For digital room correction and other equalization purposes, selectable convolution algorithms are included. Network audio is especially useful to give freedom from cables when player is run on a tablet or other wireless device. Processing is performed by the player application and the processed data is then asynchronously streamed over network to a very lightweight network audio adapter interfacing to the DAC. Asynchronous FIFO provides maximum isolation between processing and audio reproduction.
Follow Signalyst. Client playlist editor. I like winyl and ulilith. Joined Sep 18, Posts Likes A comparison of music players on windows, linux, android I have done. Note: Most of these software are free so you can try and check for yourself. Your mileage may vary on protocol support. I almost always used ASIO with proper buffer configurations wherever supported almost all of them do except strawberry, mediamonkey etc.
More on the technical breakdowns at the end of the analysis. It is too early to conclude the causation of these changes but a look into USB audio protocol asynch gives better clue. It works more like UDP than TCP in that it doesn't guarantee a failure when packets go missing or get corrupted during transmission.
So yep I have experienced till there, on a system that would be shown bitperfect by any software analysis inside the computer. The key to this is to be able to probe at the i2s pins of the usb to i2s. Gear used - surface book , apogee groove, supra usb cable, burson fun, sparkos ss opamps, shure srh, OnePlus 3. Few other headphones, dac and amp were also used to ensure coverage on other parameters, and they fit well with the same descriptions.
Windows groove player - really low fidelity. You got a pig fat low pass applied on top of the digital stream no clue why and very bad in overall implementation. When you scroll and play back instead of playing from start, you lose details the only player that I've come across that does this.
Windows media player - not as terrible as groove but forgettable. Foobar - has lots of plugins and features etc. General "I'm an audio enthusiast" circle tries to push this forward but unfortunately sound isn't the best. Its quite poor to be honest, and even music players in android sound better. Outdated asio and wasapi plugins, measurable distortion and just overall sloppy implementation.
Quite softened and smooth but in a very artificial and dry manner. A far cry from the best kind of fidelity you can get from windows. Nice tool for streaming from internet though, thanks to variable buffer on the input side of the player. Winyl - the first music player software that had decent fidelity on my tries. As my friend calls it, it is DAW level audio quality. A bit artificially sharp sounding due to some buffer management issues. Not the smoothest with bad with low res music, you want that, don't look at this.
You can hear a sheen of dither noise i assume, don't quote me on top of voices in 16bit music as well. Not quite perfect and not ultimate resolution.
Don't know how it uses ram but I wish it could flush the full song to ram and play back from there with high system priority. Peers to winyl are xmplay, musicbee and hqplayer both of which sound almost identical at identical settings. Hqplayer - it's as good as winyl in equivalent settings.
But it's a lot more feature rich. Lets you try custom upsampling PCM or DSD conversion options and can help get a better stream to your dac than the internal digital filters which can sometimes be low fidelity in the DACs. Also lets you try high precision fir filter convolution for a usable high precision eq. Musicbee - the best competition to winyl. It's from the same audio library so sounds similar for the most part.
But winyl has a more robust port configuration setting afaik and has less artefacts on that front. However winyl let's down in its buffer, while musicbee takes lead there. It doesn't have the winyl characteristic harshness once the buffer is set to load full song to RAM. Has almost all features of foobar, but built in and usable from the get go and actually sounds good.
Software volume control is most often poor on any player software, unless it's super sophisticated with 64bit precision and stuff like those roon has those options. Jriver - not as good as winyl not as bad as foobar.
It sounds a bit compressed and loud in comparison to winyl. Quite clean otherwise. If you loved the geek out you may like this but it doesn't sound "correct" with usb dacs. People have had better luck with jriver sending data to network streamers. Albumplayer - It was promising as it was coded from scratch and gave me options to prioritise it.
I set it up at the best possible settings - asio, full song to ram, high system priority. It sounds a bit softened but not bad like foobar - this thing has depth. I don't know if this is what people call as analog. It sounds very different from winyl but very hard to compare which is better. The general opinion from my side is albumplayer is a little too midrangey and slightly muffled for the most part but with a bass punch somewhere could just be distortion.
On one song it just sounds softened and dull but on another it carries a lot of bass weight. Midrange detail is typically more visible on albumplayer but winyl produces the same with a tiny bit more edge. Most of the time albumplayer is softer but sometimes it can sound exceedingly bright or hard hitting.
One thing i like though is that it can bring back that tactile feel in bass in certain songs which i mostly lost with winyl. It sounds weightier and more natural which i like but i just can't get over the resolution winyl offers typically. I wouldn't be doing further testing since I have heard players that outperform both winyl and album player by a significant margin. If the formers are a bit contrasty, edgy and in my face, album player is a bit soft and nice to listen with a different presentation of detail.
