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Post by pinkie on Dec 31, 2014 19:49:27 GMT
Omg Omg - total success. Playing new wav rip of kerry Ellis & Brian may cd through dacapo controlled by lms from my android phone. Awesome quality. This is the way to go!
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Post by pinkie on Dec 31, 2014 19:30:46 GMT
OK folks, I am listening to Adele via wifi to the Pi controlled by LMS (Logitech Media Server). Fairly straightforward, once you realise the wifi has a different Ip address for the player from the ethernet. The player is given a name in the configuration, and it may be that if you just refresh that in LMS it finds the device. However if you want to use the PiCoreplayer software to further configure, you have to use the correct ip address. I need to evict a teenager to test the Digi+ board , but its selected from a dropdown menu, and the PiCoreplayer has been bomb-proof so far, so I have high hopes. Now - LMS experts Can I expect to synchronise 2 squeezeboxes (RPis) to play the same music simultaneously in 2 rooms? What file handling abilities does LMS have? Will it transcode Hi-res files for me? Will it deal with synching my library to a mobile device? If not, what do I use? Should I rip to WAV with Windows Media Player, or FLAC with something else? What? Oh - such fun!!
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Post by pinkie on Dec 31, 2014 19:22:25 GMT
Has anyone here tried loading the RPi with piCorePlayer? I like the way that LMS organises my digital library (I still think it's the best way), and that a piCorePlayer device can be controlled from LMS, at least according to what I read on the HiFiBerry web site. As a long term Squeezebox user it looks to be the way for me to go Ok. THought it was time I pioneered and blazed a trail. Sorry to hear about your car. A lot of my time has been taken up by my sons. He is just 20 (last week) and has a job in recruitment and bought himself a BMW320d - with a loan. The turbo went, and the short version is 1 garage charged him £1700 to fit a new one and give him his engine back in bits. He had the car taken to an engine rebuilder, who, after 5 weeks, and telling him he needed new con rods, and all new injectors, I found out from my daughter what was going on and went with him to collect it. £2600 for the engine rebuild - we arrived at 6PM - to find... the turbocharger wasn't working correctly. The new unit fitted by the first garage had almost certainly been damaged fitting it to a damaged engine. 2 days before Christmas - 6'5" of 20 year old with very wet eyes. I decided he had had quite enough of a kick in the teeth, paid for a new turbocharger to be fitted next day, and have taken on responsibility for recovering the money from the culpable garage -who saw the light when I got a solicitor friend to help me draft a communication. Back on topic - I have downloaded and installed piCorePlayer and have it running with Logitech Media Server (LMS) as a "squeezebox". This was a bit of a learning curve. It is pretty simple if you follow the website instructions, which greatly simplify things like overclocking experiments, since they are available from a menu based GUI. Where I hit a wall was failing to get the wireless to work. This too is configured from a simple GUI - but when I unplugged the network cable, I lost control. The reason, I have just worked out, is that there is no DNS. So 192.168.1.96 is the IP address for the Pi on the ethernet connection, but 192.168.1.87 is the Wifi address!! We live and learn. Currently just running it from the Pi soundcard , but once I kick the teenager out of the living room, I will try the Digi+ and the Dac Then I have to learn how to use LMS. And choose an android app. But solid progress
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Post by pinkie on Dec 31, 2014 17:06:43 GMT
Exciting news (for me). Not remotely relevant, but its my blog, and I wanted to be excited somewhere. Owen has finally got hold of a Benchmark power amp for me to try (long term loan hopefully) and signed off Pip 2 as fully healed and fit for active service. It it wasn't for bloody tax returns...
(I'll get back to Pi stuff shortly)
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Post by pinkie on Dec 31, 2014 17:02:19 GMT
That's the vid that got my "left brain / right brain" thread locked elsewhere .
People get very defensive about the idea that they don't just hear with their ears. The really big effect I notice is closing my eyes to shut off the visual input to the listening process. In part, maybe this just helps relaxation. But the major factor I consistently note is that the sound expands in space when I close my eyes. With my eyes shut, the sound (from my system at its best) comes from beyond the physical dimensions of the room. I "hear" the music coming from a place that must be next doors living room (to the left) or the dogs room (behind).
With my eyes open - the sound is confined to the gap between the speakers, or at best the room itself. It may appear to be "big" or "small" - and instruments may be crowded and blurred, or distinct and placed, but they are always constrained by the physical boundaries of the room that I can see. Shut my eyes - and the sound comes from a wider source. The room gets bigger!
