progo
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2007
- Posts
- 1,592
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- 14
Howdy ho, how are you doing?
I've been a happy Amarok user, forwarding the music without alterings to ALSA and from there my sound card, the ESI Juli@. So, I have thought all these months Amarok is very transparent (in this case, bit-perfect).
Then I happened to try this lovely piece of software called MPD (Music Player Daemon) that basically is a server software that plays music. It's controlled via different clients. In normal use, if you wanted to listen to an album, you would start a client, do a search for album, add it to playlist and press 'play'. After that you can close the client from consuming memory or other assets and let the music flow freely. So, I installed MPD and checked the configuration: it's same as Amarok's one so the software connects to ALSA in the same way in both apps. Should result in same sound, since ALSA is bit perfect, no?
But no. Both played in unaltered volume (100%), I get greater soundstage via MPD than in Amarok. The difference is not day and night, but after I listen to an album in Amarok and then switch to MPD I clearly hear the same drums in different position. To overrule the placebo that some of you so much seem to hate, I did some ABX and could tell which app played the song. MPD's presentation separates more, it's laid back thus making better experience via expanded soundstage.
Now, which one is closer to real deal? I must presume some of you have experienced with MPD and Amarok and could know something regarding this. I don't have a DTS capable receiver that could be evidently the best way to see if one of these actually does bit perfect playback.
MPD could be resampling the music that perhaps shows as muffled midrange which subsequently could attribute to an impression that the players were farther from me.
The meaningful bits of mpd.conf:
Code:
So, any thoughts? I considered buying a digital interconnect to make a loop-back recording and see if the graphs differ, but found out these drivers for ALSA are so buggy that only Audacity can record sound. And Audacity doesn't work too well.
Btw it'd be so perfect to have a little device (or a large for that matter, as long as it's cheap!
) that accepted coaxial and optical digital inputs, it'd be shipped with a test CD with some music or something and you could see if your computer passes with bitperfectness. (You'd plug in the device to your soundcard and put the CD (or waves ripped from it) playing. If your player would be bit-perfect, the device blinked a red light or similar).
I've been a happy Amarok user, forwarding the music without alterings to ALSA and from there my sound card, the ESI Juli@. So, I have thought all these months Amarok is very transparent (in this case, bit-perfect).
Then I happened to try this lovely piece of software called MPD (Music Player Daemon) that basically is a server software that plays music. It's controlled via different clients. In normal use, if you wanted to listen to an album, you would start a client, do a search for album, add it to playlist and press 'play'. After that you can close the client from consuming memory or other assets and let the music flow freely. So, I installed MPD and checked the configuration: it's same as Amarok's one so the software connects to ALSA in the same way in both apps. Should result in same sound, since ALSA is bit perfect, no?
But no. Both played in unaltered volume (100%), I get greater soundstage via MPD than in Amarok. The difference is not day and night, but after I listen to an album in Amarok and then switch to MPD I clearly hear the same drums in different position. To overrule the placebo that some of you so much seem to hate, I did some ABX and could tell which app played the song. MPD's presentation separates more, it's laid back thus making better experience via expanded soundstage.
Now, which one is closer to real deal? I must presume some of you have experienced with MPD and Amarok and could know something regarding this. I don't have a DTS capable receiver that could be evidently the best way to see if one of these actually does bit perfect playback.
MPD could be resampling the music that perhaps shows as muffled midrange which subsequently could attribute to an impression that the players were farther from me.
The meaningful bits of mpd.conf:
Code:
Code:
[left]##--snip-- audio_output { type "alsa" name "julia" options "hw:1,0" } ##--snip-- mixer_type "alsa" mixer_device "default" mixer_control "default"[/left]So, any thoughts? I considered buying a digital interconnect to make a loop-back recording and see if the graphs differ, but found out these drivers for ALSA are so buggy that only Audacity can record sound. And Audacity doesn't work too well.
Btw it'd be so perfect to have a little device (or a large for that matter, as long as it's cheap!
