Sound quality of MinimServer

[sng2021]

Hello everyone,

I have been comparing the sound from MinimServer/JPlay with that of JRiver/JRemote and Audirvana/Audirvana Remote and was greatly surprised to find MinimServer compromises the quality of sound in my system.

MinimServer's sound lacks bass, and maybe because of it affects the midrange by taking away the presence and warmth in the sound.

I ran both MinimServer and JRiver on the same Asus PN64 mini PC with Intel i7 CPU, 32GB DDR5 RAM and 2TB PCIE NVME M.2 SSD running Linux Mint 21.2. This was sequential, by terminating one server before starting the other. Audirvana was installed on my iMac with 32 GB RAM and i7 cpu running MacOS 11.7.10. The same database of music on an external disk was used in all cases.

I used Jplay on my iPad to control MinimServer and also used it as the control point for JRiver in some of my tests.

My system consists of the SoTM SMS 200 and txUSBultra, Bricasti M1SE DAC, VTL TL5 preamp, Krell 350 MCX mono blocks and Magico S1 speakers. The network is a wired LAN from Asus and iMac to a switch and switch to the sMS200.

All hardware components remained the same when switching between JRiver and MinimServer on the Asus and yet the sound from MinimServer was very underwhelming. The difference was like night and day. MinimServer sounded lifeless. Bass was reduced a lot. It did not present much of the ambient information in the tracks I played, narrowed the soundstage and also made it shallower. There was no "presence" in the music.

One very clear example of missing information is when playing Roger Waters "Amused to Death" Track # 1 - The Ballard of Bill Hubbard where there is the sound of a dog barking on the right. This was almost completely inaudible. I really had to concentrate to even catch a little of it whereas it was loud and clear with the other apps I tried.

Another example is The Eagles "Hell Freezes Over" - Hotel California where the kick drum at the start of the track really sounds full bodied, powerful and there is a reverb that comes from the acoustics of the venue. With MinimServer there was no power and the reverb "minimised".

I tried all kinds of music - classical, jazz, popular, etc, and every single track I played sounded quite anaemic.

In all cases the volume control was set at exactly the same loudness.

Before anyone asks - NO, I do not upsample/downsample and neither do I use any DSP or equaliser, so all the bits coming from JRiver, Audirvana or MinimServer are pure uncontaminated, untouched and yet there is a huge difference in the sound.

I am trying to get to the bottom of this. Can anyone shed some light on this? Bits-are-bits right? Yet MinimServer is not serving all the bits correctly!

Regards.