Slightly hungover, both of us, we have just compared cd to the pi on lms. It's close enough to be happy listening to the pi, but cd is clearly better. Using coax inputs for both, so the trouble lies with the streamer. Wav file format. 

Of course could be the software, WiFi, file type, power supply, and "tweaks".  I think though that I like the multi room streaming concept, and lms functionality, so will accept some sq compromise if necessary. I do need to sort out organisation of my library though if staying with lms as it merges mp3 and flac duplicates into one album and would play track 1 mp3 followed by track 1 flac, track 2 mp3, track2 flac etc if playing an album. 

What's the best way to store lossless for the pi, but synch mp3 to mobile when using squeezebox? 

Why the power supply?  I can try a battery fairly easily, but I would expect that to only make a difference with the DAC card.  At the moment the Pi is pure digital in my setup.

Very surprised to have played a Fourplay track just now, then thought "That sounds too good for MP3 - maybe I ripped hi-res without realising".  Nope - it was MP3.  There are starting to get too many parameters to investigate thoroughly - like why I thought MP3 was so poor using the cheap and nasty USB to optical adaptor before.  I'm afraid my thirst for knowledge in the form of pure academic research is limited at this time of year.  I'll tinker a bit to see if it can sound better - but I'm not going back over old ground.  Maybe later in the year.

But I can drill a hole and rig up a battery sometime...

I have no experience of power supplies and digital signal transmission, but based on a discussion of cable lengths I was having yesterday, I fail to understand why. Happy to give it a go. 
Not quite sure why WiFi will make a difference either since it is just transferring data which is not time critical. Mrs S pulled a face when I reached for the drill so I have ordered 30 metres for £2.69 free postage. If it works I'll drill the hole and do it tidily 

The EDO plug-in is for a real Logitech Touch and installs there to shut down all unnecessary services.

Yes - that's bound to be the problem.  I don't know it will be a big problem for me, since I am happy with 16/44.1, although interested to try higher.  I have the Pi2 with the Berry Dac on the desk in front of me now to be set up. 





If this fails to wow me, I might try the sabre.  Or, since we have wangled a THX/Benchmark AHB2, see if we can wangle one of their DAC's too.  I fear that bloody power amp is going to force another hole in my wallet.  It's designer is very coy and diffident about its qualities - nobody else who's heard it is.

I can't find a spec sheet for DaCapo, although since Arthur is in a chatty mood today, and due out to Munich where he will doubtless see Westlake again, I might be able to get in touch with JW again (he sent me a pic with his dogs from Munich, but ignores me on PinkFish and DIY).  I think it can handle 96KHz - but I'm not sure if it handles higher than 16 bit numbers.  I guess since it handles HDCD (with a filter I don't have) then it must somehow handle 20bit equivalent.

I am just sitting here flipping a coin between JRiver, Volumio or LMS, squeezebox.  JRiver annoyed me for hi-jacking my pc's sound system, shite documentation, and an inability to get internet radio stations as easily as in Volumio / Sound @ home.  I'm also not sure how easy it will be to use JRiver with multi-room, although I think Sound at Home / Volumio deal with it.  By contrast its file handling facilities are top-draw and a big attraction (JRiver).  If it would work multi-room, then I presume it would downsample on the fly to both DAC's which would be fine.  I don't need it to play HiRes in the kitchen while low-res to DaCapo.

But I think maybe LMS will suit best for functionality - I am just going to have to sort out my own file system a bit better.  No duplicates of tracks in the library, and a way of ripping FLAC.  (Tried EAC - well, downloaded and allowed Bitdefender to go ballistic.  Browser hijacked and search engines changed.  Why do people do that crap?  Fortunately Bit-defender clobbered it effectively and just left me to tidy up my home pages and search engines, but it p**** me off).  I baulked at poweramp, partly due to having to pay, partly due to bad experiences with a similarly named music player on Android, and mainly because I failed to understand its selling points, which mostly seemed to be telling me I needed a whizzy MP3 format.

