WTFPLAY

[Soniclife]

Unfortunately I don't have evidence as of now.

Then don't make the claim then, or defend it.

P.S. There are plenty of qualified people posting here, people making baseless claims will drive them away.

 

[manueljenkin]

Seems less than useless, text based gui plays files from local storage only , what do you even as remote control?

Also no network so you can’t use Remote Desktop or VNC or similar from a tablet to control

It's task is to play music. It does it. It is functional. It may not have any of the features or input modes you want but it certainly isn't useless since it does what it is meant to - playing music. Comfort/usability is subjective, I prefer commandline since I find it quicker to use than keyboard and mouse or touchscreen. Just a few tabs and I'm in my music, and the relevant shortcuts to play pause or rewind music.

 

[Mnyb]

I don’t have the equipment, but if you have it, done in an hour just measure an USB DAC on it’s analog output, done deal it’s should be visible in Sinad THD FR etc I love to see DAC’s with sinad of 120dB getting even better ?

Wait a minute is not USB audio asynchronous so unless something is severely broken it’s the same from any source...
But if some gremlins sneak in ( aka “disturbances” of unknown nature ) they should show up in a simple measurement.

So a kind soul on the forum that do have some kind of analyser , does not have to be AP to begin with just something that’s better than a human ...

 

[ElNino]

I think the reason these specialty playback systems for Linux are so popular is because it's way too easy to configure the Linux audio chain in a way that inadvertently performs resampling, where you don't realize that it's happening. This is particularly true of playback chains involving MPD or Jack.

That being said, for programs like this that talk to ALSA directly, there shouldn't be a difference. The ALSA playback interface isn't particularly modern, but internally it uses a ring buffer properly. I don't understand the rationale for why some people claim that buffer sizes change the sound quality as the WTFplay docs mention, unless you've got old school hardware using isochronous transfers.

 

[manueljenkin]

I don’t have the equipment, but if you have it, done in an hour just measure an USB DAC on it’s analog output, done deal it’s should be visible in Sinad THD FR etc I love to see DAC’s with sinad of 120dB getting even better ?

Wait a minute is not USB audio asynchronous so unless something is severely broken it’s the same from any source...
But if some gremlins sneak in ( aka “disturbances” of unknown nature ) they should show up in a simple measurement.

So a kind soul on the forum that do have some kind of analyser , does not have to be AP to begin with just something that’s better than a human ...

Not sure what is broken in the nx4dsd I bought after the glowing positive review here. Drivers installed, so definitely in asynchronous mode. There are changes, if I have the gear like a decent ADC, I would likely be able measure it.

 

[manueljenkin]

I think the reason these specialty playback systems for Linux are so popular is because it's way too easy to configure the Linux audio chain in a way that inadvertently performs resampling, where you don't realize that it's happening. This is particularly true of playback chains involving MPD or Jack.

That being said, for programs like this that talk to ALSA directly, there shouldn't be a difference. The ALSA playback interface isn't particularly modern, but internally it uses a ring buffer properly. I don't understand the rationale for why some people claim that buffer sizes change the sound quality as the WTFplay docs mention, unless you've got old school hardware using isochronous transfers.

It is alsa, UAC compliant and asynchronous.

 

[Killingbeans]

Armchair opinions, thinking every audible parameter is covered with a limited subset of measurements (most of them static or steady state) isn't common sense either.

Don't get me wrong. I love music, but you give it way too much credit IMO. It's not a big mystery.

If something "audible" doesn't show up in measurements, do a controlled listening test. And if it disappears under those conditions, that's when common sense should be applied.

Science often can't prove that something can never occur.

Science assumes that anything can happen, but that some things are very, very (very... very) unlikely to do so. If some freak state does occur, it will be highly unstable and probably cease to exist before you even have a chance to detect it.

They may anytime be over written.

They are rarely over written these days. Mostly just refined. I doubt Planck's constant or the speed of light gets written over any time soon

 

[manueljenkin]

Don't get me wrong. I love music, but you give it way too much credit IMO. It's not a big mystery.

If something "audible" doesn't show up in measurements, do a controlled listening test. And if it disappears under those conditions, that's when common sense should be applied.



Science assumes that anything can happen, but that some things are very, very (very... very) unlikely to do so. If some freak state does occur, it will be highly unstable and probably cease to exist before you even have the chance to detect it.



