Music Streamer/DACs (1 Viewer)

[John Dirk]

It certainly is a nice looking piece of gear. Hope it exceeds expectations.

 

[JohnRice]

It certainly is a nice looking piece of gear. Hope it exceeds expectations.

Everything about it belies the price. The closest component I can compare it to is the Naim Uniti Atom Headphone Edition, which costs $3,800. The EverSolo is $860. I wonder about the whole "too good to be true" thing, because it seems too good to be true. I was also very lucky to get one domestically. I really didn't want to import one through AliExpress, but kept a watch on The Evil A and grabbed what I'm convinced was an order someone else decided to cancel. I managed to see it and grab it, after which it was again unavailable, and has remained so ever since. In fact, only one seller on AliExpress has any, and they've jacked up the price to $1,000. If I had ordered it there, it only would have been from the Zidoo store, which is the manufacturer.

So, I have a full and exhausting day tomorrow, but hope to set it up in the late afternoon.

 

[JohnRice]

Something I find impressive is that during my wait for it to arrive, there have been two updates to the app. It was released less than a month ago, which tells me they are really on the ball about improving the app, which really is the best way to control the unit.

 

[JohnRice]

I lied...

I hooked it up.

None of you believed I'd wait... did you?

It sounds really nice, even though I expect it will improve a little with some burn-in. Yeah, I'm one of those.

 

[JohnRice]

I can definitely say the DMP-A6 is rather awesome. It is still evolving, demonstrated by the fact I've only had it three days and there have been two firmware updates. Still some little things they can improve, such as playing back from internal storage, it displays the file name, rather than the song title from metadata, and it doesn't display the artist or album.

I thought it came with a remote, which I didn't plan on using anyway, but it doesn't. Something like this is too complicated for a remote. So you use the app, or the touchscreen. A nice detail is the app interaction is basically identical to the touchscreen. So, neither is a limited interaction. Of course, with some uses like AirPlay, you don't control playback through it anyway.

It's very slick, and sounds great. It genuinely is hard to believe it for the price. I have no doubt that will go up, and sellers who have them available are jacking up the price already.

 

[jcroy]

I'm playing CD rips as well as high res files up to 192/24.

In practice, I've found that higher resolutions does not matter at all if the original producers/engineers didn't know what they were doing or were completely incompetent. (ie. Higher resolutions in the sense of sampling over 44.1 or 48 kHz and above 16 bits per channel, in the pcm sense such as the format of *.wav files).

From first hand experience, I use to do my own multi-track recordings and mixing around 20 years ago where I sometimes used higher sampling (such as 96 kHz). I learned the hard way that sound quality was completely dependent on microphone placement, which I didn't know how to do at first. For example, such as trying to get a decent sound quality with four microphones on a set of drums being played "live". All kinds of issues, such as reducing the sound reflection/echo from the walls, etc ...

It didn't matter what sampling frequency or bits per channels I was recording at, if the original microphone placements + room acoustics were not very good. This is the type of thing which cannot be "fixed up" at all in the mixdown stage via equalization, noise gates, layering tracks, etc ...

 

[JohnRice]

In practice, I've found that higher resolutions does not matter at all if the original producers/engineers didn't know what they were doing or were completely incompetent. (ie. Higher resolutions in the sense of sampling over 44.1 or 48 kHz and above 16 bits per channel, in the pcm sense such as the format of *.wav files).

From first hand experience, I use to do my own multi-track recordings and mixing around 20 years ago where I sometimes used higher sampling (such as 96 kHz). I learned the hard way that sound quality was completely dependent on microphone placement, which I didn't know how to do at first. For example, such as trying to get a decent sound quality with four microphones on a set of drums being played "live". All kinds of issues, such as reducing the sound reflection/echo from the walls, etc ...

It didn't matter what sampling frequency or bits per channels I was recording at, if the original microphone placements + room acoustics were not very good. This is the type of thing which cannot be "fixed up" at all in the mixdown stage via equalization, noise gates, layering tracks, etc ...

So, what you're saying is, increasing the resolution of shit only produces high resolution shit.

Yes, I completely agree.

I tend not to waste my time with high resolution versions of music that was a crap recording to begin with.

 

[JohnRice]

BTW, I only have a couple 192/24 recordings. I find that's beyond the realm of audible benefit. I've only gotten those when it was the only option and no 96/24 version was available.

 

[jcroy]

So, what you're saying is, increasing the resolution of shit only produces high resolution shit.

Yes, I completely agree.

Going back further in time, I use to do multi-track recordings on a 4-track tape machine. In those days, I thought 4-tracks demo tapes were not meant to sound very good due to the limitations of the tape. It never occurred to me that adjusting microphone placement was the difference between a good sound and something that was crap.

When I first started recording digitally via the computer's soundcard, that's when I realized my multi-track recordings still sounded horrible just like my older 4-track demo recordings from the early 1990s. I incorrectly thought that enough "massaging" with outboard equalizers, etc ... and other plugin "boxes" could easily "fix up" the crappy sound problems. I eventually realized it was a complete folly / farce, where the final result was just the same crappy sound with "more bass and treble boosted".

