How about sitting in your listening position, browsing jremote, and pulling up a pure native 5.1 DSD rip of Beck-Sea Change, for playback in native DSD. And no, I don't have a Sonoma workstation sitting here! YES!!
Well, I mentioned in a few threads on other forums that I was getting ready to prototype a possible 5.1 pure DSD playback setup. The thought of using J River and jremote (ipad) to browse a multichannel catalog that includes native DSD 5.1 (and 3.0, etc) is a 2013 goal of mine. 2012 was a watershed for DSD-capable stereo DACS (I own 3, Metiner, Mytek, exasound).
Well..yesterday marks the first huge step in that goal!
Mytek delivered my third Mytek Stereo 192 DSD DAC yesterday Own one, demoing the seond for their newer hardware boards), along with a simple 4-port USB hub. My goal for this weekend coming up was to simply get something working, and I assumed it would be a lot of trial and error..even though Michal and Chebon (Mytek) had given me pretty good instructions going in.
Matt at J River had just released a beta version of JRMC that fixed a couple idiosyncrasies in 5.0 vs 5.1 playback, so i downloaded 18.0131, made sure Mytek's 133.1 Windows ASIO driver was loaded on my CAPS V2+ and hooked up the USB hub. I used some decent (and awful generic) USB cables to cobble together a three-port setup, and used the SOtM card to drive it (directly powered by the iFi). I thought the hub would need power but it didn't. The USBPAL driver screen indicates what goes where (hint: the oldest serial number gets main lf/rf, the next gets c/sw and the newest DAC gets ls/rs). I guessed right the first time! Go figure.
I use a tried-and-true analog multichannel preamp (Sony TAP-9000ES) for volume and analog channel trimming (so far done via ear only; I will drag out the Rat Shack digital SPL meter tonight). I created a MCh DSF parent folder, moved a few 5.1 DSF albums into it and had J Remote add the parent in auto-import. Voila. (My next step is to create a multichannel view and use it in jremote; the view rule will be simple..."channels greater than 2"). One of the DSF folders is the Pentatone sampler that includes test tones and channel id tracks.
First up, after confirming channels and doing simple trims, was Beck-Sea Change, a tremendous surround sound album. The clarity, tone, dynamics and deep bass of this thing, heard 1000 times before, was startling. The Mytek trio blew away (yes blew away) the Oppo 83SE in this first test. And channel trims weren't even done yet. Wow!
Stay tuned for more updates.
Here's what the setup looks like (stacked Myteks next to my CAPS V2+. The other thing is simply a gigabit ethernet switch, so my 2 channel setup would still have ethernet).
Updates:
Myteks are all stock. They were set for bypass volume. J River was setup for ASIO and bitstream "DSD" (not "DoP"). Rebooted initially as one of the DACS wasn't seeing the CAPS, and J River was having issues. Reboot took care of everything. I do not have Fidelizer running currently. Win 8 is un-tweaked currently (I've used Fidelizer to do that so far, short of a good list of changes). ISO's were extracted using "extract DST DSF multichannel.bat" and I appended each DSF multichannel album name with "(DSD MCH)" to intially differentiate from its DSD stereo counterpart.. As i said earlier, I will simply make a mch view that jremote will also use.
Oh, the DSF 5.1 folders are freaking huge. My 1000 ripped SACDs in stereo are like 2.5TB; for mch we're gonna need a bigger boat!
Well, I mentioned in a few threads on other forums that I was getting ready to prototype a possible 5.1 pure DSD playback setup. The thought of using J River and jremote (ipad) to browse a multichannel catalog that includes native DSD 5.1 (and 3.0, etc) is a 2013 goal of mine. 2012 was a watershed for DSD-capable stereo DACS (I own 3, Metiner, Mytek, exasound).
Well..yesterday marks the first huge step in that goal!
Mytek delivered my third Mytek Stereo 192 DSD DAC yesterday Own one, demoing the seond for their newer hardware boards), along with a simple 4-port USB hub. My goal for this weekend coming up was to simply get something working, and I assumed it would be a lot of trial and error..even though Michal and Chebon (Mytek) had given me pretty good instructions going in.
Matt at J River had just released a beta version of JRMC that fixed a couple idiosyncrasies in 5.0 vs 5.1 playback, so i downloaded 18.0131, made sure Mytek's 133.1 Windows ASIO driver was loaded on my CAPS V2+ and hooked up the USB hub. I used some decent (and awful generic) USB cables to cobble together a three-port setup, and used the SOtM card to drive it (directly powered by the iFi). I thought the hub would need power but it didn't. The USBPAL driver screen indicates what goes where (hint: the oldest serial number gets main lf/rf, the next gets c/sw and the newest DAC gets ls/rs). I guessed right the first time! Go figure.
I use a tried-and-true analog multichannel preamp (Sony TAP-9000ES) for volume and analog channel trimming (so far done via ear only; I will drag out the Rat Shack digital SPL meter tonight). I created a MCh DSF parent folder, moved a few 5.1 DSF albums into it and had J Remote add the parent in auto-import. Voila. (My next step is to create a multichannel view and use it in jremote; the view rule will be simple..."channels greater than 2"). One of the DSF folders is the Pentatone sampler that includes test tones and channel id tracks.
First up, after confirming channels and doing simple trims, was Beck-Sea Change, a tremendous surround sound album. The clarity, tone, dynamics and deep bass of this thing, heard 1000 times before, was startling. The Mytek trio blew away (yes blew away) the Oppo 83SE in this first test. And channel trims weren't even done yet. Wow!
Stay tuned for more updates.
Here's what the setup looks like (stacked Myteks next to my CAPS V2+. The other thing is simply a gigabit ethernet switch, so my 2 channel setup would still have ethernet).
Updates:
Myteks are all stock. They were set for bypass volume. J River was setup for ASIO and bitstream "DSD" (not "DoP"). Rebooted initially as one of the DACS wasn't seeing the CAPS, and J River was having issues. Reboot took care of everything. I do not have Fidelizer running currently. Win 8 is un-tweaked currently (I've used Fidelizer to do that so far, short of a good list of changes). ISO's were extracted using "extract DST DSF multichannel.bat" and I appended each DSF multichannel album name with "(DSD MCH)" to intially differentiate from its DSD stereo counterpart.. As i said earlier, I will simply make a mch view that jremote will also use.
Oh, the DSF 5.1 folders are freaking huge. My 1000 ripped SACDs in stereo are like 2.5TB; for mch we're gonna need a bigger boat!
