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https://6moons.com/audioreview_articles/jplay-app/
Cut to razor sounding violins
Edits: 06/27/24Follow Ups:
Roon can display the Signal Path and assigns a color dot to indicate the quality. The reviewer who compared Roon to JPlay botched the comparison as he did not have Roon configured for bit-perfect output.The comment by philr in the paragraph below is all telling.
In my Roon screen shot examples below I show a signal path that is not bit-perfect and one that is bit-perfectHere, the music is going thru the Mac OS Mixer which is not bit-perfect. (BTW, Windows mixer is similarly not bit-perfect).
In this example the music bypasses the Mac OS Mixer so the music data is bit-perfect end to end.
Bottom Line : The reviewer didn't know what he was doing and didn't have Roon set up for bit-perfect playback placing Roon
at a serious disadvantage in his botched comparison against JPlay.
Edits: 07/05/24 07/05/24 07/05/24 07/05/24
They say LMS sounds better than Roon and no need for free trials cause it's free
" They say LMS sounds better than Roon . . ."
Sorry, no. They don't say that.
I asked them, and they told me so.
. . . in theory, practice and theory are the same; in practice, they are different . . .
Yeah but they say Jplay sounds better than Roon
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...see my post about the reviewer's botched setup.
I seem to remember you from this forum as the guy who thinks paying anything for software is a ripoff.
. . . in theory, practice and theory are the same; in practice, they are different . . .
Its a bit more nuanced than that but you are essentially right. Though in this case its a one time purchase not a monthly subscription. If the sound is better, for $150 it not that crazy. But yeah its probably a non starter. And since it looks like I already trialed it and the license is expired its pretty much dead.
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Agreed, $150 flat rate is reasonable, which presumably lasts until the next upgrade, but I only see that offered on the .eu site. Does it apply in the US? The .app site shows $49/year. Still very reasonable, but it is subscription.The one French review from a few months ago that you linked thought JPLAY sounded better than Roon, but others don't agree. Predictably, there was grumbling about it in the Roon community at the time. Apparently the reviewer had Roon set to a lower resolution, so it may not have been a fair comparison.
Anyway, sorry to hear it's a non-starter for you. I would be interested to hear your impressions. I'm satisfied with Roon, but competition is always good.
. . . in theory, practice and theory are the same; in practice, they are different . . .
Edits: 07/04/24 07/04/24
Thanks. That was a good read. Though i was a bit confused. Jplay has a controller too but isn't it about the program on the computer causing the improved sq? I was planning on using Hysolid as the front end.
I think there is a way to edit the registry to redo the trial but not sure I will bother.
Anyhow, glad you are happy with roon. It looks solid.
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If you are confused, I don't think I can help b/c you know a lot more about this stuff than I do. But let me offer what I can. My understanding is that JPlay is a player/controller only (what I would call "front-end") and relies on a UPnP server like Minim, LMS, Plex, etc on the back-end. If I'm right, your comment about using Hysolid on the front-end doesn't parse. I think JPlay would replace Hysolid's UI and player but you would still be using the Hysolid engine. Or maybe we are using different terminologies.
Admittedly, I'm out of my lane here b/c I have little direct experience. Haven't tried JPlay or Hysolid so I'm just going on what I've read. I ran LMS for a while before I jumped on the Roon startup in 2015 and have never looked back. Way back when, trying to improve on iTunes, I experimented with Plex, Firefly, and something called Twonky, but that was back in the Aughts so no longer relevant.
. . . in theory, practice and theory are the same; in practice, they are different . . .
I asked them too and they said no.
No ASIO support:
ASIO, WASAPI and WDMKS support have been removed as they hang audio playback after the first sample rate change on win7+
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HMM. I can try that I suppose thanks for the thought.
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to truly see if there will be worthwhile SQ upgrade in your own system.
I don't do iOS, but back when I tried Jplay for ASIO playback in Windows, it was the purest sounding playback I had..
Thanks that is good to hear. What are you running now?
Cut to razor sounding violins
After I started powering my SOtM USB card and DAC with native batteries, SQ reached a point where I stopped worrying too much about software.
Happy enough running Amazon Music HD on PC, and due to Amazon's proprietary nature, one can't run nice 3rd party upsamplers, processors, etc anyway.