So I had to start again from scratch. Initially I read some web pages about microphone placement techniques, where through a lot of trial and error eventually figured out how to get something that sounded ok (though not great).

 

[jcroy]

BTW, I only have a couple 192/24 recordings. I find that's beyond the realm of audible benefit. I've only gotten those when it was the only option and no 96/24 version was available.

The absolute stupidest case of 192/24 I ever came across, was a classic album where all the album tracks were remastered at 192/24 on a separate dvd-rom computer disc, in a special limited edition re-release of the album.

It turns out the "remastered" tracks in 192/24 resolution on the dvd-rom disc, were completely brickwalled to death. Completely defeating any conceivable "improvements" of 192/24, and ending up with an even bigger pile of shit than even the original crappy vinyl version from the mid 1980s.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Curious. You previously mentioned wanting to use internal M.2 slot, but since something like this inevitably comes w/ USB ports (and even multiple, fast USB3 ports... looks like 2x USB-A + 1x USB-C), why not just use those instead?

Don't really need faster than USB2 and certainly not faster than USB3 for audio streaming, right?

Internally installed SSD would certainly look nicer of course and also save you a USB port for something else (though again, there are 3 total on this unit), but otherwise, what other real advantage(s)?

I probably would prefer using external SSD for something like this myself, so I'm wondering... though I'm probably not in the market for this anytime soon...

_Man_

 

[JohnRice]

Curious. You previously mentioned wanting to use internal M.2 slot, but since something like this inevitably comes w/ USB ports (and even multiple, fast USB3 ports... looks like 2x USB-A + 1x USB-C), why not just use those instead?

Don't really need faster than USB2 and certainly not faster than USB3 for audio streaming, right?

Internally installed SSD would certainly look nicer of course and also save you a USB port for something else (though again, there are 3 total on this unit), but otherwise, what other real advantage(s)?

I probably would prefer using external SSD for something like this myself, so I'm wondering... though I'm probably not in the market for this anytime soon...

_Man_

And if you want to use an external drive with USB 3, you can do that. That's what I'm doing for now while I figure the thing out. I have an M.2 SSD in an enclosure. Yes, it does have three USB ports, but only one is for local storage. The USB-C is for use with a computer as a sound card, and one Type A is a digital audio output, like it's a computer source. Then the other Type A can be connected to a computer, like a USB peripheral, or for local storage.

So, you can use one USB for local storage, or you can use the internal slot, or you can use both. The bottom line is, I don't see a down side to having the option of an internal M.2 SSD for neatness, in addition to external. It has an ip based file transfer option to add files to either drive. So you can log in from any computer on the network and add files to drives in either location.

Once I get things figured out, I anticipate putting the M.2 SSD in the slot, because I can, and shouldn't need to remove it to add content.

It's a fairly complicated unit, and as the trend is these days, the documentation is a bit sparse and not especially well explained. At the same time, it's better than the Cambridge CXN v2, which has little to say about local media. It has a total of two sentences, telling what formats the drive can to be (FAT32 or NTFS) and that compatibility is not guaranteed. That's it.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Ah, ok. That does make a big diff since only one USB port can be used that way.

FWIW, I also wonder how well it manages heat/etc generated by an M.2 SSD (though maybe one could just go w/ a slower M.2 SSD that generates less heat? and whatever else?). That's probably something to be aware of... as my DIY PC build's ASRock mobo doesn't seem quite so great at that aspect... I can definite see a potential heat issue w/ the Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD I use for my PC's main drive -- Samsung's Magician app shows it usually running in the mid-50C's (and considers it "too high") although I haven't noticed any obvious, actual issues in practice so far (after ~3.5 years of use)... and the app's gauge doesn't otherwise suggest it's actually too high (and AFAIK, it's rated for upto ~70C operation). Also, in my case, my entire mobo is probably running hotter than desirable (though seemingly fairly typical for this model).

Still, for a high quality audio component (that outputs analog audio) instead of general PC usage, I do wonder if better heat management/control (and whatever other internal environment control) is needed/desirable anyway and not be overlooked if/when using your own M.2 SSD...

_Man_

 

[JohnRice]

Ah, ok. That does make a big diff since only one USB port can be used that way.

FWIW, I also wonder how well it manages heat/etc generated by an M.2 SSD (though maybe one could just go w/ a slower M.2 SSD that generates less heat? and whatever else?). That's probably something to be aware of... as my DIY PC build's ASRock mobo doesn't seem quite so great at that aspect... I can definite see a potential heat issue w/ the Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD I use for my PC's main drive -- Samsung's Magician app shows it usually running in the mid-50C's (and considers it "too high") although I haven't noticed any obvious, actual issues in practice so far (after ~3.5 years of use)... and the app's gauge doesn't otherwise suggest it's actually too high (and AFAIK, it's rated for upto ~70C operation). Also, in my case, my entire mobo is probably running hotter than desirable (though seemingly fairly typical for this model).

Still, for a high quality audio component (that outputs analog audio) instead of general PC usage, I do wonder if better heat management/control (and whatever other internal environment control) is needed/desirable anyway and not be overlooked if/when using your own M.2 SSD...

