Being busy with the best audio playback always, there came a time when I thought playback with the PC as "transport" means should just be able to beat all.
After some years of thinking about it, February 2005 I bought a (Momitsu) networked player, showing me that indeed better playback quality could be achieved by avoiding the "improper" reading of the CDs as, how I expected that as a reason for improper playback. However, such a networked player, in fact playing from the harddisk somewhere in the network, is very awkward to manipulate when it comes to track selection and all.
Anyway, the sound coming from it, connected to my dedicated audio DAC was better, stronger, more "steady", than what came from my TEAC P1 drive connected to the same (Audio Note) DAC.
July 2005 I bought an external soundcard (Fireface 800) allowing me the passthrough of S/PDIF -with decent reclocking by the soundcard- to the audio DAC. From there on began my struggle for audio playback which could match the quality I was used to, even from the old TEAC situation.
I started with XMPlay, then found Foobar, explicitly searched for all of the others, and none could bring me consistent playback to start with. The quality somehow varied per (ripped) CD and per day, and worse of all, all the players sounded differently.
My support activities over at TheaterTek.com allowed me to meet my now good friend Carlos Rodriguez, who just asked me to perform some tests on the Fireface. This was March 2006.
Carlos is able to instantly hear / judge jitter, and via hundreds of emails I started to learn what he actually hears. A dangerous job by itself, because Carlos justy can't stand jitter, hence gets crazy of some types of it.
It was August 2006 that I (or we) decided that all the existing players just "did" something to the music unknown, and there was one solution to that only : create a player myself. And since I'm into programming, say, all of my life, I did ...
I put myself to the task of creating audio playback software, that would pass on the audio data to the DAC as much 1:1 as possible, *never* touching DSP (digital sound processing) stuff.
Knowing that this would be the way already before, some earlier I bought a non-oversampling DAC, with the theory of that too passing the data far more 1:1 as the more "normal" oversampling DAC (like the Audio Note I had). For the insiders : the oversampling DAC makes a sinus of a square wave (the more oversapling, the more real sinus it gets), while the nos-DAC doesn't change anything to that. My thinking was : never mind the lacking filters, I just jump in because it must be better from the 1:1 theory.
By some coincidence, the nos-DAC I searched the internet for for quite some days, was found to be collected only 20 Km from where I live. It must have been the summer of 2006 where I met my now another good friend Bert Doppenberg, who not only sells that nos-DAC (the TwinDAC+), but who also appeared to be a builder of very fine horn loudspeakers. The greatest coincidence, however, was that he promoted PC playback instead of the boxed CD players, and so far he was the only one I found explicitly promoting that, from an audiophile point of view. Apart from myself, that is.
Of course, many people use the PC for audio playback, but note that here we are talking about "spoiling" all of your finest equipment to a PC playback means ...
For those of you readers who are not experienced to the XXHighend Audio Player ... together with the jitter knowledge or Carlos and the -if I may say- ultra high quality of the horn loudspeakers of Bert ... this is where it all came together;
The speakers of Bert could very well unveil the quality of XXHighEnd as how it was from off Augus 2006. From that point on, if somethings sounds wrongish, we say "it sounds like Foobar" (which is not meant explicitly negative, but for us indicates the type of sound which comes from there, and in fact comes from all the software players although no one is equal).
It all, by means of Berts ears for a great deal, allowed me to improve the quality. From that came, that Bert could better hear how his speakers could be improved, and from that came that we both could hear better that XXHighEnd should be improved. And up till today, this goes on and on ...
A few months back we all started to be in lack of "amplifier quality", with the sidenote of now being able to explicitly judge that it was amps doing it to us. So both Bert and me started to look for the holy grail in the amp world.
Well, to make a very long story short, that ended up by Bert creating himseld his BDCrazyA amp, and I state that the mixture of XXHighend, TwinDAC+ and Orphean/BD15 speakers produce the best music playback of the planet. And I mean, by far.
From off the August 2006 XXHighEnd version it was already the best, and so many times it - and other things were improved hugely. You just cannot imagine what happened. And what it will do to the audio playback world ...
Note that an even *far more* better version exists, not open to the public. I only want to say, we're not done yet.
Lastly in this topic, let me try to express a very - very important phenomenon I discovered along the way;
We all now about room anomalies, or better : how the room can negatively influence good audio playback. This is about reflections and standing waves.
Believe it or not (but better do
) but if the playback is good to my standards, they do not bother you anymore. Not in the slightest means.
I could say "standing waves are not there anymore", but this is not true because they can still be measured.
While you could think "that is nice", there's something far more important coming from it : this has become a measuring device ! I mean, once you encounter standing waves, something MUST be wrong somewhere. Go and find it, and keep on looking until they are gone.
Now, assuming that your equipment is rather okay (which includes proper impedenance matching as one of the most improtant factors to let things go wrong in this area), try XXHighEnd and compare it to whatever other player and watch this phenomenon ...
Hope you enjoy it !
Peter
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edit : removed a dead link)
