Fuck computer audio

HiFi
41

Naturally being an audiophile I fancied trying out Tidal masters. There is actually some sense in this for me - since I’m doing a fair bit of DSP, it makes sense to have source material of higher resolution than you can hear. It’s the same reason as it making sense to master at higher resolution.

To get bit perfect you need to bypass the windows sound mixer. Tidal has this built in - you just give it exclusive use of the sound card, and it’s not perfect.

Turns out JRiver has an interesting bug when you’re using its built-in sound card driver - give Tidal exclusive use, and you get a blue screen of death. Impressive. There are several threads about this on the JRiver forum, with no sign of a fix coming.

Several hours of fucking about later, and I have a work round that involves two extra pieces of software to route audio around, because Tidal can’t output to one and JRiver can’t input from the other. It’s actually OK in use, but WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO PLAY SOME FUCKING MUSIC?

42
7 Likes
43

Buy a cheap streamer.

44

My manky old squeezebox still does a decent job,although i’m guessing it’s very outdated.

45

Has never been bettered for usability, simplicity and decent SQ, imo. Outstanding kit.

46

I still have Squeezeboxen. Four in the house still working, and I love them to bits.

Don’t work with digital active though. Or Tidal masters.

47

I keep telling you JRiver is unstable garbage, but yuo won’t listen.

3 Likes
48

I fucking hate jriver with a vengeance, I got banned from their forum when I kept complaining about the bugs in the Mac version.

Jriver’s response was buy the next version as it may work in that and then the next version etc fucking etc.

Cunts.

2 Likes
49

I listen, for sure, and I’m not unaware of its faults, but there aren’t many systems that allow you to do what I’m doing. That said, I might spend a bit of time getting Reaper going - that can also host DSP nicely.

While the Najda solution you have is nice and easy, it’s limited in that it won’t do convolution (in a useful way at least). Linear phase will soon* be mine!

Note: *word may not be correct

50

What do you mean it won’t do convolution? It supports both IIR and FIR filters.

51

Not enough taps. It’s a fucking useless plumber :blush:

52

For what you want (JBLs) it’s perfectly adequate.

But hey, keep doing it the hard way and then moaning.

4 Likes
53

For all I complain about computer audio, sometimes it works really well.

This morning I decided to change the crossover system from the one built into JRiver to a linear phase one. Because of audiophile reasons I decided that this should run with 32k taps and at 192kHz.

Plug some shit into rePhase, save files. Create new config file for JRiver. Doesn’t work. Bollocks. Right, calm, inner Zen, reboot whole getting caffeine. Come back, works fine.

So now I have a linear phase crossover, 8th order Linkwitz-Riley (because that’s the default option in rePhase!) and with a phase adjustment to unroll the phase change from the reflex port on my JBLs. Sweet!

54

How steep is 8th order?

55

48dB per octave. Steep.

56

That is steep. Is that for all drivers?

57

At the moment it is. rePhase has loads of options - many different shapes, brick wall, together with different options for optimising them. Now that I know it’s working I’ll start to experiment, but it will be slow going. Already it sounds great though.

58

So is rePhase a plugin to JRiver or an app on it’s own?

59

It’s a program for calculating FIR filters, which can be used for crossovers, phase correction, speaker correction, room correction. All it does is create the required file, which then needs to be hosted in a playback system. JRiver is the one that I use, but there are many more.

60

Is there a price to be paid for such steep filtering e.g. that notes from a single instrument switch sharply between one driver and another as their pitch varies ?

VB