They are rarely over written these days. Mostly just refined. I doubt Planck's constant or the speed of light gets written over any time soon

Comparing this to Planck's constant or speed of light is strawman-hat argument since they are direct physical phenomenon which have now been well understood to quite a good level, while audio is cognition related. There is still plenty of research happening on cognition, especially audio. Music isn't really a mystery, cognition is. It's quite hard to probe and correlate what performs what functions there and we only get a black box view, and ears being super tied to the brain doesn't help it much. Spatial properties and object detection is still something not well understood beyond a basic abstraction. The door is wide open in this area for potential changes.

Also don't forget there were so much abstractions earlier before we got to the level of quantum physics understanding we have today. We are not sticking to the John Dalton's model anymore which probably was the best approximation a couple of centuries ago.

 

[manueljenkin]

Then don't make the claim then, or defend it.

P.S. There are plenty of qualified people posting here, people making baseless claims will drive them away.

Well telling there shouldn't be a difference is a claim too! And cognition still being an area of constant experimentation, there's no way you can conclude things today. At best, you can have correlations.

Burden of proof must be on either ways of claim. And again, you can't prove there will be no difference without getting cognition solved.

And if you want to consider this place as completely scientific, why is there a subjective part on the review side, why can't it just be charts. And also no certification from any trusted committee either, not even citations of research papers, so most things, especially correlations are up in the air, despite claiming to be a scientific forum.

"Plenty of qualified people". Need to know what's the qualification criteria, and how much of it is certifiable by some reliable source like IEEE.

 

[Sukie]

audio is cognition related. There is still plenty of research happening on cognition, especially audio. Music isn't really a mystery, cognition is.

Sorry but I think you're confusing different issues/areas. Cognition has absolutely nothing to do with audio equipment. It has a lot to do with how we perceive that which we hear, but offers no advance in the understanding of what audio equipment does. Instead it offers advances in what the brain does. You cannot possibly assess the merits of a piece of audio equipment through cognition.

You then go on to use the word "music". Do you mean music or do you mean audio? The two are not the same. I would suggest that music is a mystery (or has an element of mystery to it), but audio does not. Audio can be measured and known.

 

[manueljenkin]

Sorry but I think you're confusing different issues/areas. Cognition has absolutely nothing to do with audio equipment. It has a lot to do with how we perceive that which we hear, but offers no advance in the understanding of what audio equipment does. Instead it offers advances in what the brain does. You cannot possibly assess the merits of a piece of audio equipment through cognition.

You then go on to use the word "music". Do you mean music or do you mean audio? The two are not the same. I would suggest that music is a mystery (or has an element of mystery to it), but audio does not. Audio can be measured and known.

You certainly can't make claims on what measurements correlate to perceivable changes, the weights for different performance metric on audibility and what type of parameters need to be measured additionally unless you understand cognition properly. A big part of understanding cognition is to check what types of input it is responsive and not responsive to. Cognition is also relating to precision of detectability of different parameters (including non-desirable influences from parameters), and the location estimation is a use case for which the brain developed to this precision.

 

[Sukie]

You certainly can't make claims on what measurements correlate to perceivable changes, the weights for different performance metric on audibility and what type of parameters need to be measured additionally unless you understand cognition properly. A big part of understanding cognition is to check what types of input it is responsive and not responsive to. Cognition is also relating to precision of detectability of different parameters (including non-desirable influences from parameters), and the location estimation is a use case for which the brain developed to this precision.

This still has nothing to do with the assessment of audio equipment. You cannot assess something on the possible cognitive response that it might engender. Obviously it's a valid area of study and is extremely interesting, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how a particular piece of equipment works.

I might prefer a red DAC and HPA, you might prefer a blue one. This preference has a real effect on cognition. The red one sounds better to me because when I look at red things I perceive that thing in a favourable light. This is a real and measurable phenomena, it's just that it says absolutely nothing about the actual performance of the DAC and HPA.

The measurements on this site tell us everything that we need to know about the performance of audio equipment. What they don't tell us is how that equipment is perceived by each person in a real-life setting. These two areas are both valid areas of research, but they shouldn't be conflated.

