hot_rod wrote: Maybe there is some kind of firmware tweak they will add down the road to allow tracks in an album to be 'buffered' ahead of the prior track finishing, to address this.

...If you have Spotify access via the Oppo would be interested in your thoughts on how it compares, if you have a chance at some point to do a trial there too.

I think the buffering is exactly what has to be done, but I think the dominant music being downloaded is "pop", by which I mean everything except classical. Almost nobody needs gapless play outside of classical. Even on the Oppo I have to invoke optional play to get gapless. You'd think it would be default, but no.

I don't currently have Spotify capability in my Oppo, but that may be because I stopped all firmware upgrades after they pushed a bad one that killed gapless flac playback. Took a couple of months and a special beta firmware release to get the gapless flac play back again, and I don't want to risk losing it. So I am stuck at the firware release I have.

Charlie

charliehatch wrote: ...Almost nobody needs gapless play outside of classical. Even on the Oppo I have to invoke optional play to get gapless. You'd think it would be default, but no.Charlie

Not true what-so-ever (in my case). You did write "almost"

Gapless is absolutely essential, critical, etc. for the music I primarily listen to - Grateful Dead. If UDP-205 did not support gapless, I would not have an Oppo UDP-205.

Side note with Oppo UDP-205. There is a problem that I reported related to gapless - and Oppo acknowledges in writing I am correct and will (hopefully) fix eventually - whereby if the player is set to display the track remaining time and the user chooses the gapless option, only the on screen (hdmi) display indicates time remaining. The front panel display of the unit itself only counts forward.

GDHAL wrote:

charliehatch wrote: ...Almost nobody needs gapless play outside of classical. Even on the Oppo I have to invoke optional play to get gapless. You'd think it would be default, but no.Charlie

Not true what-so-ever (in my case). You did write "almost"

Gapless is absolutely essential, critical, etc. for the music I primarily listen to - Grateful Dead. If UDP-205 did not support gapless, I would not have an Oppo UDP-205.

Side note with Oppo UDP-205. There is a problem that I reported related to gapless - and Oppo acknowledges in writing I am correct and will (hopefully) fix eventually - whereby if the player is set to display the track remaining time and the user chooses the gapless option, only the on screen (hdmi) display indicates time remaining. The front panel display of the unit itself only counts forward.

Yes, I did write "almost" because I knew there had to be at least one person out there who used it outside of classical. You must be one of them!

That's not the only thing that's wrong with Oppo's gapless play. Were talking flac files on my 105 here. There is an error in the time accounting that can be either short or long. It accumulates over multiple tracks, and I've actually had the final track stop playing before the end of the piece because of this accumulated error. Also, if you look closely, the time does not increment evenly (tick tick tick...), but unevenly (tick TOCK tick TOCK...), which may be related to the problem. Maybe your 205 doesn't have this problem? Ain't firmware wonderful?

charliehatch wrote:

rjohn79395 wrote: Hi, Charlie and hot_rod

I've enjoyed your discussion of streaming options, Tidal vs. Spotify, and who is really streaming what.

I stream through SONOS (though upsampled via Wyred 4 Sound upgrades to 96k and reclocked but still limited via SONOS to a max of 16k bit rate).

The only input I can add is that when I stream DEEZER Elite (the sister option to Tidal), I can see from the "info" button on SONOS that it is FLAC 44.1 quality. When I stream Spotify, again through SONOS, I cannot see via the "info" button that it has been upgraded past MP3 320 kbps. I'll have to play some more when I get back to TX. May depend on the service providing the streaming pass through????

I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Tidal to give it a try. Hi Res option. Turns out that I control my Oppo Tidal streaming via the Oppo smart phone app, which is pretty slick and easy to use.

So I noticed some things about Tidal. I was streaming away and my DAC showed 44.1 kHz, fine, but I looked in the options of my controller app and found it was set to a lower bit rate! I reset it to Hi Res, and my DAC still showed 44.1 kHz. So it may be that the Oppo player upsamples mp3 to 44.1 before outputting.

I also found that Tidal can't handle classical gapless play. When you encounter a track change in the middle of continuous music, the music stops while the next track loads. Seems to be better suited for popular music than classical.

I did compare sound quality between Tidal Hi-Res and my own 44.1 kHz flac file of the same music, and they sounded absolutely identical, right down to the terrible Sony piano sound engineering.

Not sure I'll stick with it, I'll give it some time.

Charlie

Hi, Charlie

I guess the conventional wisdom is that the human ear, and brain, can't discern added SQ above 16 bit, 44.1. I don't happen to agree with that.

When I upgraded SONOS via Wyred 4 Sound, which upsampled to 96k, and reclocked the inputs to remove digital jitter, the sound just plain got better. Digital glare all but disappeared, sound was smoother. Can't say for sure what the relative contribution was of reclocking vs. up sampling, but I sure like the result.

Do you have a way to try similar signal path upgrades? Results may well depend on signal path quality you're starting with.

Happy listening!

Rick

rjohn79395 wrote:
I guess the conventional wisdom is that the human ear, and brain, can't discern added SQ above 16 bit, 44.1. I don't happen to agree with that.

When I upgraded SONOS via Wyred 4 Sound, which upsampled to 96k, and reclocked the inputs to remove digital jitter, the sound just plain got better. Digital glare all but disappeared, sound was smoother. Can't say for sure what the relative contribution was of reclocking vs. up sampling, but I sure like the result.

Rick

Hi Rick,

We had an interesting discussion about hi-res recordings over on the Hi-Res topic. I was able to tell the difference (barely) with my old system, but I haven't tried the experiment with the new speakers and amps.

My Vega DAC has an option where I can set the clock to EXACT, which is the tightest clocking tolerance. It has never had a problem with my Oppo 105 coax digital output when using EXACT. My DAC has had interrupts (on all clock settings) when using the 48 kHz optical output from my Samsung TV. This doesn't happen when the TV optical goes to the Oppo first, so I think the Oppo must be internally reclocking the signal. That seems to be one thing the Oppo is very good at.

I hope to get into more things (like Dirac room correction) in the future, but for now I'm just letting things settle.

Charlie

A few tidbits.
Not sure about all the complaints about lack of gapless playback etc. In live classical music they take a break between the sections of music?
Only problem I have with no gapless is when I do random playback, a set of music (like the second side of abbey road) don't play together unless you play tricks (as I've learned to do with iTunes).

I''ve done blind testing with friends, where only I know what's going on. Certainly they hear a difference between compressed playback, wav or flac lossless, and high res, on the same track of music.

Loving the T Refs! I'd say that are a magical mix of revealing without being analytical (although I'm using tubes so that might remove the analytical). Music is lush, moving, compelling.