Windows Media Player handles synching to my Android using a compressed wav (android wav) file which is an acceptable size, and performs fine, and doesn't create a duplicate on the main server, so that seems to have nailed that need.  It also rips to WAV, as does iTunes.  Now, as a pair of notorious foo bashers, Owen and I were intrigued by an article that WAV is consistently better than FLAC for sound quality - due not to the file information, but the processor overhead in decoding FLAC from its compressed state, and considering trying to measure this .  Can you explain to me why FLAC seems to be preferred?

Edit:  To clarify - I have not tried EAC due to aborting installation due to the unacceptable garbage it inflicted

FLAC carries tagging data and that data is very widely read by lots of media players. Very useful for library use.
FLAC is also faster to stream around a network, due to the reduced file size. At the player end the stream is decompressed back to its original PCM stream.

Interestingly you'll find that LMS encodes WAV to FLAC before it is streamed, and the player does the decompression as it gets played.
Setting up the server to stream WAV increases the network load by quite a bit.

Once upon a time I actually cared enough about this WAV/FLAC which one's better thing.
Recent testing I have done has laid that one to bed as far as I'm concerned.
To test the proposition I used the A/B/X/Y plugin for Foobar, and for consistency used headphones (rooms are far to open the atmospheric changes and subtle changes in noise floor).
I ripped a CD specifically for the test too, with a WAV file as the outcome.
I compressed the WAV to FLAC and into another folder, and then loaded both versions of the rip into Foobar and started the comparison.

Out of 10 attempts to correctly identify which was which A/X/Y and B/X/Y I managed to correctly identify 3, which statistically means that it was fluke to get the 3 correct.
In reality that was the case too - if I'm honest with myself I was guessing.

My conclusion is that if you can hear a difference between WAV and FLAC playback then you have a problem with the audio setup on the machine performing the playback.

One thing I will add is that playback level differences can account for much of the perceived superiority listeners can hear when comparing playbacks - the louder file is usually perceived as being superior.
Get the levels properly matched and the differences disappear.
Using the ability to control the output level of your Pi player via LMS is not something to engage in if you're comparing files.

One thing I cannot emphasise strongly enough is to sort out your ripping to be bit perfect.
Which means dropping the WMP rips - they're designed to be quick and painless, and are not bit perfect.
Last time I looked at iTunes ripping is didn't do bit perfect rips either.
EAC is free, and needs properly setting up to perform properly. You need to have a copy of flac.exe somewhere on your machine to point the compression process at (flac.exe is not included in the EAC package. Neither is LAME [for MP3], so you'll need to install that somewhere on the machine too if that's your preferred file type).
Then there's post processing - using EAC I have to manually load the ripped files into Foobar to scan for Replaygain tags.

dBPoweramp can cover all of the steps in one hit, and has a nice simple to use interface.
The results are identical to those you get using EAC, but it's nicer to use.
Considering that it's a one off hit I think the added convenience is worth the asking price.

Where did you download EAC from?
I've never had issues with the download being bloated with unwanted crap either.

This is where I've always gone to to download EAC www.exactaudiocopy.de/ and it's the only place you should be downloading it from!

dBPoweramp is available for a fixed length trial (30 days if I remember correctly) and it's fully functioning for the duration.

Ah.  The best laid plans.  The wifi dongles I have bought with the Pi are out of range in my office - and more annoyingly in the kitchen.  The office would have just allowed me to try a bit of wifi v ethernet on the NAD, which can wait.  The kitchen scenario is a bit more sad.  Not sure whether to consider running ethernet externally round the house to the kitchen (not that hard actually) or put a wireless relay station in the office and hope it boosts the kitchen.  Or get a bigger dongle?

Bugger!

And it had all been going so well. 

Any network geeks out there able to help me configure a wifi booster.  I have a BTHomehub - ye old copper cable broadband version, we dream of high speed glass around here.

I have an old (working) Netgear N300 DGN2200v3 which I wanted to use as a separate WiFi hub.  I have plugged it into the ethernet, changed its IP address to one the BThomehub uses (from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.1.201), found the wifi password, configured it to let my android phone log on to it, but I don't get any internet.  Disabling the DHCP server just lost me IP address allocation to the wireless devices attached to it.  I'm sure it must be possible to get it to act as a separate wifi network which can provide signal to parts of the house that the BThomehub covers poorly, but I have exceeded my networking expertise)

Anybody?