Please Help!! looking to get into computer audio.
Hi Whino, It sounds like your issue is really setting up a media server first. Your not really starting out with the best combination of sources. iTunes is heavily compressed, and BlueTooth was never an audiophile format, but it's gotten better. Let's try to improve your sound with a low-cost option. Sign up for a Tidal account, which you can play via the Oppo media app on your phone. Listen to some of the tunes there and compare the experience. This will get you away from compression and BlueTooth at once. Make sure you don't have Neo:6 enabled, as it will do funky things. For a media server, asynchronous USB is usually a very good place to start. Do you have a PC or media player that you can hook up that way? Macs sound very hard and brittle to my ears, so I won't immediately recommend them. Best, Erik |
I'm glad you could find the help you needed. You had a lot of obstacles at first, having the Oppo 103 BD player was a very fortunate thing. Try the upsampling on the BDA1 and let us know what you think. There's lot of music to buy as well, so getting your PC set up to play via USB to your BDA 1 should prove a great experience. Good luck! Erik |
Hi Whinoman, Now in a post USB 1 world, OSX and Linux can support most formats without extra drivers. Windows tends to be the exception. I'd look for a Bryston specific forum to ask questions about how to stream music from your PC to you DAC. You should only need a USB cable and the right driver. The two really popular apps are JRiver and Media Monkey. I don't know why but music players are among the second worst designed apps in the world. The only code I know of that's worse is auto-correct software, but I digress. I hate JRiver, and tolerate MediaMonkey. JRiver may have had some advanced features like DSD playing or transcoding, not really sure right now. MediaMonkey has a free version. I found with my USB DAC (quite old now) that getting it set up right was a bit of a PITA. Again, go to the Bryston site and see if you can find a support or forum to help you stream to your DAC. You are NOT the first person to need help with that. :) By the way, I just read a review of the BDA 1. It has an ASRC built in, so it should do the same work as a W4S Remedy. It may be called "upsampling" or something like that. Try it. I have found that the better the original source, the less benefit this has. More reason to save your cash for other things. :) Best, Erik |
Hi Whinoman! Go to the Tidal website (click on this blue text). Sign up for an account. I think it's easier to sign up via PC and a browser. Once you have that, the Oppo "Media Control" app will let you select Tidal as a source. You'll have to use your new Tidal credentials (name/password) and you can then stream any of Tidal's music directly from your Oppo BD player. With Tidal I find it easier to create music lists and favorite artists/albums, etc. via the browser, and then use the Oppo Medeia Control app to select from them and play. Best, Erik |
Get a New Old Stock (NOS) Squeezebox Transporter. Selling on Audiogon for around $550. Honestly there is no other media server I would buy right now, except a Squeezebox Touch. The current one's I might buy lack Android phone support. The transporter however has broad open source support. It IS old though, but a good one. Best, Erik |
dtc Upsampling is no panacea. Its much better to get an outboard asynch USB converter than to rely on upsampling. PCs are not real time systems. synchronous usb is very high in jitter which can be made a little better by Asynch. Sample Rate Conversion, and heavy buffering. The reviews for the BDA1 and how much better it sounds with the Bryston Player make me worry this is the case. Asynch Usb however can resolve these issues. Yes Im aware of the difference between a 103 and 105. I was just offering options. Best Erik |
To make some terms more clear, and take them out of vendor-speak we are talking about the differences between Asynchronous USB (A-USB) and Asynchronous Sample Rate Conversion (ASRC). Usually vendors will call ASRC something like upsampling and re-clocking or something like that. The Wyred4Sound Remedy Recklocker is an example, but many DAC's have this feature built in. Both help to reduce jitter but the similarities in how they work and how well they may work in any given circumstance are not the same. Jitter from an A-USB source is often as low as the DAC that is pulling the data, and is bit-perfect. That is, the DAC receives exactly the bits in the source file, and the output signal is evidence of the very best the DAC can do. There's very little to do to make a no-compromise solution with this interface. As you are expecting, ASRC will also improve bad sources, reducing measured jitter somewhat but at a certain point, based on it's implementation, it has to give up. This can be improved upon by bigger input buffers, but it usually does not yield the same level of improvement, especially with things like internet radio, iTunes, Chromecast, etc. The worse the input signal (i.e. more jittery) the worse the output signal. By contrast, A-USB can tolerate a lot of lag in the input before ANY of it becomes measurable. Further, ASRC is not bit-perfect. The entire output signal is a mathematical reconstruction of the input. For fun reading on this look up some of the writing around the closed-form digital filters used by Schiit. Of course, they are all pro-Schiit, but they offer a great education in how ASRC is accomplished, and what kind of compromises are made. In general, ASRC prefers time precision to bit-perfection. It will sacrifice the data to meet it's time goal, as much as it can. Of course, the devil is in the details, and anyone can make a crappy version of any technology. You can also chain one after the other, yielding very good results at times. A better option, in my mind, is the latter Bryston DAC's with built in USB 2.0 A-USB support AND upsampling. Given the option for just 1, I'd take A-USB any day of the week. Best, Erik |
Without knowing the actual implementation, they could use a large-ish buffer and then upsample, but these issues have the same limitations as ASRC. The re-clocker has to constantly try to guess the long term stability of the original source clock AND the buffer has to be big enough to handle the difference between the source clock and the DAC clock. This is why ASRC is actually pretty easy to implement. You just say F* it to the original clock completely and really only need a very small buffer. My guess, is that they are just doing ASRC, like everyone else these days. Again, the best solution among the now 3 different types of implementations is Asynch-USB. Try this thought experiment. Let's say your source is feeding out samples every 1/44,110 of a second instead of 1/44,100 of a second. The only one of the three methods that is immune to this problem entirely is Asynch-USB. The source clock has nothing to do with the frequency of data fed to the DAC (within reason, if the PC is running Windows and it's in the middle of an update, chances are it's all going to hell). Parasound's CD player, and some digital players have implemented memory-only players. They read the entire file into memory at once, completely doing away with issues of source jitter. There's no evidence it's better than Asynch-USB though. PS Audio has a useful article on this too somewhere, of course it's all pro-PS Audio's dac or something. :) Best, Erik |
@brenro I'm not sure what your core problem is though. :) Are you saying you don't like downloads? If so, you are exactly the sort of person MQA was designed for. It offers to compress high resolution audio several fold without loss. The Ayre IS a very nice player. How are you hooking it and the Oppo up to your sound though? Is it analog out or are you using a DAC? I like the video and anime performance of Oppo, but um, not a fan of their internal DAC's. At least on the 103, I can't hear any benefit at all of SACD. However, the 105 has Asynch-USB 2.0 so it should make a great source for just about any outboard DAC. |
Gee @dtc it took a lot of typing before you got what I was saying and got mad at me for it. I like ASRC by the way, and buffering and stuff like that. I don’t think the engineers at Bryston are crap. I just don’t think all jitter reduction solutions are equally good which is what I thought you wrote. There is a reason why the next generation incorporated Asynch-USB 2.0 I’m very happy that over the past decade or so Asynch-USB and high resolution audio have become so important that Macs and Linux now incorporate a standard USB 2.0 audio driver as part of their distributions. This is much better than the dark ages of Synch-USB or Asynch but with custom drivers needed. Best, Erik |