_Man_

I have several pci M.2 SSDs and they can definitely get very hot, when you slam them. The thing is, the demands of playing back music files is virtually nothing, and I seriously doubt heat will ever be a problem. The exception would be trying to install a ton of new media in a short time. I expect I would allow a little time to cool after each album if I was going to upload a bunch of stuff. I still haven't tried the ip transfer feature, though. I just accessed it from my computer to see what the interface is, and it's a basic browse/drag and drop type of window. Pretty simple. what I don't know yet is if it provides more indexing features than the method I've always used of connecting the drive to my computer, transferring files, and taking it back to the HT.

 

[JohnRice]

This seems to be a common problem, but complicated components tend to not provide proper information about how everything works. The DMP-A6 is no exception. I'm having to just look around and try to figure out how it all works. I just found the feature that indexes the music stored on local files. I saw nothing at all about that in the manual, and while you can play stuff without doing that, it's just a matter of locating the files. Now I want to do a lot of modifying to the meta data. Playing back local files is an entirely new experience once files have been indexed.

 

[jcroy]

Ah, ok. That does make a big diff since only one USB port can be used that way.

FWIW, I also wonder how well it manages heat/etc generated

More generally on the issue of excess heat, I encountered this when I was watching dvd or bluray rips where I was playing the iso (or vob or m2ts) file straight from an external hard drive connected via usb2 or usb3. After about an hour or so, the heat from the external hard drive was considerable.

(This was less of an issue with playing *.wav or mp3/ogg/etc ... audio files from an external hard drive).

The only way I could find to get around this excess heat issue, was to just copy the video (or audio) files to the internal hard drive of the laptop or desktop computer I was using to play them. So any excess heat was from the actual internal hard drive itself in the computer.


In practice, I've found that generic internal hard drives in laptops or desktops can take a lot more punishment and heat, than external hard drives. An extreme case of this, are the internal hard drives used in DVR boxes used for digital cable television service which are always throwing off excess heat.

Back in the day, I had enough external hard drive failures / brickings that I actively take measures to avoid excess heat buildup in external hard drives.

 

[jcroy]

It's a fairly complicated unit, and as the trend is these days, the documentation is a bit sparse and not especially well explained. At the same time, it's better than the Cambridge CXN v2, which has little to say about local media. It has a total of two sentences, telling what formats the drive can to be (FAT32 or NTFS) and that compatibility is not guaranteed. That's it.

In a more general sense, what I found really annoying about slightly older standalone playback devices, is when more recent video + audio formats/containers or even a drive's format are introduced, which an older playback device was not designed for.

In the case of external hard drives, it is stuff like an older playback device not recognizing an exFAT filesystem on an external hard drive.

At a video/audio file level, it is older playback devices not understanding codecs beyond mpeg1, mpeg2, mp3, mkv, etc ....

Even in the case of a container like mkv, my old western digital WDTV standalone playback unit, did not understand how to decode an mkv file where the underlying video was in the vp9 or av1 codec in 1080p resolution. (VP9 is what youtube videos are encoded in).

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

^Yeah, HDDs definitely generate more heat (and consumes more power to go w/ that) compared to typical (non-NVMe) SSDs... and they're probably more susceptible to failure from that heat.

All my non-NVMe SSDs (though none of them are M.2) run quite cool (usually around mid-20C's according to Samsung's Magician app) though they don't usually get as much load (mostly being 2ndary storage, except when used for video shoots/editing very sporadically) as my NVMe SSD that's used for main/system drive.

Still, yeah, I imagine music playback itself should be on the lower end for heat generation since the bitrates are very small compared to video. I might just go w/ a non-NVMe M.2 SSD to play it safer for this since the extra speed is definitely not needed -- not sure if there's any cost-savings at all though (like there probably used to be several years ago).

_Man_

 

[JohnRice]

^Yeah, HDDs definitely generate more heat (and consumes more power to go w/ that) compared to typical (non-NVMe) SSDs... and they're probably more susceptible to failure from that heat.

All my non-NVMe SSDs (though none of them are M.2) run quite cool (usually around mid-20C's according to Samsung's Magician app) though they don't usually get as much load (mostly being 2ndary storage, except when used for video shoots/editing very sporadically) as my NVMe SSD that's used for main/system drive.

Still, yeah, I imagine music playback itself should be on the lower end for heat generation since the bitrates are very small compared to video. I might just go w/ a non-NVMe M.2 SSD to play it safer for this since the extra speed is definitely not needed -- not sure if there's any cost-savings at all though (like there probably used to be several years ago).

_Man_

M.2 and 2.5” SSDs are basically the same price these days.

I have no idea why video files are being brought up here. These are music only players, and heat simply is not a problem.

 

[JohnRice]

Just to add some specific details. The read speed of a typical 96/24 FLAC file is a whopping 0.35MB/s. That's roughly 1/4,300 of the actual read speed capability of a low end M.2 drive. Unlike platter drives, SSDs generate virtually no heat just by being on, and they generate far less heat being read from than being written to. Any SSD, especially an M.2 can play indefinitely at that rate with zero risk of heat problems.