[Bellyworshipper]

Internal amplifier is a little bit too warm for my liking

I guess it's the tuning as W1 has an enormous output power according to the specs

 

[Whitigir]

I haven't compared it to anything yet but the line out to Romi BX2+ is has a very striking desktop level sound. Internal amplifier is a little bit too warm for my liking (maybe more suitable for treble sensitive people out there) but from line out it sounds amazing. Very very good DAC section.

And that is why you would want to modify the internal amplifier !!! Keep us updated

 

[DarginMahkum]

Kodi

 

[Bellyworshipper]

@DarginMahkum , have you managed to play DSD in the native mode (with "D" letter displayed near the digital filter number on the W1 small upper screen) in Linux, by the way?

 

[eskamobob1]

Oh, gosh! It still wasn't picked up! Delivery is set for Thursday...

Glad im not the only one havin issues with this. Did you order from hifigo? My shipment has been sitting in HK for 10 days now...

 

[DarginMahkum]

@DarginMahkum , have you managed to play DSD in the native mode (with "D" letter displayed near the digital filter number on the W1 small upper screen) in Linux, by the way?

No, not yet. I hope to try these on the weekend.

Glad im not the only one havin issues with this. Did you order from hifigo? My shipment has been sitting in HK for 10 days now...

Yes, I bought from Hifigo. I guess due to Chinese new year UPS, TNT etc. are all bit overload at the moment. Mine started moving about 7 days later. But this week, as I understand, many already have vacations. I hope it gets resolved soon. You can try contacting the Hifigo support over Facebook. They might give you a better idea.

 

[DarginMahkum]

@DarginMahkum , have you managed to play DSD in the native mode (with "D" letter displayed near the digital filter number on the W1 small upper screen) in Linux, by the way?

I normally use HQPlayer on Linux, but I just tried the DeadBeeF and apparently it does PCM conversion. I will try the HQPlayer - of course no oversampling ButI still need a good music player with a good DAP skin. If I can configure that, it is a killer. Works much better under Linux than Windows.

Suspend / wakeup and display backlight seems to be properly controlled.

 

[Whitigir]

I normally use HQPlayer on Linux, but I just tried the DeadBeeF and apparently it does PCM conversion. I will try the HQPlayer - of course no oversampling ButI still need a good music player with a good DAP skin. If I can configure that, it is a killer. Works much better under Linux than Windows.

Suspend / wakeup and display backlight seems to be properly controlled.

Very nice! Linux is awesome OS. The player should run much cooler and more responsive

 

[DarginMahkum]

Playing DSD native via HQPlayer...

 

[andersos]

Is it possible to install Linux beside Windows on the internal storage to do dual boot? How large is the storage?

 

[DarginMahkum]

Is it possible to install Linux beside Windows on the internal storage to do dual boot? How large is the storage?

I would expect that it should work but until now I installed in a microSD card - it was just easier for me to install it on a microSD card on PC as VM, do the configuration and then put it on W1. It has 128 GB internal storage. I need to check what type it is.

 

[andersos]

I would expect that it should work but until now I installed in a microSD card - it was just easier for me to install it on a microSD card on PC as VM, do the configuration and then put it on W1. It has 128 GB internal storage. I need to check what type it is.

It's probably eMMC storage.

 

[Bellyworshipper]

Playing DSD native via HQPlayer...

Superb! Thanks for the info on a DSD-capable software player for Linux Will try it on my old Linux system. It has quite a list of custom Linux kernel packages for enabling native DSD support though.
@DarginMahkum, do I need to install these ones beside the player itself?
libgmpris-dbg_2.2.1-8_amd64.deb 13-Oct-2020 02:35 115308
linux-headers-5.4.91-jl+_5.4.91-jl+-6_amd64.deb 20-Jan-2021 03:53 11547968
linux-image-5.4.91-jl+_5.4.91-jl+-6_amd64.deb 20-Jan-2021 03:54 58072944
src/ 24-Jan-2021 20:50 -
And most importantly, how does DSD sound on W1? Any comparison with DSD playback on Windows?

 

[Bellyworshipper]

Just a quick comparison of HQPlayer and Album player resource consumption on Win10, Intel i5-3570k, 16 Gb RAM (DSD 128, .dsf) via the M400Plus DACamp (it has the same SA9227 USB chip as W1 and A2 DAPs).
Plays via Album player (ASIO), HQPlayer is idle:

Plays via HQPlayer (WASAPI/ASIO is not that stable, but CPU power and RAM consumption is the same), Album player is idle:

And now, for comparison's sake a 24 bit 48 kHz PCM FLAC played via HQPlayer (WASAPI), Album player is idle:

HQPlayer turns out to be quite CPU power and RAM consuming, especially for native DSD playback. I'd go for something like Album Player or Foobar2000 on Windows-based system, but for Linux there seems to be very few alternatives (Roon with all its painstaking installation and configuration and maybe something else) for native DSD playback.

 

[DarginMahkum]

Superb! Thanks for the info on a DSD-capable software player for Linux Will try it on my old Linux system. It has quite a list of custom Linux kernel packages for enabling native DSD support though.
@DarginMahkum, do I need to install these ones beside the player itself?
libgmpris-dbg_2.2.1-8_amd64.deb 13-Oct-2020 02:35 115308
linux-headers-5.4.91-jl+_5.4.91-jl+-6_amd64.deb 20-Jan-2021 03:53 11547968
linux-image-5.4.91-jl+_5.4.91-jl+-6_amd64.deb 20-Jan-2021 03:54 58072944
src/ 24-Jan-2021 20:50 -
And most importantly, how does DSD sound on W1? Any comparison with DSD playback on Windows?

Unfortunately HQPlayer is a very expensive option to play DSD only. I mainly use it for desktop oversampling to DSD. But it was just as a proof of concept on W1. Other DSD capable player is the JRiver player, which is again commercial and heavy.

I installed yesterday wine to run Windows software on W1 and I can run Windows foobar2000 on Linux but didn't try DSD playing yet. As I understand there might be a way to play using wine-foobar2000...but still the question is for me why isn't there an open source option. Maybe in the end I need to focus on that, writing myself one.

I tried the skin options of foobar2000 via Wine (for a better DAP look) but as I understand they use some components of the Windows system which are not available via wine.

Memory is not an issue. I can barely fill up even 1GB while running HQPlayer on W1.

So far the best DAP experience was gnome desktop, which did auto rotation and on screen keyboard automatically. Also the touchscreen needs to be autorotated, which is not happening with others. I don't now the details of how they are functioning so cannot say much at this stage.

This weekend I will try the other Kernel options like low latency and real-time kernels. Gnome is good but there are things I need to figure out still. I guess it will take some time until i can get a good DAP experience.