Bryston BDP-1 & MinimServer

[krutsch]

Just an FYI ... I picked-up a Bryston BDP-1 media streamer last weekend and am using it with MinimServer/Streamer w/ BubbleUPnP Server.

Gapless playback works flawlessly with the beta DLNA renderer in the latest F/W release (Manic Moose 2.11). Works great with Kazoo and the Bubble android app. Finally, my renderer search is over.

And, a significant step-up in SQ from my MacBook Retina. I wish I could understand why one computer-based player can sound better than another, through the same playback chain, but maybe it's the result of things like mitigation of electrical noise and jitter?

[DavidHB]

An intriguing product. I was prompted to look it up on the web. If the sound quality is what you want, it looks like a good value package.

There is a story I have not got to the bottom of. Early versions of the BDP-1 were explicitly not streamers or renderers; the data source was, I think, USB only. Apparently Bryston were claiming that network streaming compromised sound quality, which is the exact opposite of the line taken by Linn, then and now. The current BDP-1 clearly has network connectivity, and from your description functions as a standard UPnP renderer. It still has USB connectivity, which Linn continues to shudder at. Wouldn't you just like to lock them both in a room for a few hours ...

You mention that you're using MinimStreamer but don't say whether it's transcoding, radio streams or both you've tried with the Bryston. It would be interesting to know how you get on with those, as the reviews say that the Bryston has good format support.

And as regards your final question, I think that we are only now beginning to learn how aspects of digital data manipulation and transmission can affect sound quality (even when the bits and bytes of the digital file remain completely unchanged), and that's before we get into the whole realm of digital to analogue conversion.

David

[krutsch]

(17-04-2015 16:32)DavidHB Wrote:  The current BDP-1 clearly has network connectivity, and from your description functions as a standard UPnP renderer. It still has USB connectivity, which Linn continues to shudder at. Wouldn't you just like to lock them both in a room for a few hours ...

You mention that you're using MinimStreamer but don't say whether it's transcoding, radio streams or both you've tried with the Bryston. It would be interesting to know how you get on with those, as the reviews say that the Bryston has good format support.

I am going to load my library this weekend on a pair of USB Flash drives and see if I experience any change in SQ between USB Flash and network access - both NAS direct, as well as uPnP. I would prefer the uPnP route, because I like the way I have configured MinimServer to organize my library and I love Bubble as an app... but SQ is always paramount.

What I am doing now is using MinimStreamer to transcode my ALAC library to WAV/24, but I've experienced some drop-outs with 192/24 files. I will also try serving up my parallel FLAC library with no transcoding and see what happens.

I'll say this: transcoding with sox at high precision into WAV/24 from Minim to the Bryston is the best sound I've personally experienced. Looking forward to a weekend of audiophile experimentation and I'll report back.

[DavidHB]

(17-04-2015 21:48)krutsch Wrote:  I am going to load my library this weekend on a pair of USB Flash drives and see if I experience any change in SQ between USB Flash and network access - both NAS direct, as well as uPnP. I would prefer the uPnP route, because I like the way I have configured MinimServer to organize my library and I love Bubble as an app... but SQ is always paramount.

I'm a 'bang for buck' person. SQ is my first priority, but not any improvement at any price. I really value the accessibility to my music that the combination of MunimServer and Bubble DS give me.

(17-04-2015 21:48)krutsch Wrote:  What I am doing now is using MinimStreamer to transcode my ALAC library to WAV/24, but I've experienced some drop-outs with 192/24 files. I will also try serving up my parallel FLAC library with no transcoding and see what happens.

The MinimStreamer User Guide indicates that, as transcoding is done in memory, this is likely to be a network issue.

(17-04-2015 21:48)krutsch Wrote:  I'll say this: transcoding with sox at high precision into WAV/24 from Minim to the Bryston is the best sound I've personally experienced. Looking forward to a weekend of audiophile experimentation and I'll report back.

Sounds good. I'll look forward to it.

David

[audio_elf]

(17-04-2015 16:32)DavidHB Wrote:  There is a story I have not got to the bottom of. Early versions of the BDP-1 were explicitly not streamers or renderers; the data source was, I think, USB only. Apparently Bryston were claiming that network streaming compromised sound quality, which is the exact opposite of the line taken by Linn, then and now. The current BDP-1 clearly has network connectivity, and from your description functions as a standard UPnP renderer. It still has USB connectivity, which Linn continues to shudder at. Wouldn't you just like to lock them both in a room for a few hours ...

Please note: some of what follows is a combination of heresy and inferences so please take it for what you will...

The Bryston BDP-1 (and later BDP-2 and BDP-1 USB) has always been a low powered off the shelf industrial/embedded motherboard coupled with a tweaked sounds card to offer SPDIF and AES (where offered) a "audiophile" power supply and running a version of Linux and the MPd music player. Out of the box it was never going to be easy to auto mount a random share to access music so they stipulated a USB drive.

