[sbgk]

tried Tahrpuppy 64 6.0.5 sounded ok. Seemed to improve the sound by muting all other sounds and making my usb device the default. Also removing the SuperEQ in the dsp tab made a small improvement, except it gets added back in, so kept the dsp tab open while playing.
 
this another example of a optimised linux distro with optimised player with minimal functionality
 
http://wtfplay-project.org/

 

[Caper]

I tried to compare with W7/jriver.
Not so easy to say wich is better since I have to reboot everytime I change player.
I think Jriver is a bit brighter but less bass.
 
Will try some more later, it takes a lot of listening before I can make a conclusion.

 

[Caper]

I just went to my friend and borrowed an external cd player.
Going to connect it to my dac with digital coax.
At the moment I am ripping some High Fidely cd´s as unkompressed wave files.
Then I can atleast do A/B comparison just by switching input between the cd player and Tahrpuppy.
Maybe not straitly fair as I guess the coax sounds better than USB input.
 
Fun to try though!

 

[Caper]

That was not hard to hear difference 

 
The standalone cd player connected with digital coax sounds sooo much better, crispier with a lot more dynamic than Tharpuppy through USB.
I guess it has to do with the coax input quality compared to the USB input on my amp/dac.
 
Soon I will have a USB/spdif converter at home, I will then compare again.
My amp/dac has 2 coax inputs so easy to do a A/B comparison again.

 

[Paul70]

I am a full time Linux user having been a dual booter for about 15 years. Current flavour is Mint 17.3 64 bit.
 
I use a Xonar DS card and DeadBeef for playback purposes.
DeadBeef makes it very easy to route bypass Pulse and dmix, letting me push ALSA directly to the Xonar DAC hardware with no conversions.
Disable ASLA re-sampling and delete Secret Rabbit Code re-sampler.
I replaced the 5532 OP amp in the DS with a LM4562NA. Slightly nicer to my ears, but I wouldn't get too involved in Op amp rolling.
 
The DS card is pathetic in terms of driving 'phones but through my 35 old year old Technics amp and modest pair of Eltax two-ways I have good music on tap.
 
Unless you are recording and playing back simultaneously you do not need to worry about latency.

 

[drjoms]

I need to point out though, that packages are awesome as someone who used RedHat and fedora for a while. I also used Gentoo back in the day. .deb packages are awesome.

I am also surprised that you will hear differences between different linux distros. They all use the same code and packages. Hell, even the drivers are the same. You can easily hear a difference between Windows and Linux but I am skeptical that you hear actual differences between Ubuntu and Debian since Ubuntu is really a set of debian packages. I have heard of linux mint. They say straight up that it is an ubuntu clone with some package modifications. These modifications use common code and Linux Mint seems to bundle more A/V codecs. Almost certainly they use exactly the same audio drivers. There are only a few ways to play audio in Linux. OSS4, which is currently outdated and most likely shouldn't be used, ALSA, and if you want to hurt yourself, PluseAudio. The only difference I could see is the default setup of the audio and perhaps a few equalizer settings.

ALSA is fantastic. I am guessing that mess of people who worked on OSS4 moved to ALSA. The drivers are generally very good and it has wide support. Again though, once an ALSA driver is written, it is shared among all distros. It isn't like you pick up Linux Mint and get a totally different driver.

In my opinion, stick to Ubuntu. It is a great OS and quite stable. You can also do just about anything you want to do with it. Hell, you can uninstall every package and compile each from scratch if you wanted to. I don't know why you would want to, but you can.

"Almost certainly they use exactly the same audio drivers" - 110%

Pulseaudio is... ALSA client... It can't work without ALSA. It's one giant Fsck'd up Alsa plugin. Both suck, but Pulse becomes defacto sound server in Linux, unfortunately.

With that said, sound is not necessary weak side of Linux if you are not affraid of goole and get your hands dirty.

 

[drjoms]

I am a full time Linux user having been a dual booter for about 15 years. Current flavour is Mint 17.3 64 bit.

I use a Xonar DS card and DeadBeef for playback purposes.
DeadBeef makes it very easy to route bypass Pulse and dmix, letting me push ALSA directly to the Xonar DAC hardware with no conversions.
Disable ASLA re-sampling and delete Secret Rabbit Code re-sampler.
I replaced the 5532 OP amp in the DS with a LM4562NA. Slightly nicer to my ears, but I wouldn't get too involved in Op amp rolling.

The DS card is pathetic in terms of driving 'phones but through my 35 old year old Technics amp and modest pair of Eltax two-ways I have good music on tap.

Unless you are recording and playing back simultaneously you do not need to worry about latency.

There is a way to force application to use ALSA directly bypassing Pulse, when pulse is actually running.
ANd yes Asus Xonar DX was amazing for me as well, till floppy power connector did not fail after many years of use.

 

[Paul70]

I managed to bypass Pulse through DeadBeef via the GUI. I've not tired it with any other players. DB offers everything I need really. My library isn't huge so I don't need anything really special.

 

[theaudiologist1]

does AP Linux play DSD natively or DoP, if at all? Also, can anybody tell me a way to listen to DSD without having to install an entire distro? any linux music player that doesn't suck?

 

[drjoms]

does AP Linux play DSD natively or DoP, if at all? Also, can anybody tell me a way to listen to DSD without having to install an entire distro? any linux music player that doesn't suck?

'does AP Linux play DSD natively or DoP, if at all?' - dunno.

'Also, can anybody tell me a way to listen to DSD without having to install an entire distro?' - install linux on big USB flash drive. 20 gig would prolly be big enough.

 

[Stevko]

not sure if my pc will run win 11.
so maybe i must install linux. any good software for linux with asio/wasapi?
what linux distro is ok? ubuntu?

 

[drjoms]

not sure if my pc will run win 11.
so maybe i must install linux. any good software for linux with asio/wasapi?
what linux distro is ok? ubuntu?

There is no such thing as asio/wasapi there.
If you have reasonably supported DAC, likely quality will be just fine by default.
Unless you will be doing some mixing/sound engineering. Which you can, but you will need to invest time to know linux sound sub system.