DSD Playback

[Andre Gosselin]

(08-03-2015 00:52)simoncn Wrote:  

(08-03-2015 00:42)Andre Gosselin Wrote:  Hi,
I own a Moon Mind 180D renderer which supports PCM input up to 24/192. I would like to test the qualities offered by .dsf files (using samples provided on NativeDSD). I am using latest update of minimserver on Win7. I tried setting the "stream.transcode" property to "dsf:dopwav", but this does not work, I suppose because my renderer does not support DoP. I tried setting the property to "dsf:wav24;176", but this setting is declared invalid. From the documentation, I guess the win7 platform does not have the proper ffmpeg version.

Is there a way to solve this issue, or is my understanding of DSD transcoding a bit oversimplistic given my current hardware ? Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I can declare myself to be a rather DSD newbie.

The Windows platform doesn't contain any ffmpeg version by default, so you must have installed one somewhere along the way.

You can download a recent ffmpeg Windows binary from this page. Put the full path to the location of the ffmpeg.exe file in the stream.converter property and you should be able add dsf:wav24;176 to the stream.transcode property.

Thanks Simon for your prompt reply. I followed your instructions and was able to correctly transcode the dsf track. I however had to lower the frequency to "dsf:wav24;96", as transcoding to 176kHz resulted in streaming interruptions every 15secs or so. I suspect my wifi bandwidth is the culprit here, since transcoding a standard flac file using "flac:wav24;176" results in the same problem.

I have a flac 24/192 version of the same track, which plays without problem on my setup without transcoding. I did numerous and carefull listenings of this 24/192 non transcoded track, compared to the dsf version transcoded with a "wav24;96" setting. Quite honestly, I did not hear any significant gain with the dsf version, and I even admit that quite a few times I favored the flac 24/192 non transcoded version of the the dsf transcoded one.

Maybe this is normal, if transcoding dsf to "wav24;96" severely downgrades the quality of a DSD file, and if this quality requires transcoding to DoP in order to be preserved. I am not knowledgeable enough about the DSD world to tell.

I would be very much interested in comments from more experienced users.

As an aside, I once mistakingly set during my tests the transcoding property to "dsf:wav24;96k" (notice the trailing "k"), and this setting was accepted. The transcoded stream was seen in BubbleUPnP as "WAV | 352.8 kHz | 24bits", as if minimserver ignored the "96k" altogether and set the frequency to the default setting.

Also, I tried hard during the last month to differentiate in hearing sessions between non transcoded flac files (16/48, 24/96), and the same files transcoded using "flac:wav24". On my setup, wav transcoding does not seem to produce significant improvements in sound quality. This is not to criticize in any way the transcoding done by minimstreamer. I just want to mention that, maybe, the advantages of transcoding to wav are dependent on the type of hardware used.

Regards