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[Hilton]

Hi All,

I had the pleasure of attending a night of Jazz listening to this awesome system.

My mighty little raspberry Pi brick running MC 21 was also given a run, plugged directly into the $10,000 Bricasti M1 USB DAC and it was well up to the task working straight out of the box with no special configuration required.

We played some 192k and 96K and 48K 24bit Flac and even DSD64.  The Pi and DAC didn't play as nicely with the DSD64 SACD ISO with some stuttering problems but everything else played perfectly, with comments of "wow that sounds good".

The DSD64 plays fine on my headphone DSD capable DAC so it's likely with some more time and tinkering with buffer settings we could have got DSD to work too.

It was a great night and really interesting to hear how good JRiver MC21 on Linux can sound with an uber expensive system.

Raspberry Pi with mega system by Hilton, on Flickr


For those that don't know what the Pi Brick is.
IMG_5827 by Hilton, on Flickr

[phillil]

Although not quite in the same league....

My RaspPi2 running MC plays quite nicely with my £5,500 Classe CP800 DAC/Pre-amp!!

[blgentry]

That's really neat.

What did the assembled group think of the Pi Brick?  What was their reaction to JRemote controlling the whole thing?

Brian.

[Hilton]

That's really neat.

What did the assembled group think of the Pi Brick?  What was their reaction to JRemote controlling the whole thing?

Brian.

People thought it was amazing and that it sounded better than the MAC mini. The mini was running a different program though, not sure which one but either Audiovana plus, Pure Music or Amarra - I'll ask and find out. (I think it was Audivana Plus) Discussions about the Pi running on battery, having no moving parts, being a low power device etc ensued.....  
Probably more expectation bias than truth, but in any case I think it was pretty unanimous it sounded great.

You might be surprised to hear this but the audio remotes on iPad for most of the high end players are quite good now too, so JRemote wasn't such a revelation in itself, however being able to just plugin and power up the Pi headless and start using JRemote tethered to the iPhone raised a few eyebrows. No configurations or stuffing around with software to configure the DAC, it just worked. (apart from VNC in to the Pi to change the DAC settings to DSD bitstreaming when we played some DSD.)

[Hilton]

Although not quite in the same league....

My RaspPi2 running MC plays quite nicely with my £5,500 Classe CP800 DAC/Pre-amp!!

Sounds like a lovely combo!

[Hilton]

BTW the Bricasti M1 DAC has many different filter settings that we flipped through and they have a marked effect on the sound, with filters to remove digital pre-ringing etc. It really is a lovely piece of kit.

"The Filter button allows for 9 different types of Linear Phase digital over sampling filters labeled Linear 0-8 with 6 Minimum Phase filters labeled Minimum 0-5. By simply pressing the filter button, the rotary control will allow rapid changes of the filters for easy sonic comparisons. The M1 uses delta sigma 8 X over sampling conversion. 3 DSD filters labeled 0, 1 and 2 are also delivered with the M1"

[blgentry]

The mini was running a different program though, not sure which one but either Audiovana plus, Pure Music or Amarra - I'll ask and find out. (I think it was Audivana Plus)

There's a thread on Head-fi that I monitor talking about media players for OSX.  I started posting there to tell people how good JRiver is, since it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention on OSX for some reason.  There are a small group of posters there that insist that Amara and Audirvana Plus sound better than anything else.  It just makes no sense to me, but that's what they continue to say.  I tried Audirvana on my system briefly, but I didn't do any controlled testing.  It sounded just as good as JRiver (anecdotally), but it's so "low powered" compared to MC that I just couldn't keep using it.

Brian.

[JimH]

How about a link to the thread? 

Thanks.

[Hilton]

Some people prefer the sound of Audirvana Plus because they like the effect of the Izotope resampling filters compared with just straight OSX Core audio.
They certainly have a lot more granularity and control over the resampling with Izotope than we get with native resampling in JRiver.

Also their "Direct Mode" and "Integer Mode" which effectively replaces some low-level core audio driver stuff with their own driver. Some DACs wont work with "their" driver, in fact many DACS that have their own manufacturers DAC drivers wont work in Direct Mode.

Personally I think its a good "sounding" player but they seem to have a lot more problems getting DACs to work without clicks and pops and making the iTunes integration play nicely than I would care to deal with. (and I also strongly dislike iTunes)

JRiver has far better library management and overall DSP management, (plus zones) and anecdotally (and in my experience) it works more reliably with a broad range of DACS.

I haven't really looked into it but I guess we could apply DSP filters in JRiver to similar affect if we wanted too.

[Hilton]

I found some filter VST DSP plugins that have oversampling, dithering and linear/natural/zero Phase settings which work in DSP studio.

Interesting effects.

Download the 32bit VST filters. (of course this doesn't help our Linux/Mac cousins.)
http://www.fabfilter.com/products/

Oversampling, Dither and Noise Shaping

fabfilter1 by Hilton, on Flickr

Phase
fabfilter2 by Hilton, on Flickr

[blgentry]

How about a link to the thread?

You may have seen it before.  It's a rather large thread (over 200 pages).

http://www.head-fi.org/t/539740/mac-os-x-music-players-alternatives-to-itunes

I just realized, reading the first page again, that it *still* says "jriver is developing a player for mac".  Which initially made me think that there wasn't anything ready yet.  This was over a year ago.  I pointed this out in the thread after I figured out that MC *does* run on Mac.  I thought they had changed it.  Darn it!  It's so misleading.  I feel lucky that I figured out that MC exists for Mac.

Brian.

[JimH]

Thanks for the link.