up DPC latency or something, in which case, throw it away, or use it for spreadsheets or something. Or a really bad power supply (whyohwhyohwhy do audiophiles tend to use laptops?)

    And avoid sites like computer audiophile. Like the plague. They will ruin your nerves and shorten your life.

    Disclosure: At one time, I needed to output from my player at a fixed sample rate. I changed the player because whenever the sample rate was being converted, the music didn't sound so good.
     
  5. meloman

    meloman Acquaintance

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    Some of us extensively use EQs and DSPs to improve sound quality, and then feed it to the "bitperfect" filter in a Schiit DAC. Abomination, indeed. :D
     
  6. Luckbad

    Luckbad Traded in a unicorn for a Corolla

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    I feel like this thread should really be split in two. One about the actual subject of the thread, and one about music software.

    That said, to go ahead and throw a wrench in my suggestion, JRiver by default uses dithering. Not sure if other players do the same, but there should theoretically be a sound difference because of it.
     
  7. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Done
     
  8. 3X0

    3X0 Friend

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    That begs the question whether Winyl has some type of DSP going on.

    Tried it and preferred Musicbee (both via WASAPI with all visible DSP turned off), but could easily be placebo.

    I guess I'm the third that doesn't like it -- does anyone prefer it to their usual player?
     
  9. pavement714

    pavement714 New

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    The most significant changes in audio players, IMO, comes down to their Sample Rate Conversion DSP. Tweaking iZoTope settings in Audirvana produces a lot of interesting differences in soundstage, airiness, etc for Delta-Sigma DACs. Anything else is probably placebo.
     
  10. Lightbulb Sun

    Lightbulb Sun Friend

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    After trying Winyl, I prefer HQPlayer [differences in resampling-- I use closed-form in the latter-- possibly combined with other variables] for imaging with my current setup. The "staging" for Anathema's "Hindsight" (2010) and Fates Warning's "Eye to Eye" (2015) seem collapsed, too. Those songs are not unpleasant with Winyl, however, just not what I prefer. Winyl's library handling absolutely slaughters HQP's, though.

    I may well be hearing the above.
     
  11. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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    I didn't notice winyl's collapsed soundstage on headphones and thought the player gives music a more euphoric/warmer/forgiving sound with Yggdrasil + hd800.
    Once I tried winyl with speakers, then I noticed the soundstage sounded collapsed.

    Also this:
    This Japanese player is even more weird. It does some kind of data rewriting which it claims to reduce playback jitter of some sorts:
    http://oryaaaaa.world.coocan.jp/bughead/

    Also he has some kind of tool which optimized cpu for audio.
     
  12. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Try saving FLACs to WAV or other raw uncompressed formats. Might sound better. Depends upon CPU, alignment of the stars, etc.
     
  13. SSL

    SSL Friend

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    Ah yes, transcendental bit-level modulation.
     
  14. chakku

    chakku Friend

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    Media player burn-in. I think I can safely say I've seen it all now.
     
  15. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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    Ok, I am gonna quote a post from Amirm(WBF):

    http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?5175-WAV-vs-FLAC-revisited&p=76379&viewfull=1#post76379
    Yup, 400hours....
    (Please note that I personally cannot tell any audible difference between flac and wav, and no I don't believe in media player burn-in)
     
  16. Thad E Ginathom

    Thad E Ginathom Friend

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    haha, another one who thinks computers are still 8086s, and that Windows still can't do more than one file copy with crashing.(Yes, it did. Sure, you could have Windows but you can only useone at a time.
    Potentially, I agree with that one, having experienced something of the sort. However, should we need to do sample-rate conversion on the computer anyway? Maybe yes, sometimes: even those of us who think that all this "high-res" stuff is bollocks sometimes acquire files that may be 192, and some of us have DACs that only count up to 96. (I put myself on the stand, and asked, do you really, really, really think it is bollocks? No ifs, buts. maybes, there's-no-harm-in-its, or just in case? After getting an affirmative to that, I converted all my 192 files to 96 (why not 48, you may ask? Well, my ifs, buts, maybes clicked in at that point)

    Sample rate converters should be very well understood, but it does seem that they are not all equal (what do our engineers have to say on this one?) and I disliked the effect of the one my player was using, regardless of whether it was converting up or down. The difference was in the foot-tapping thing: loving the music, or waiting for the track to end. A bit audiophile, yes, especially as I did not go for any sort of blind test --- although I may have taken my glasses off.
    That is not impossible. The terminology might be mixed up, or even ignorant or hopelessly wrong, but my system is optimised for audio: it is to do with Interrupt balancing and priorities. Thank god the Linux world has competent engineers to mess with that stuff: it is beyond me!
    Ha Ha! Total and absolute bullshit.

    But wait! What about having to reinstall Windows regularly? (Is that still the case?) I used to joke that software had gone off, got stale, thus we had to do a re-install. Should have done one last week; next week it might smell. Bunch of jokes. One has to make work bearable some way. Except it was partly true: It was part of the poor reliability that people in the Windows world accepted as normal. Is it still like that? If so, why are you guys even using it? Surely you don't do exel spreadsheets as you listen to your music, do you?
     
  17. cizx

    cizx Friend

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    It's just music. Listen to it and stfu. Also, use Linux and a clicky IBM Model M kb. With that and the whine from your CRT, you won't be able to hear any differences between Weird Al and whatever he's parodying anyway. Plus with Linux, you won't want to spend as much time sitting at the computer.

    Seriously, though, I find that I prefer players that make navigating my music collection easier over players that might provide that last 1% SQ improvement. Foobar2000 is fine for tagging and sorting, but I haven't found a config that I like for library management.

    JRiver is too bulky.

    iTunes is okay, but I'm too erratic to rely on its shoddy database management. (Typically, if my computer isn't working fast enough for me, I respond violently enough that it turns off... That tends to create database problems.)

    Vox is pretty simple and seems to work okay, but it doesn't make me want to keep listening.

    mpd on a dedicated Linux box worked for a while because of the iOS remote app, but I switched to a Linux squeezebox clone thing. I can't hear a difference between that and mpd, and the iOS app for that is better.
     
  18. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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    i find that musicbee is better than foobar when it comes to library management. Musicbee plays dsd files with regular pcm DACs using software down sampling without the need to install any additional dll/components etc.
     
  19. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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  20. SSL

    SSL Friend

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