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Post by pinkie on Dec 31, 2014 16:55:32 GMT
So frustrating. I keep trying to get time to play, and being thwarted by "stuff". I fancied trying the Logitech version. My Dac is here now - waiting to be set up. In "casual" use so far I have noted no issues - certainly no pops or clicks, and very satisfying sound quality with lossless files.
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Post by pinkie on Dec 29, 2014 8:32:48 GMT
I was adamant that I heard differences in mains leads when I bought expensive ones As was I when I upgraded my mains cables to cheaper ones.
Anyone can overcome expectation bias if they just be honest with themselves.
The point is you had an expectation that the leads would make a difference. That's not overcoming expectation bias. My expectation is that they don't. That gives us different maps. And we can both be happy with our results. But to overcome expectation bias, you need to be able to compare the "bargain, nugget, all my skill and experience to discover" lead with an ordinary kettle lead - without knowing which you are listening to. If you know what you are listening to, then your expectations will be part of the experience. It's only really relevant if you work in the industry, and want to be sure your latest innovation is real and not wishful thinking. As a consumer -listen and enjoy however you like. The more I look at forums, the more evident it is that a very substantial part of the pleasure is "doing something". Having the all time final solution perfect way to listen to music would be a disaster for most HiFi enthusiasts.
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Post by pinkie on Dec 28, 2014 15:29:55 GMT
Picking up where I left off on the "ground vibrations" thread, the big difficulty we face in evaluating whether something "non-mainstream" like mains quality or cones under amplifiers has an effect or not, is that the basis for the claims are almost invariably purely subjective. And not universally replicable. If I change a goldring 1032 for a Dynavector XX2II - I would expect 100% of HiFi buffs in the room to hear the difference and agree which was which (not necessarily which they preferred). But change the mains lead to the power amp? Advocates of these "unmeasurable" hifi treatments often maintain that listening is the only approach - that's what the music is all about. "The ears are the final arbiter" is a familiar mantra of another forum leader. The irony is, based on what this thread has helped to explain, while the ear may be a fine measuring instrument, and the instrument of choice, it is not used by those making statements like "the ear is the final arbiter" Instead of measuring with the ear - they listen. And listening is a function of the brain, which makes use of stimuli from the ear drum, but also from the eyes, and also those "map factors". Including mood, ambient temperature, fatigue level, but also critically expectation and preconception. Blind testing - which as a manufacturer we used at Pink Triangle, was an attempt to, as far as possible, remove the other stimuli and factors influencing "listening" and make it just a measurement using the ear as a detector. As a punter, just enjoying my music, this doesn't matter. If cones "sound" good to me, it makes no difference whether that is due to the cones changing the sound waves that strike my eardrum, or just belief in the cones making me feel good about what I hear. All that matters is that I enjoy listening more - not which stimulus caused that. But that is not capable of being universally shared. Something that changes the sound vibrations made, should be able to have a reasonably universal applicability. Something that depends on aspects of our map that are internal rather than external, cannot be shared (necessarily) in the same way. People get very defensive about this. To suggest that your listening experience depends on your mind and not purely your ears is pejorative to many. But am I the only one on this forum to hear music in their sleep. Real , vivid music. Some of my guitar solos are just awesome, but I hear orchestral music and the singing of others at times. This is completely real - an identical experience to the waking one stimulated by actual sound pressure stimulation of my ear drum - but entirely internally generated. Our reality is what we perceive it to be, and we do our perceiving with that fabulous instrument - the brain. Hell, I have dreamed I am stumbling, and lashed out physically whilst asleep to regain my balance. The experience is real - because , although physical stimuli feed the brain in processing its experience of the world, ultimately that experience is only realised inside our brains - inside our consciousness. So evaluations of anything unmeasurable, that depend on "when I listen to it for long enough, I am sure of it" are real listening experiences, but not necessarily real changes to the sound waves striking our eardrums. Establishing that, requires drastic steps to disable some of the automatic powerful processing functions of the brain. As a minimum it is necessary to remove visual cues, and "knowledge" cues. I have had a couple of goes at doing this, but of course, if I fail then it is attributed to my lack of acuity, not evidence that the effect is not a real sonic one. Manufacturers are uninterested in this sort of test all the time there is a lucrative market which maintains the orthodoxy that the "magic bullet" is for real. So those that like it continue to enjoy it, and those of us that fail to get the benefit, console ourselves that if it is due to our lack of perception, at least our wallets are heavier for it But accept that if the effects others hear are internally generated then lightening our wallets is never going to enable us to share them.
