It's less complex to achieve this with relatively low bitrate audio data I suspect. Witness Netflix streaming from SD to 4K/HDR depending on line conditions and equipment. As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention" and in the video streaming world, adaptive compression has been in use for years. Neil certainly did owe the community some explanation for what happened even if the writing was clearly on the wall.Īs for the XStream technology, well, I guess it's about time. It's no surprise that this type of explanation is coming given the 8+ months since the shutting down of the Pono download store. Instead of quoting the text, check out this Steve Hoffman Forum post to read. Unfortunately, I think you need to be a member of Pono to log in, but NY posted what looks like his "swan song" to Pono on April 20th here. However, I've seen some new articles about Neil Young and his next venture into "XStream" an adaptive streaming system that dynamically shapes the recompression of music data depending on bandwidth. I noticed remarkably little being said about high-res streaming like TIDAL or MQA. Looking over the AXPONA reports from this past week, it looks like things are pretty tame in the Audiophile Industry. video production in spite of technological advancements in both. The juxtaposition shows a sad dissociation between the quality of modern audio vs. On the other hand, in the world of video, if you have a 4K/HDR TV, you owe it to yourself and loves ones to watch BBC's Planet Earth II! Seriously, this is likely going to be the most impressive looking documentary for years. Yet again, I wish it wasn't so dynamically compressed for those of us with hi-fi gear. This past week I've been enjoying Canadian Ron Sexsmith's new album The Last Rider(2017, DR7). Should at least save some folks the hassle of finding a device driver. I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere testifies that this driver "sounds bad" based on sighted listening though :-). No concern with temporal issues like jitter which as I have discussed in the past many times is a function of the asynchronous device and would not vary with streamer device or in this case the device driver unless there's some severe bug in the programming. Again, notice the accuracy of the objective measurements indicating no difference in the frequency domain and very low harmonic and intermodulation distortions. I hear no difference with playback using this driver compared to the OEM TEAC driver with ASIO or using the Raspberry Pi 3 as streamer through my main system. I spent an evening enjoying a few familiar albums - Kind of Blue, High Lonesome Sound, and being a child of the '70/80's - Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. Good demonstration of "bit-perfect" playback. As usual, JRiver does a good job with decoding DST-compressed DSD files. No problem with DoP output of DSD64 and DSD128 to the TEAC DAC. The main difference these days is that I have an ASUS nVidia GTX 1080 strapped in there for 4K gaming. The HTPC with Windows 10 CU installed is essentially my Skylake build from late 2015 with i5-6500 CPU, 16GB DDR4 RAM, using the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 motherboard. HTPC (Windows 10 UAC2 driver) -> 12' USB 2.0 cable -> TEAC UD-501 -> 6' RCA interconnect -> Focusrite Forte ADC -> 6' USB cable -> Windows 10 measurement laptop Remember, as far as I'm concerned, "bits are bits" so long as we don't have any major timing errors (like buffer underruns) and with an asynchronous interface and a reputable DAC with stable clocking, jitter will typically not be be a problem (as demonstrated many times before).įor the measurements today, I'll just use the TEAC UD-501 DAC installed by Windows 10 in the image above. Very simply, I just wanted to put up some measurements today to demonstrate how well the native drivers work and see if there are any unexpected anomalies. Companies have been releasing their own drivers since the beginning. Of course, this doesn't mean the Windows world has been deprived of high quality sound. Remember, "UAC2" has been out since 2009 as an evolution of the "UAC1" standard from 1998. I updated my home theater PC and when I plugged in my TEAC UD-501 DAC to the USB port (with no TEAC driver installed), Windows detected it and proceeded with the device set-up automatically.Ĭonsidering that Mac OS X and Linux have had "native" drivers for years, I guess it's about time that Microsoft finally got the job done. Microsoft's USB Audio Class 2 (UAC2) native Windows driver has been released with the recent Windows 10 Creators Update ("CU", version 1703, build 15063.138).
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