REVO, Upsampling, HDCDs and Software

[Cyberius]

Ok, so there's lots of buzz about the Revo, and lots about upsampling players, and about HDCD. So here's where I start getting curious....

The revo (and other higher-end cards) can do 24-bit/192kHz.
A Redbook CD is 16/44.1

I can think of 3 techniques that could work here...

A. The cards drivers would upsample the audio datastream in realtime.

B. An alternate player program would rip from CD, upsample, and send the upsampled stream to the revo in realtime.

C. You rip the Wav's to your harddisk, run it through some sort of non-realtime upsampling conversion program and generate a upsampled wav for later playback.

Depending on the complexity of upsampling algorithms, I would suspect choice C would give the best results as you could take as much time as needed to do the math, as opposed to an algorithm that is speed compromised. This should be able to smoke any DAC'$ math yes? If the math is really easy, then it probably doesn't matter anyway.

Would there be value in this? If so then the question becomes, where do we get the software to do it?

Oh, and I've read that HDCDs are ripable by EAC, so there should be a way to get HDCD playback with a regular CDRom drive and a higher bit resolution card yes?

 

[lan]

This has been possible with Winamp 2 + CDReader Plugin + SSRC output plugins for sometime now. The developer of those plugins has stopped working with Winamp and is making his own audio player, foobar2000. You have 3 options:

1) Winamp 2 + ASIO output (this supports 192khz but that will need WinXP SP1 and ASIO capable card. it also has highest quality realtime SSRC conversion)
http://www.aikis.or.jp/~otachan/out_asio.html


2) Winamp 2 + SSRC (directsound or waveout/mme)

3) Foobar2000, http://foobar2000.hydrogenaudio.org

high res HDCD playback is only possible with Windows Media Player 9.

 

[Cyberius]

Cool! Thanks.

I downloaded foobar. I can't hear any improvemnet with it, but that's on an Audigy1 with old drivers so I didn't expect anything yet, and wow can it hog some CPU on my P3-450.

Didn't wan't to put forth the effort to updated the drivers if I'm gonna rip it out and stick a revo in there anyway.

 

[Cyberius]

Ok, I did a bunch of research, and here's what I've currently set up. Probably not the ultimate, but better than what I was doing.

0. Got the latest audigy 2 drivers, patched them to work with my Audigy 1. Makes a big difference, but still not as good as my CDP. I'm due for a new card (actually whole PC) soon.

1. Got Winamp 2.x (3x doesn't support all the needed plugins). Yea, winamp sux, but it will become just a UI as I replace all the engines w/ plugins.
http://classic.winamp.com/

2. For MP3, got the MAD MP3 Decoder, use it instead of winamps builtin decoder. Supposedly about the best decoder going. Does 32bit floating point, upsampling, dithering, all that jazz. You can set the bit depth, cpu priorities etc. THIS IS THE MAIN TWEAK for MP3 purposes. I noticed the difference.
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin

3. Got the CDDA plugin. This does EAC style error-correctiing ripping on audio CD in realtime, instead of the generic cdda routines that don't do error correction. This is for audioCD playback, not mp3. Kinda like those $$$meridian players. I haven't test this yet.
http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/CDDApluginWinAmp/

4. Got the ASIO output plugin for winamp. This allows winamp to talk (nearly) direct to the soundcard, instead of going through windows Kmixer to avoid OS level resampling (and potentially downsampling). You can also play with the resampling of the audio stream. The creative cards do 48kbit internally. Many people say you take a quality hit doing the resampling in the hardware, and it's better to pre-resample it before the card in software using a better algorithm than what the hardware will do.
Others say this is a waste as it resamples 48 to 48 and you take an extra hit. I'm not going to get too obsesed with figuring this out and listening test and all that cuz audigy will probably go bye-bye shortly.
http://www.aikis.or.jp/~otachan/

 

[dd3mon]

That's almost the same exact setup I used with my Audigy (tweaked out w/ audigy 2 drivers, etc) - now that I have my REVO I prefer totally non-resampled (44.1khz) kernel streaming from FooBar2k to any software upsampling I've heard thus far.

-dd3mon

 

[Multi]

dd3mon, kernel streaming for me doesn't work when I try to output it at 24bit. Do you have the same problem?

 

[XzeroR3]

My aureal card cannot play kernel streaming at 24bit.

but at 16bit it works.

wow, this foobar prog is amazing. It's everything I've ever wanted in an mp3 player.

after 10 mins dang, megawow, i like the resampling dsp plugin with kernel streaming. the resampling helps individual instruments standout and sound better. wow my mp3s sound awesome now.