[koinmove]

I just ordered the Rubato from Amazon Japan. Had i known that Tidal wasn't available on the Japanese version, I've gone with another DAP.

Yes it dont have spotify or tidal T-T

 

[qsk78]

I ordered the 1st one you mentioned from Ebay, Japanese, seller, since B&H "kinda" had it. I wanted the one of the Musashino ones, but wasn't willing to pay $75-100 for one.

The original case from Onkyo is just good. Hope it will last long.
Do not see any reason to buy a fancy expensive case for it.

 

[Mython]

Hi - I've been using a Fiio X5ii for about a year. As I find the interface (scroll wheel) insanely fiddly, I upgraded to the X5iii, but after about six weeks it started to freeze so often (four times in one commute) as well as split albums up and refuse to show album art so much, I gave up and returned it. But I do like the easier interface - I have a LOT of music saved onto two 256GB cards, and the X5ii reads these without a hitch at all. I got the Pioneer XDP-30R, hoping that this would be easier, but the problems were the same - it refused to read one card at all, and on the remaining card it wouldn't read some tracks, split albums and...again with the album art. Now, again -- all this works fine on the X5ii. I did try asking Pioneer on the website about the problems I was having, but they never replied, so after a week I thought I'd cut my losses and sent it back. Now, still on the lookout for something with good storage and an easier interface, I'm tempted by the Rubato, so.....what are the odds I'd have these same problems with these? And would it even read my 2 x 256GB cards or would it only read part of them or...? I'm not bothered about Tidal, so this may not be ideal at all and I might just have to wait. Thanks.

To be honest, this sounds like you either have some corrupt files or tags within the files, or perhaps inconsistent tagging between different files in the same album. Also, have you tried reformatting the cards and rewriting the files? If you do, try not to use the player to write to the cards - use a dedicated card reader. Many players do a pretty poor job when writing files to large filing systems on SD cards. The XDP-30R and Rubato share the same core firmware. If the Pioneer doesn't like your files then almost certainly the Onkyo won't either.

If reformatting and rewriting does not work would use some file checkers and also a tool like MP3Tag to help clean up meta-data. It's great for removing garbage tags, resizing album art, and many other aspects. It may be worth organising folders a bit if you have a very large number of files. As noted in an earlier post, I have around 8,800 files in two 128GB cards and I have no issues - but I ripped all of the files myself and am pretty careful about tagging and so on.

Thanks for this. Now, I have to be careful what I say 'cos I'm not very tech-savvy, but....when you say about using the player to write to the cards, I'm not entirely sure I know what you mean. I use CDex to rip the CDs to a hard drive, each artist has a folder and each album is a subfolder (complete with artwork saves as "cover.jpeg", usually downloaded from Amazon. I have...well, a lot. I have no idea how many. I've just counted the number of artist folders, and it's 427, so if you figure an average of 5 albums per artist, say, that's 2, 135 albums and...well, okay, probably about 10,000 music files in there. Roughly. Someone once said that the problem might be that the device has file limits. Could that be right?

I'm happy to give cleaning up the tags a go, but...what is meta-data? Sorry, that's a pretty basic question, I realise.

Meta-data is just a term for data related to the files - in this case tags, art, etc. There are different ways of tagging FLAC files I believe, so MP3Tag can be a help in cleaning things up, but it also might take a bit of learning if you're not used to it. I use it most by selecting a bunch of files (same artist or album, for example) and then right-click and select Extended Tags. That allows you quickly to apply a change to all of the selected files - like delete surplus tags, or update so they all have the same spellings for the artist, or so that all have the same embedded album art for an album). You need to play around with it, but it's a very powerful tool once you dig into the possibilities. You can use MP3Tag across multiple artist folders at the same time, so don't worry that you have many of them. Then look at all of the tag fields using the Extended tags editor and delete any tags that have no relevance. Some CD rippers fill in loads of stuff you probably don't need.

Another thing you can do with your FLAC files is to check them for errors using flactester.exe - a Windows utility often distributed with the FLAC encoder - decoder software. That will allow you to identify any files that have errors in the FLAC data stream.

Lastly, you can use either the FLAC executable itself or a utility like dBpoweramp (highly recommended) to re-encode your FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files. I use it after a lot of tag editing sometimes to remove redundant space in the file. For FLAC, re-encoding to FLAC is very fast and 100% accurate as far as the lossless audio is concerned. For optimum speed, if you have more than one hard drive, use separate drives for source and destination data when re-encoding. It helps a lot.