Ok cool. Totally agree about Amazon music. Would use it more if I could control it with the iphone or ipad. Oh well.
Hopefully I can get around to trying jplay though I think I might have already tried it on that computer. I know I tried it once so it probably will be a short test.
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The problem. My problem.
All audio network streaming I tried, IMO sounded worse than playing local files.
Even if you're running advanced FullRAMBuffer playback players.
That's also valid for network-file services such as Samba, Cifs, NFS etc.
All I am saying. I experience slight audible differences using different methods on my system. And if I'd still be a no-compromise audiophile I simply couldn't use audio streaming services. Nowadays convenience beats the last bit of perceived sound quality. I somewhat learned to live with that compromise.
Beside that beating a dead horse like UPnP - wouldn't be my way of getting things evolved.
And. Lyrion is a free, feature-rich and great sounding client-server system supporting Qobuz etc. Comes with a great UI (Material Skin) for any OS out there. I am not sure why I'd spend any $ on some other mostly redundant stuff.
Enjoy.
I was going to use local files with it, not UPnp or files stored on a server.
Was planning on using Hysolid as the main player and Jplay as the asio driver basically. There was a write up about that combo and Audio fidelizer. Maybe the review was talking about UPnP but I wouldn't use it like that myself, outside of just the Hysolid control app which I don't know if it is using UPnP. Don't think it is because I have never seen it show up when using UPnP apps.
I tried a Lyrion based system I believe when I tried Daphile. It was good but I ditched it because of the USB it required.
Glad you are enjoying things and being a no-compromising audiophile can take the fun out of things...
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> > "I tried a Lyrion based system I believe when I tried Daphile. It was good but I ditched it because of the USB it required."
Second soundcheck's comment -- not sure what you mean. I've been using LMS for years now and it works just fine with coax and optical outputs as well as USB. In fact, a few years ago it used to be that a player's coax/optical outputs to a DAC were the preferred methods as USB output to a DAC had its share of issues. I still have several HiFiBerry "Digi" HATs for my RPi players that have only coax/optical outputs. In fact, these are still preferred if you have a RPi 3B board since this particular RPi is flaky when it comes to using the USB output to an external DAC, along with two WiiMs.
Note that LMS is the "server" side of the player system and can be matched with a number of different players. I use LMS on a RPi 5 as a server and all of my players are separate devices, using either HFB OS or pCP.
My pc only has usb out so I had to use a usb/ spdif converter.
Here is my explanation:
The usb thing is because I use DANTE and have 2 devices that output AES, 2 Devices that have a balanced DAC, and one device that outputs AES, coax, and toslink. I have 2 computers and since all devices and computers are on the network I can send audio wherever I want. So if I want to watch movies I can send that sound to the bed for instance or send music from the music computer to my main system, etc. Lots of flexibility.
With Daphile I had to use USB and can only send the signal to one device. Though I could send the signal to a Big Ben and switch between the different computers but not send different signals to different devices. So the usb was less flexible and the usb to spdif device was just $60 so not sure how good it was.
Cut to razor sounding violins
You're still working with Windows. I see.
Fidelizer...
Hysolid...
Jplay...
Roon...
Daphile... (I know -- its Linux)
"...of the USB it required..." - what does that mean ??
My solution.
Of course Linux. At least since 2007 we know that Linux Audio is the way to go . ;)
A simple RPi5 using piCorePlayer.
You can now attach a 2TB SSD (system and data) via PCie-NVME HAT.
You run the Lyrion server and the client squeezelite on the same machine.
You use the excellent material-skin plugin as UI.
It's all free. No fees. And IMO no compromises in quality. Just a little DIY spirit.
Of course you need a good 5V supply.
And. You can find high quality HATs that provide all kind of IFs such as SPDIF/TOSL/I2S...
All that is no rocket science.
Just to mention it:
Some weeks ago I went to France and we compared my own RPi5 setup to a fully tweaked (clock upgrade etc) Eversolo DMP-6 streamer.
We also ran tests using attached USB DACs. The Eversolo owner ordered the RPi the next day. No kidding.
Of course the standard pCP installation isn't the end of story. There's still quite some space for improvement. However. I'd be surprised if any of your Windows based solutions would be able to beat just a basic pCP setup.
Good luck.