As time and developments came along they added the ability to mount a share off a NAS or PC as an alternative to a directly attached USB drive and the later BDP-2 added the ability to add an internal drive (iirc) as another alternative. Recently the open source community have come up with the ability to utilise MPd as a UPnP server and this has been incorporated into the main MPd programme (as of version 0.19 iirc).

Eloise

[simoncn]

(17-04-2015 22:44)audio_elf Wrote:  Please note: some of what follows is a combination of heresy and inferences so please take it for what you will...

The Bryston BDP-1 (and later BDP-2 and BDP-1 USB) has always been a low powered off the shelf industrial/embedded motherboard coupled with a tweaked sounds card to offer SPDIF and AES (where offered) a "audiophile" power supply and running a version of Linux and the MPd music player. Out of the box it was never going to be easy to auto mount a random share to access music so they stipulated a USB drive.

As time and developments came along they added the ability to mount a share off a NAS or PC as an alternative to a directly attached USB drive and the later BDP-2 added the ability to add an internal drive (iirc) as another alternative. Recently the open source community have come up with the ability to utilise MPd as a UPnP server and this has been incorporated into the main MPd programme (as of version 0.19 iirc).

Eloise

I don't think you have mentioned network streaming in this very helpful description. What capabilities does the current model range have for network streaming?

[krutsch]

(17-04-2015 23:31)simoncn Wrote:  I don't think you have mentioned network streaming in this very helpful description. What capabilities does the current model range have for network streaming?

Not sure to whom your reply was addressed, but I'll tell you what I've discovered with my player, so far.

1. NAS indexing and playback - the web UI allows you to add multiple NAS shares (either SMB or AFP) and the device will index for playback, directly from NAS storage; there are some limitations, but it was painless to setup.

*I think the decision with earlier F/W to support only USB attached flash/HDD was a decision in support of user experience and sound quality, not that they couldn't make it work.

2. uPnP / DLNA client and renderer - i.e. you can index and playback tracks from a DLNA server (client mode) or use the BDP as a full renderer with an external control point (the latter being preferred, since you don't have to wait for indexing, et al., but the option is there and it works). As I mentioned earlier, gapless playback has worked well on my gapless test tracks.

3. Tidal streaming - there is BETA support for Tidal HiFi playback; seems to work, but I've not played with this extensively, since I access Tidal via BubbleUPnP Server controlled via Kazoo.

4. Airplay, Squeeze - haven't played with this, but there is an option to enable the Linux Shairplay feature, along with Squeeze server functions.

5. Samba - finally, if you have plugged in USB storage and have audio files you want to serve to other devices, you can export SMB shares.

[krutsch]

(17-04-2015 22:04)DavidHB Wrote:  

(17-04-2015 21:48)krutsch Wrote:  What I am doing now is using MinimStreamer to transcode my ALAC library to WAV/24, but I've experienced some drop-outs with 192/24 files. I will also try serving up my parallel FLAC library with no transcoding and see what happens.

The MinimStreamer User Guide indicates that, as transcoding is done in memory, this is likely to be a network issue.

Yup. I was making the point that the BDP-1 doesn't aggressively buffer network traffic, so when you transcode 192/24 files into WAV, the audio files get large and a 100 Mbps ethernet port struggles to keep up.

[DavidHB]

(17-04-2015 22:44)audio_elf Wrote:  Please note: some of what follows is a combination of heresy and inferences so please take it for what you will...

The Bryston BDP-1 (and later BDP-2 and BDP-1 USB) has always been a low powered off the shelf industrial/embedded motherboard coupled with a tweaked sounds card to offer SPDIF and AES (where offered) a "audiophile" power supply and running a version of Linux and the MPd music player. Out of the box it was never going to be easy to auto mount a random share to access music so they stipulated a USB drive.

As time and developments came along they added the ability to mount a share off a NAS or PC as an alternative to a directly attached USB drive and the later BDP-2 added the ability to add an internal drive (iirc) as another alternative. Recently the open source community have come up with the ability to utilise MPd as a UPnP server and this has been incorporated into the main MPd programme (as of version 0.19 iirc)

Thanks for this. It makes sense of the references to the Bryston devices as "computer based" or similar. To my mind, it's a distinction without a difference. All renderers are, in effect, specialised computers.

Your account almost suggests that Bryston made a marketing point out of necessity in arguing that network streaming compromised sound quality (perhaps it did within their design framework at the time). They've obviously been prepared to take on board new developments in the open source world, and should be given due credit for that.

David

[DavidHB]

(18-04-2015 04:23)krutsch Wrote:  I was making the point that the BDP-1 doesn't aggressively buffer network traffic, so when you transcode 192/24 files into WAV, the audio files get large and a 100 Mbps ethernet port struggles to keep up.

While this seems plausible, I can't think offhand of a player with a gigabit port, and buffering, of any kind, can really only cope with fluctuations in transmission speed; it cannot compensate when the network is just too slow. I lack the ability to work out how much of the capacity of a 100Mbps port is taken up by a 192/24 stream, but I don't recall any previous report that this is a problem.

David