Thank you verymuch for this. I'll give the MP3Tag a go when I get a moment, but I suspect it might just be a bit much for my non-technical mind. I'm reminded of having Foobar2000 being recommended to me and, despite numerous visits to fan forums, never being able to remotely fathom what it was or what it was supposed to be or why everyone liked it, due to my lack of technical knowledge. I'll admit, I didn't understand a lot of your reply, and I still don't understand why all my files will work absolutely fine on the Fiio X5ii (and the Cowon X7 before that, although I've added a lot of files in the past year to take advantage of the increased capacity) but not with the X5iii or the Pioneer. But, I guess first I have to take a look at some of this software, so thanks for the recommendations!

In addition to BadBanana's good advice, I'll mention that some DAPs do not handle large album art well (large file size of the jpegs, or large pixel size of the jpegs), or they may have difficulties indexing the files if there are different file formats for the cover art (e.g. .BMP, .PNG, etc.). Generally-speaking, JPEGs (.JPG) are a reliable choice of file format, and if you have .BMP or .PNG files (or even others, such as .PSD), it is extremely easy to convert them all to .JPG, using freeware image viewer/editor software. For example, IrfanView is a popular one, on the Windows platform. Some music file taggers (AKA metadata editors) will even automatically convert artwork.

Another thing that sometimes causes problems is if you have one or more of your album folders containing more than one type of music file format within a single folder. For example, my old Cowon J3 used to freeze every single time when I searched for a tune, and I eventually discovered that just one of my album folders, out of many hundreds, had several tracks in .mp3 format but one .aac format track was also in that folder.

Another thing that can sometimes cause problems is if you have downloaded mp3 files that contain non-standard characters (or non-standard languages) within the metadata tags. This is surprisingly common, and it's just one more reason why one should be disciplined in legitimately ripping one's own purchased mp3 library, rather than obtaining from dubious internet sources. It is also a reason why it is important to have the self-discipline to spend as long as it takes (it could even take a couple of weeks, working a couple of hours each night) to thoroughly check and correct all the tags in your music files, as BadBanana suggested. It's extremely boring work, but it is worth it because you can then use those correctly-tagged files for many years of trouble-free enjoyment.

Also, make sure that none of your music track filenames are too long, as some DAPs struggle to index and/or read very long filenames successfully (in this case, I am primarily referring to the actual 'physical' file names on the memory card, rather than the embedded metadata within those files, although it is wise to also check that none of the text content of the embedded metadata is excessively long)

 

[BadBanana]

In addition to BadBanana's good advice, I'll mention that some DAPs do not handle large album art well (large file size of the jpegs, or large pixel size of the jpegs), or they may have difficulties indexing the files if there are different file formats for the cover art (e.g. .BMP, .PNG, etc.). Generally-speaking, JPEGs (.JPG) are a reliable choice of file format, and if you have .BMP or .PNG files (or even others, such as .PSD), it is extremely easy to convert them all to .JPG, using freeware image viewer/editor software. For example, IrfanView is a popular one, on the Windows platform. Some music file taggers (AKA metadata editors) will even automatically convert artwork.

Another thing that sometimes causes problems is if you have one or more of your album folders containing more than one type of music file format within a single folder. For example, my old Cowon J3 used to freeze every single time when I searched for a tune, and I eventually discovered that just one of my album folders, out of many hundreds, had several tracks in .mp3 format but one .aac format track was also in that folder.

Another thing that can sometimes cause problems is if you have downloaded mp3 files that contain non-standard characters (or non-standard languages) within the metadata tags. This is surprisingly common, and it's just one more reason why one should be disciplined in legitimately ripping one's own purchased mp3 library, rather than obtaining from dubious internet sources. It is also a reason why it is important to have the self-discipline to spend as long as it takes (it could even take a couple of weeks, working a couple of hours each night) to thoroughly check and correct all the tags in your music files, as BadBanana suggested. It's extremely boring work, but it is worth it because you can then use those correctly-tagged files for many years of trouble-free enjoyment.