That is nice of you making the Eversolo guy spend more money :)
The usb thing is because I use DANTE and have 2 devices that output AES, 2 Devices that have a balanced DAC, and one device that outputs AES, coax, and toslink. I have 2 computers and since all devices and computers are on the network I can send audio wherever I want. So if I want to watch movies I can send that sound to the bed for instance or send music from the music computer to my main system, etc. Lots of flexibility.
With Daphile I had to use USB and can only send the signal to one device. Though I could send the signal to a Big Ben and switch between the different computers but not send different signals to different devices. So the usb was less flexible and the usb to spdif device was just $60 so not sure how good it was.
But I could live with those limitations if the sound was there. Daphile sounded great I used it for a few months. I then switched back to Hysolid on the same machine and there wasn't a big difference. Hysolid sounded better in some regards and not in others. It was hard to A/B obviously. So I ditched Daphile. Also the control of Daphile was lame. Like who uses QUES? I just want to play an album or track by clicking on it. Maybe there was a way around that but I never found it.
I was excited about the upsampling in Daphile and through USB could get 192k. My DANTE is limited to 96k. At the end I concluded that upsampling via Daphile didn't really do much in terms of sound and limited me to 1 or 2 dacs.
Anyhow I was reading that Jplay was a better sounding option and thought I could use it with Hysolid. Its possible but recently I don't find myself going out of my way to fiddle. But would if it seems like a good upgrade.
What would a RPi5 get me over what I have given my daphile experience?
Cut to razor sounding violins
You can try it, but I suspect you'll find much at all as "improvement" My friend brought his RPi setup over and we conducted a non-scientific comparison.
Bias? Of course. He wanted to like his RPi setup versus my Daphile, and I wanted to prefer my Daphile. At the end of the day both setups sounded great and we were hard-pressed to note significant differences.
Also, for what its worth, I didn't get much out of "upsampling" either. While in some cases upsampling in Daphile sounded different than the non upsampled audio track, I can't say that it was "better".
Daphile doesn't limit you to one or two DAC's. With the right plugins, you have much flexibility to select multiple DAC's or endpoints. In my use case, Dahile can output to my choice of two DAC's, a Wiim Mini, or either of two Google Nest Minis we have here at the house. You can also synchronize output so that Daphile can output to the above devices at the same time.
You can't compare apples and oranges.
"RPi vs Daphile"
You can compare
pCP vs Daphile
and/or
RPi vs X86
The RPi(5) is simply much less complex than a PC. A simple 5V supply
is required. A SBC - done right - IMO beats any PC. If you run custom
SW like your RME or other ProAudio stuff it's a different story of course.
But. Do I need that for audio playback !?!?
Many (most!?!?) streamers run a small Linux based SBCs inside btw.
Now.
pCP vs Daphile. pCP is the OS utilising the least amount of resources and it focusses on Lyrion/squeezelite only.
Most other OSes, such as Moode, Daphile, Volumio IMO do not come close to the efficiency of PCP. I've been working for Moode for a while. In the end they want to attract all kind of users (customers) and therefore these kind of systems get bloated over time. pCP is still a pretty lean approach. However.
The pCP folks are all but audiophile minded. That the system performs the way
it does is related to the very efficient way of using resources - and that's the contribution of its base OS - Tiny Core Linux. In the past I also contributed this or that optimization to pCP - as long as a tweak didn't get the label "audiophile", they (Paul) was willing to accept it. I even offer(ed) a small set of tools to make pCP sing. It's still on github. (I havn't ported it to RPi5 yet - perhaps after summer)
Anyhow. I do think with your rather complex DANTE and AES setup it's gonna be tricky to port such an approach. Perhaps you could/should rethink the whole setup.
Just playing around with a RPi5 is no big deal on the other hand.
You can btw also sync clients on Lyrion. You can also use shairport-sync (an Apple Airplay port) on RPI if you want to get video sound on your audio system - I do that via Apple TV > > RPI (Note: my TV runs as sole HDMI-display - no network - no nothing, all SW is handled via Apple TV).
If you really need to SRC - it can also be done by Lyrion or squeezelite
Today, with numerous real great budget audio interface offerings at hand, it's IMO worth to review any setup/chain out there. That's why my main audio system is a standalone system nowadays. For most other settings I use Bluetooth or Airplay straight from the iPhone. I really don't want numerous audio RPis and or PCs in the house. Makes life much easier. ;)
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