 

[q3cpma]

It's task is to play music. It does it. It is functional. It may not have any of the features or input modes you want but it certainly isn't useless since it does what it is meant to - playing music. Comfort/usability is subjective, I prefer commandline since I find it quicker to use than keyboard and mouse or touchscreen. Just a few tabs and I'm in my music, and the relevant shortcuts to play pause or rewind music.

If you want an actually simple and free software music player, look into my signature. But as it is actually simple, there's no interface other than IPC; a TUI can never be called simple, as everything related to terminals (curse, termcap/terminfo and termios) is an incredibly complex mess.
After that, just install a light distribution like Alpine and you're set.

 

[Killingbeans]

Comparing this to Planck's constant or speed of light is strawman-hat argument since they are direct physical phenomenon which have now been well understood to quite a good level, while audio is cognition related.

Strawman? Am I the one who's suddenly switching claims between audio reproduction/sound waves and auditory perception/cognition?

Music isn't really a mystery, cognition is.

I completely agree. But what does the "transparency and details" of a music player have to do with cognition?

Am I getting this right?: If two different audio players output two audio signals that are measurably identical but sound different to you, it's beacuse the measurements are missing something related to cognition that is still unknown to science? And expectation bias is completely out of the picture?

 

[manueljenkin]

The number of tests being done here cover a very minimal subset of the total number of parameters that determine a signal's behavior. Simple. You don't have enough tests to conclusively say the full performance of the device with relation to reproduction of a real sampled signal of recorded music. At best all that is being done here is a few static/steady-state tests, most of them at fixed amplitude, barely anything correlates to real transients, while music is quite transient and significantly varying behavior in frequency and amplitude with time. And you certainly can't associate weights to parameters on what is the most audible and discernible and what is indiscernible unless you understood cognition limits properly.

Also where's the official certification and citations to call your club to be "scientific". It's just a claim in the air.

Tl,dr: You can't conclude things, especially relating to audibility limits, with the limited set of measurements being done here.

 

[Killingbeans]

At best all that is being done here is a few static/steady-state tests, most of them at fixed amplitude, barely anything correlates to real transients, while music is quite transient and significantly varying behavior in frequency and amplitude with time.

Slew rate? And if not, what other crucial parameters are we missing?

You keep mentioning steady state and transient behaviour, but give absolutely no suggestions of what it should mean for measurements.

And you certainly can't associate weights to parameters on what is the most audible and discernible and what is indiscernible unless you understood cognition limits properly.

That's where controlled listening tests come in. They cut through all of that like a hot knife through butter.

Also where's the official certification and citations to call your club to be "scientific". It's just a claim in the air.

I see the 'science' part of ASR as nothing more than a middle finger aimed at the sea of superstition, delusion and snake oil that this hobby seems to be soaking in. It could be called 'Audio Data Review' for all I care. I don't see any claims on this site saying that it is representing a certified scientific organization? I'm just a technician, and I have never claimed to be anything else.

 

[q3cpma]

Also where's the official certification and citations to call your club to be "scientific". It's just a claim in the air.

See Floyd Toole's handbook "Sound Reproduction: Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms" that's the reference - not blindly followed, not undisputed, but still the reference - for a lot of work done here.
Here's a little introduction: https://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/sound-reproduction

On the subject of electrical signal, everything is much simpler: just bring the least linear/non-linear/time domain distorsion and you're good.
On the subject of digital audio, it's even simpler: just decode it properly and apply proper dither if needed; the decoding part being done by libraries used by music player developers, it's not like there can be a significant difference in that part.

 

[BDWoody]

The number of tests being done here cover a very minimal subset of the total number of parameters that determine a signal's behavior.

Can you describe what tests are missing, and how to perform them?

Looks like between this and the jitterbug, you've got your work cut out for you

 

[solderdude]

Armchair opinions, thinking every audible parameter is covered with a limited subset of measurements (most of them static or steady state) isn't common sense either.

You would rather see a testsignal that looked more like this..

 

[R8ssweisse]

If you sense a difference in sound quality between the playback software, it's worth trying to visualize the difference in the DAC output.
There are several software packages that can be used for this purpose, and I find DeltaWave matching to be very stable and excellent.

DeltaWave's RMS and DF Metric are sensitive to the measurement environment, and the results can be a few dB blurry, but I thought it was possible to figure out the characteristics of the software after multiple measurements.
One of the things that tend to be different depending on the playback software is the "Delta Phase" graph.