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Post by pinkie on Dec 28, 2014 14:23:13 GMT
You need to live in rural France!! Mains quality is terrific, no fuses in the plugs, no traffic to speak of apart from the tractors. With their big squishy tyres, they hardly cause any ground vibration at all. 1 metre thick walls resist the air born stuff nicely. We have a great environment for just listening to the music. You're having a bubble aren't you. When I sat in your living room there was a fairly constant traffic noise from a road which is about 10 feet from the speakers. And mains is mains...
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Post by pinkie on Dec 28, 2014 14:20:56 GMT
By the sound of it you don't live on a busy road. For those of us who do ground vibration is a consideration. Large volumes of cars aren't too much of an issue, but you get something big, such as a bus or HGV (it's mainly HGVs round here) then you get a combination of both ground vibration and low frequency sound vibration (them big diesel engines make a lot of low frequency sounds when they're idling). You're right. I don't live on a busy road. In the house the main noise nuisance is the rattle of the flu liner in the wind. Otherwise its the sound of birds or sometimes people on the local football pitch or cricket pitch. But the point is, if I did live on a noisy road - the "spoiling" would be the noise - not the ground vibration (necessarily). Your appreciation of music depends on the background of silence. If lorries are rumbling past they affect your enjoyment of the music, by feeding noises to your eardrum, not vibrations to your power amp. Clearly we need to distinguish transducers (record player and speakers) from other kit. If I put the speakers against a wall, or in the corner, or on cones, that affects how they sound. If I do those three things with an amplifier, in my experience, that does not affect the sound. And the main vibration source for most peoples amplifiers will be from their HiFi!!!! And that will be airborne not ground based (we're back to the discussion about turntables with suspensions and lids) The issue, I alluded to, is that when we hear, we don't do that exclusively (possibly even primarily) with our ears. The experience is supplied by our brains, and the brain processing draws on a number of factors - sensory input from the ears, but also the eyes, knowledge, expectations, mood, and "our map". Accordingly I won't labour the point here but pick it up on the NLP thread.
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Post by pinkie on Dec 28, 2014 9:21:41 GMT
I mentioned before to Martin that I struggle with participating in forums, because earnest nice people get foo fixated and it leaves me cold. So I avoided this thread especially when I saw the lecture was 25 minutes. I weakened and took a peak while waiting for sue to shower. I got maybe 2 minutes in, by which time the guy had already made the obvious point made by me and many others. Better listening at night is due to reduced background noise, that compression of airwaves which hits your ear drums and directly affects what you hear. Not mains quality. Not vibration in equipment. You can test mains and you can test adding vibration to equipment. Unless you have poor equipment which is badly microphonic then vibration will have no effect. And if it is microphonic, the clue here guys is in the name, it will be affected by airborne not ground vibration. I have, for cosmetic and convenience reasons changed my equipment shelving 3 times recently. Zero affect.
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Post by pinkie on Dec 27, 2014 11:57:16 GMT
What does JRiver do that Windows Media Player (or the equivalent free alternative) doesn't? I'm not sure - it maybe I just don't know how to use them, but 1) JRiver can be controlled on the PC by an android app 2) JRiver can in turn control Volumio on the Pi "transparently" via the DLNA renderer/ server / controller function 3) JRiver will play the 192K files downloaded from Linn. It just plays them. I click on the pretty picture of the band and it plays as if it was a 48K CD track on my DAC which is only capable of handling 48 K (actually, I think 96K, but not 192) 4) JRiver will then synch that same file as an MP3 to my Android phone to use in the car without creating a duplicate on the disk to take up more space, and leave 2 files for a music track instead of one Can I do all of that with Windows Media? What JRiver can't do (I am unable to follow a couple of tutorials to make it do) is just have working internet radio stations there to select. I find the volumio app sound@home better for that (although I haven't tried to add a radio station). However, volumio lists Hi-res radio stations, and when I select them just goes silent. By contrast, I assume J River would "down-scale" the stream to play through DaCapo. Volumio on its own, if I select a hi-res track from the NAS, just goes silent. I'll keep learning...
