vietngohong
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2012
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I would go for Foobar2K, just simple
I second foobar2000. It's lightweight and highly customizable. You can get custom skins and plugin modules for it to suit your preference/needs.
On a side note. I wish people would stop using FLAC. IMHO, FLAC is the Flash of audio.
To this day, I don't understand how anyone can believe that one digital player provides "superior" sound over another. As long as the base program is rendering bit perfect sound, it is, by definition, perfect. If I want some added level of sound processing (eq, convolution, dithering, upsampling, etc), I will add it. In no way do I want that kind of processing to be a non alterable,undefeatable feature of my digital player. And I certainly would never pay upwards of $500 for it.
To this day, I don't understand how anyone can believe that one digital player provides "superior" sound over another. As long as the base program is rendering bit perfect sound, it is, by definition, perfect.
It's not a case of believing - all one has to do is to listen.
I've found HQ Player to sound better than JRiver irrespective of DSP settings, or bit perfectness, or conversion/upsampling. I'm currently using both with everything switched off, other than some dither on HQP. This on Windows in my case, as that's all I've got, but others have enthused about HQP on OSX.
I haven't wasted my JRMC license though. I continue to use JRMC for ripping, tagging, library management and all those clever things it's good at - to organise things as i want them. And it's a single command to import the whole lot into HQP's library. Admittedly, HQP's rather basic UI is an acquired taste shall we say, And its library management is almost none existent. But, at substantial extra cost, you can link it with Roon to get the best of both worlds (some say - I've haven't tried Roon myself yet).
The SQ differences between JRMC and HQP is not night and day IMO with direct USB connection. But insert a microRendu using HQP's NAA mode and it goes up another division. I think the insertion of mR is mostly to do with noise reduction, but I don't care what the reason is - I just go with what sounds best to me.
Since you own the DAVE, I'd imagine it would sound better leaving the processing to the DAC. It would be interesting if you could report how things sound on your system with and without.
When I tried HQP with my portable iFi MicroDSD, I (and others) found HQP sounded best at the highest upsampling rates. Furthermore, I (and others) preferred the sound when converted to DSD. But on this point, some differed and preferred high sample rate PCM. In my case, all files were redbook FLAC. However, DSD conversion put the biggest load on my i7 CPU, around 20%-40% depending on DSD64-512. I found DSD512 impossible to use, and even the lower DSD speeds caused occasional stuttering and the high CPU load caused my laptop's fan to come on - not nice.
With DAVE, I prefer all DSP off, apart from experimenting with the subtle effect of dither. In this case, the filter and upsampling options generally give a slightly smoothing effect, which is not unpleasant, but not as transparent as letting DAVE do the work. And in this case, the CPU load is an insignificant 2% or so.
So, those HQP DSP options may work better with some DACS than others, and can give flexibility, but my main point is that HQP sounds better than JRMC even with all DSP switched off. A clearer, more transparent sound. Going back to JRMC gives a smoother, mushier, woollier sound. Like I said, it's not night and day difference with direct USB connection, but those who want to get the best SQ out of their computer system should give it a try. Those that don't get on with HQP's clunky UI have the integration options with Roon or foobar etc.
Allegedly, Bug Head Emperor can give better still sound, but that is too esoteric for me to even try. And it doesn't have the NAA feature of HQP which takes things to a another level
I just recently moved to JRiver. Before that I used foobar2000 for over ten years. The biggest reason for me was that JRiver sounds better than foobar2000. It's strange since they're both configured to output bitperfect, unmodified signal through WASAPI output but still there's a clear difference on sound quality. JRiver sounds more analog and slightly punchier, more refined I'd say. foobar2000 is slightly edgier and raw sounding. It really is weird that there can be a difference but I trust my ears.
I use some of the most extreme settings, which do stutter, but the RAM drives fix that.
I use some of the most extreme settings, which do stutter, but the RAM drives fix that.
What kind of hardware has your laptop got? I build my own pcs and it is difficult hard to find anything that can cause them to slow up. Running things from PCI-E M2 drives can speed processing up considerably.
Are you using an ASIO driver at very low latency?
They were originally designed for musicians who needed the responsiveness.
For audio playback, a larger buffer gives a much smoother experience with a lower overhead.