Also, make sure that none of your music track filenames are too long, as some DAPs struggle to index and/or read very long filenames successfully (in this case, I am primarily referring to the actual 'physical' file names on the memory card, rather than the embedded metadata within those files, although it is wise to also check that none of the text content of the embedded metadata is excessively long)

Some good advice here. Picture size seems not as critical on his player as some others, but setting a sensible limit for the files in a library is good practice. For devices with small screen I limit this to 300x300, while my main library is mostly 800x800. I avoid art that is not in JPEG format, and I only embed the art, I don't use additional files (like cover.jpg, folder.jpg, etc), The Onkyo player does hand non-standard characters pretty well, including simple and complex Chinese characters and Japanese (based on my collection of around 100 CDs from that part of the world that I have ripped and tagged). I hadn't thought of file / path length, but that can be an issue in some systems. It's worth checking by renaming long file names and / or folder names, especially if the folders are nested a few levels deep.

Not directly related, but I saw that the people that produce dBpoweramp are trialling a new program called TuneFUSION. It is specifically intended to allow a single generic library to be synchronised to other devices and storage media with different audio encodes, different art sizes, etc. while avoiding the need to maintain a second copy of the library for devices that have those kinds of needs. I haven't played with it in anger yet, but if it's as good as their other tools, it will be a great help. Details here https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?39617-TuneFUSION-Release-1-Beta-Windows

 

[jwbrent]

Wow, the price of the DP-S1 is coming down a lot, now $293 on US Amazon, from a Japanese merchant: https://www.amazon.com/DP-S1-【Ultrahigh-resolution-Player】【Japan-products】/dp/B06XGWGLDK/ref=pd_lutyp_simh_5_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B06XGWGLDK&pd_rd_r=NJBG6TNHH1MJTGS7P3AR&pd_rd_w=m18ib&pd_rd_wg=Qy21y&psc=1&refRID=NJBG6TNHH1MJTGS7P3AR

good as gold for that price!

Not sure why the price has come down since the dollar has weakened against the yen. Anyway, this has to be the best DAP one can buy for $300!

 

[toanaldino]

could you use this as a USB DAC?

 

[FortisFlyer75]

sorry, mis read post, retracted! eyesight not what it used to be!

 

[FortisFlyer75]

could you use this as a USB DAC?

If you mean use it as a stand alone dac then no afraid not.

 

[toanaldino]

If you mean use it as a stand alone dac then no afraid not.

That's a shame, my DP-S1 arrived two days ago from Japan and I was looking for the stand alone dac function. oh well, it's a great little unit.

 

[FortisFlyer75]

That's a shame, my DP-S1 arrived two days ago from Japan and I was looking for the stand alone dac function. oh well, it's a great little unit.

It can be convenient sometimes with a dap to have that feature but you probably would be better off with a dedicated standalone dac like a mojo for example if funds permit that is.

From my experience of the dp-s1 not having a USB dac would not be a deal breaker. I know the USB line out is coming back with an update before end of year off you wanted to use it as a Transport only.

 

[MentTheNewbie]

Hi guys, I would like to ask does rubato can drive sennheiser ie80 nicely? Recently just bought an ie80 (haven’t arrive). If not powerful enough, should I get a aune b1 or cayin c5?

 

[Fra D]

Hi guys, I would like to ask does rubato can drive sennheiser ie80 nicely? Recently just bought an ie80 (haven’t arrive). If not powerful enough, should I get a aune b1 or cayin c5?

At 16Ω impedance, sure.

Onkyo, please add
ogg vorbis support,
don't turn on display when ff/rew with hardware switches
bass boost settings without switching to custom sound, to use it without setting eq
a way to install other region apps instead of the Japanese ones

Is there a setting I missed to get to last played song after power up, have not found out how to.....

 

[Technocrafts]

Hi guys, I would like to ask does rubato can drive sennheiser ie80 nicely? Recently just bought an ie80 (haven’t arrive). If not powerful enough, should I get a aune b1 or cayin c5?

That's what I'm using with mine, but with a balanced cable upgrade. The ie80 is a good match for the Rubato!

 

[BadBanana]

Is there a setting I missed to get to last played song after power up, have not found out how to.....

This feature came with the last firmware update... Playback resumes from the start of the last played track. After start up, access the play screen with the music icon at bottom right of the screen.
See here for details...http://www.eu.onkyo.com/en/articles/firmware-update-dp-s1-12-09-2017-140690.html

 

[Mython]

Has anyone found out what the output impedance of this DAP is?

I'm guessing (and it's nothing more than a guess) it may be in the region of 2 Ω (single-ended), but I'd like to know for certain.

Cheers