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Post by pinkie on Dec 27, 2014 11:48:06 GMT
I hope this doesn't amount to drift or hijacking, but I think its related to a thread I started on AOS (and which, like so many of mine, got locked). It was to do with right brain and left brain and their influence on our appreciation of music and our auditioning experiences. Briefly, our 2 brain halves are specialised and function VERY differently. This has been discovered / established as a result of work on people with brain injuries, and other tests. The left brain, which receives input from the right eye and ear, is usually dominant and is the rational, numerical, logical, conscious verbal reasoning brain. The right brain, is the sub-conscious, creative, relational, instinctive, perceptive, automatic brain. We automatically use both, but most, like me, find it hard to "deliberately" use the right brain. I taught myself to do so using a book called "drawing on the right side of the brain" by Betty Edwards. I had to train my left brain to "hush" so I could use my right brain to draw (which, compared with my left brain, it is very good at). By contrast, my wife is plainly a right brain dominant individual. She can draw and paint "naturally" but gets into a panic state if asked to deal with numbers, and, even accepting that "feminine logic" is an oxymoron anyway, she is far more creative and expressive than rational. Couldn't reason her way out of a paper bag. I am pretty sure this is why she is "quicker" to pick differences on audition in some situations than I am. We both have a reasonably common experience, just listening and appreciating - our "maps" are very similar - and very tilted towards our experiences of live acoustic rather than electric music. But she can immediately listen with her right brain, whereas when I am "evaluating" I am always going to have a very strong left brain getting in the way. I hear it in the end - but things that take me half an hour, or half a days auditioning to pick, she can pick, I kid you not, in 20 seconds. I noticed at my time at Pink Triangle, where we had to audition "professionally" to be sure differences were real, where there would be peer pressure to notice the difference, and a lot succumbed, and frankly you could tell them what to hear. I think this offers a "rational" explanation for things like cable burn-in which people experience. I note, as others have, that it's always burn-in, never burn-out. I think these are left-brainers (most of us) and the "new" equipment is being auditioned with the left brain which just doesnt enjoy or experience music in the way the right brain does. After a while, folk return to just listening to the music (right brain) and prefer that experience, and the component has "burned in" Note - neither the issue of our own map, nor right brain / left brain, make "A:B" comparisons impossible. Just harder. So I got Sue to evaluate the effect of home plugs feeding mains into the system blind. But you need an accomplice. All Sue knew was she was evaluating. She didn't know what she was evaluating, or even when she was expected to hear a difference. Her "hifi auditioners map" was by-passed (with Sue, it pretty much is anyway - she has no such "map"). If I had any doubts, I will do the experiment I plan to do once I connect her PC to the network direct with Cat5, rather than via homeplugs. I will roll a dice to pick 30 days worth of even numbers = plug in homeplug, odd numbers = unplug homeplugs, and we will just listen to music as normal. If it makes a difference, Sue will comment . Come day 15, if no results, I will fish for comments still without telling her what I am doing. Anyone who wants to convince me that a mains lead makes a difference, would need to arrange a similar test, where they can know they are auditioning, but nothing else. The accomplice (that'll be the missus) needs to randomly use an ordinary lead and a "super lead" according to a daily pattern set by dice throws, and the evaluator needs to comment on the "perception" of the music every day - no peeking. That takes knowledge of the component being evaluated out of the map, and leaves only sensory (and other experiential factors) in the map. Note - all of us routinely learn using each specialised half for their own purposes. I have just been trying to learn the intro to Silent Night on the guitar. It's not technically difficult at all -and perhaps because of that I struggled. My rational, impatient left brain says "this is easy and familiar" and tries to play it at performance speed, repeating mistakes and training to play it wrong. When I slow it right down to 2 seconds per beat, and play it correctly 5 times in a row, my right brain says "got it" and just plays it while I talk to Sue and formulate this post. I don't hear my right brain say "got it" - its the non-verbal half. I just suddenly realise I am playing it and it is childishly simple and impossible to play wrong - until I start thinking about it again! Enough - post too long already
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Post by pinkie on Dec 27, 2014 7:43:45 GMT
I found JRiver maddening, it messed with the sound from all my applications so it didn't last long. As Tom (pinch) noted it has a much more attractive interface than volumio, and was more akin to the sonus experience I had when buying the esl63s. Also, critically, it deals with playing hi-res files automatically on my dacapo, without my needing to convert manually or store files at multiple resolutions. It will also do that for files synched to my portable devices. What alternatives might I consider (pc not apple)?
