Hi there PhilHill, dror & andfor,
The moral of the story is: when you're down in the tiny details you miss the bigger picture. The fact is that no matter how bit-perfect and pristine your source is, the source is not the sound. The sound is fluctuations in air pressure coming out of the speakers, bouncing around the room and hitting your eardrums.
I completely agree.
But I am interested in a potential difference (regardless of whether it is better or worse) in sound when some MPD configuration details are changed.
I would be interested if PhilHill would be prepared to carry out a test? If so...
Log in via SSH and edit mpd.conf:
nano /etc/mpd.conf
Add the code (anywhere):
resampler {
plugin "soxr"
quality "very high"
}
Then restart MPD with the commands:
systemctl stop mpd
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start mpd
Just check that you can play some music, there should be no effect in the sound. SoXr does nothing unless resampling takes place within MPD.
Now for the tests which could change the sound. Modify mpd.conf again and remove the following lines one by one and listen after each change (don’t forget to restart MPD after each change). They are in the output section for the Allo Boss DAC:
auto_resample "no"
auto_format "no"
After this you could also modify the line containing 'device "hw:0,0"' (0.0, may be 1.0 or some other number). After modification it should look something like this:
device "plughw:0,0"
For an explanation, see here:
https://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/doc/suse/suse9.0/userguide-9.0/ch18.html#id2935295 and here:
http://www.volkerschatz.com/noise/alsa.html
If there are differences in the sound you can see what is happening to the MPD output with the command:
cat /proc/asound/card?/pcm0p/sub0/hw_params
where the '?' should be the first number in the 'device "hw:
0,0"' line. This command only provides output when music is actually playing. If you get so far, please share your findings.
To reset mpd.conf back to the standard just go to the MPD menu in the Rune UI and follow the instructions.
janui