Idk if it's distortion or just another way to present it or even better accuracy. Aimp: I wanted it to sound identical. But unfortunately it didnt. Lacks depth. Can't be sure if it is volume or the volume control or anything of that sort. Not a particularly bad player but I'm not particularly impressed.
Mediamonkey: didn't have an asio output so used wasapi. Didn't like it. Sounded like a low pass filter or bass boost was applied. The liveliness was missing.
Can't say i noticed a difference between wasapi and asio in other players but will return to testing media monkey in asio if it improves. Not bad. I like it. Winyl shows the texture and depth noticeably better. Audirvana is a little softer.
Bass is even less tactile than winyl on audirvana. Yep I did try changing settings on audirvana. It was created by an UCLA graduate I think, can't be bad and it's not , but then again winyl is super lightweight with no bloat, runs on a rock solid audio library, and has multiple other checks to ensure better detail.
I'd rate audirvana above jriver and of course we are well beyond foobar at this point. Didn't sound like it had any compression or anything of that sort. Roon: to be honest the settings I described above is sub optimal for roon. They recommend you to use your pc as a roon source and another endpoint device like raspberry Pi or ethernet streamer.
I can see why. With the same pc acting as both source and endpoint fidelity suffers significantly. It sounds as if I input clipped my amplifier. Doesn't have as muddy artefacts as foobar but I don't like it since it doesn't sound transparent and has a clearly audible aberration.
However if your system uses ethernet receiver or roon supported endpoints, I assume it'll be very good owing to the custom roon protocol and compliance control. The difference from foobar to winyl was a little bit more than the difference between DACs I tried.
The difference from winyl to hysolid was more than the difference between multiple tiers of headphones. If you had said that a year ago, I'd have laughed at you, but now that I have heard, I cannot unhear this. If I have to describe it's sound concisely, I'd say saturated and detailed.
It is not the most transparent and has an obvious character that is fairly borderline warmish but without the Treble suffering anything. In fact, Treble texture was the biggest improvement from winyl - finally all the hf noise is gone but without being gooey unresolving mud like foobar. Started to hear a million shades of cymbals and digital hi hat synths listening to mausam and escape right now. And everything else follows, vocal textures whispers and so forth , bass instruments. Inter channel integrity still not perfect I guess maybe coz due to it being 32 bit but otherwise Sounds stellar.
The difference in decay texture and detail with hysolid. The sound of water drops, the sound of claps, vocal textures. Feels like the first time I upgraded from hd to vsonic gr It's buggy.
Android app didn't work it broke after android 6 and never got an update I guess so I had to use it on iOS. Running through asio to my computer. Regarding android. Where do I even begin. What a forcibly gronked system is all I can say. Just overall low fi and I rather prefer it sending the stream as bluetooth signal and listen than to use stock android stuff. The only instance where I could get decent sound out of android is when using uapp or hiby music and an external dac coz the internal dacs also mostly suck.
I envy lg users coz lg has a reworked kernel and music player that apparently doesn't screw these things too much, apart from actually having a usable sound chip. After all these, I tried my attempt at linux distros. First tried ubuntu without setting up alsa, just pulse audio. As expected disappointment. Then I tried ap-linux, a fork of arch Linux with audio optimizations and kernels built in. The installation process was a pain and unfortunately it didn't support my network card.
I couldn't do further updates and sound quality wasn't anything to write home about in that config. I thought I had hit a dead end and had to resort to battling windows.. All sorts of good adjectives - transparency, detail, effortlessness.
There is no character I can attribute to this other than those of the recordings themselves, and maybe minor effect changes by changing buffer settings or some BIOS settings and apparently changing RAM changes sound, since different RAM will have different memory refresh properties and response times.
It is a live cd, so no need to install. Just burn to pendrive, boot from the drive. When you play a song it'll be decoded and loaded to RAM and played from there, instead of buffers from storage drives. It is super focused in audio tasks and has very minimal daemons. It sounds great and has been my reference for the last 4 months.
Haven't had the chance to compare to ethernet streamers, but within system software, this is leagues above everything available on windows, with hysolid being the only thing that can even be compared, and even that is not as transparent. Highly recommend this player. Continuing some technical analysis from top. ASIO communicates both the bit depth and sample rate along with volume control info in the control frames, as per my understanding. It for sure communicates sample rate that way and I can see it even in my DAC control panel.
If you send something with 32khz sample rate via asio to my dac it will refuse to pick it up and throw an error. In other operating system like mac os, we have other data structure for sending the data,including left justified inputs. I did further investigation on this topic earlier.