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Post by pinkie on Dec 26, 2014 22:13:20 GMT
Not yet. A battery is on the "to do" list. As is fitting the heat sink and trying ethernet. And another dac, and with it hi-res. And then ripping and organising a library, probably a bigger hard drive, and the list goes on. But I'd like to sort functionality and user interface first. Jriver is a real curates egg. Good in parts, but maddening in others, and the frustrations make me wary of parting with $50 yet. Getting there gradually
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Post by pinkie on Dec 26, 2014 18:57:25 GMT
Tiny bit more experimenting. I am listening to a JRiver bit perfect rip of Mary Black "Columbus". This was my stock first demo track with DaCapo 20 years ago, so it is VERY familiar into a DaCapo 22 bit, Pip, Quad 405-2 ESL 63 set up. OK - that's not the same as a direct A:B but I am impressed this is "good enough" - and that isnt meant to damn with faint praise. I am unmotivated to fettle or tweak - I can listen to this and seriously enjoy it (using the SPDIF connector) No 2 dabble - sorry Martin, I finally got round to putting the Missus into the hot seat to audition. This is not a case of "my wife the musician needs to do my listening for me". Since playing with HiFi recently I have come to completely trust that Sue can hear anything I can, usually much quicker to spot the differences if they are subtle. She may not have the vocab for describing it, which I have found frustrating at times, but on a binary "diferrence / No difference" she is 100% reliable, and I would put money down on her in any A:B contest. So I left her listening and told her to listen real hard and be sure to tell me when she heard "it" I didn't define "It". "It" included removing one home plug, then the 2nd (last) home plug, then reconnecting, then browsing the web across them. In short, taking out a mains noise source, then reinstating it and feeding as much noise into it as I could. It's on the same ring main. Not a peep, dicky bird, whatever. No difference at all. This hasn't shattered any illusions for me... "Hobbit time" now
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Post by pinkie on Dec 26, 2014 9:26:57 GMT
OK - quick Christmas update No putty used so far - very wary of touching an operating system I know nothing about. Is there a complete beginners guide to Linux - the 5 page version somewhere? As noted on Pinch's "Fingers in the pi" thread I have volumio controlled by JRiver now after an aborted attempt on Christmas Day. Pretty obvious really, but volumio needs to be in a web browser on the device with JRiver running. JRiver is on my laptop, the NAS and volumio controller (web page open) were on the desktop. Opening a web page with volumio on the laptop fixed it. I have configured JRiver to convert files only when necessary and convert to PCM16. Is that right for my DaCapo? There sadly doesn't seem to be a setting to get it to convert to "best possible" So far I have not been making any quality assessments, just working on functionality. I have had no clicks or pops or any need to overclock or mess with other operating system aspects. I am using the Digi+ with optical on input 4 of DaCapo, SPDIF RCA to Bayonet on input 2, and all 75ohm on input 1 from the CD6. Will do some comparisons later. As stated several times, I need to get ripping higher quality than MP3, but interestingly some MP3's via the Digi+ are HiFi enough to get played I am looking at leaving the Digi+ in the mains system and putting the DAC+ in the kitchen. Volumio I think can then play simultaneously to both to give around the house music (wife and teenagers set this as a challenge, but I think it will just do it. Not sure it knows which volumio is which. Any help configuring multiroom will be much appreciated) I must get JRiver installed and working on the desktop, and then make a decision about buying it (very likely, unless the annoying habit of taking over the PC's audio can't be fixed. However, I think using the DNLA renderer aspect means JRiver can be configured to output ITS sound (never used) through the PC soundcard, and all music is output through the DNLA renderer which is the Pi Boxing Day at the outlaws beckons...
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Post by pinkie on Dec 26, 2014 9:13:08 GMT
Tom. You are da man! Like you I much prefer the user interface of JRiver (still have issues about it controlling the audio on the PC, although as a DNLA device (it can be configured as server, controller and renderer or perm any 1,2,or 3 from 3), maybe its not such an issue I failed to get it to work first time because my trial JRiver is on the laptop, and I was controlling volumio from the desktop. Volumio needs to be in a browser on the JRiver device (ie my laptop) for it to find it. Thereafter it is superb. My android phone can browse the whole library and JRiver sorts out where it is. It will play the files without the need to configure a NAS on volumio, and selects its own direct library in preference for any duplicates. I'll go back to my own blog to repeat this, and ask a few questions Brilliant! Thanks for blazing the trail
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Post by pinkie on Dec 24, 2014 22:09:57 GMT
Merry Christmas everyone
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Post by pinkie on Dec 22, 2014 10:09:46 GMT
Finishing my post interrupted by the arrival of my daughter, The usb dongle which just worked was bought specifically for the Pi with the Pi at the same time on Amazon. I can't work out a brand from the packaging but it is USB 2.0, 802.IIN and uses a Ralink 5370 chipset. Configuration consisted of telling Volumio the network name, security type and password. I also had to tell Volumio I was using the Digi+ but there was a drop-down menu for that (actually it was the "Digi" I selected, and it worked. There is no Digi+ mentioned) Otherwise, it was pretty much Plug and Pray with very pleasing results. Just need to get Owen to modify Pip with a remote volume control which can be controlled from a phone app... (Thank you waiter, I'll have another wing of pork please)
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