Archphile - An Archlinux Based Audiophile Distribution for Raspberry Pi and Udoo Quad

Comparing PCM and DSD is pointless, second one has far more 'natural' way of encoding music data..

For whatever "natural" means. I guess in this context it means "hard to process", as in requiring it to be converted to PCM for processing, and then back again...

Someone hears a difference, someone else does not, someone just claims to hear.. but this is no proof or argument..

Indeed...
 
The human brain is 1-bit digital and not analog devices..
I'm not talking about how ear works..

I think this analogy is being stretched to the snapping point.

Even if your analogy was true, the DSD bit stream never reaches your brain - what the speaker sees is a continuous analog waveform. There is no way (apart from HF noise and frequency response irregularities) to tell from the speaker output if the signal driving the speaker came from a PCM or DSD source.

Anyway, this has very little to do with Archphile...
 
Hi all,

I thought that it might be interested to share with you my experience so far with DSD reproduction alternatives:

MPD package with SACD/DVD-A ISO support - Blog - Archphile

MPD with native DSD mode support - Blog - Archphile

Although native DSD support is still under development, it appears that SACD ISO support works ok for many Archphile users.

However, in my opinion the best practice is always to convert the ISO to dsf files. This way you can get rid of the multichannel part of the ISO and free up disk space.

For anyone that wants to test the sacd ISO package, please not that it's an unofficial and experimental package. In addition it's not vanilla MPD but an MPD fork created by Maxim V. Anisiutkin.
 
Hi all,

after a long time I am really happy to announce that I am working on the next Archphile image. There is no ETA yet, but I believe that it will be ready in the next 30 days.

Some worth noting details:

- Support of ODROID C1+
- End of support of the old Raspberry Pi (arm6)
- latest MPD 0.19.11 with the less possible configuration options enabled for a minimal result
- latest MPD fork with SACD ISO support (not installed by default)
- latest YMPD from github sources with various changes (the most noticeable being dirble support)
- replacement of shairport with shairport-sync (ios9 compatible)
- many backend improvements (custom IRQ affinity for each board, setting MPD to use 1 core for all it's threads (with taskset), option for usb disk sleep etc)

Last but not least I have prepared some unofficial packages that will be in playground repository for squeezelite and LMS. I will not support these packages but feel free to experiment with them as it will be very easy for MPD and squeezelite to coexist in the same system.

Currently I am doing all development and testing on my new Odroid C1+ and in the next days I will start transfering all the optimization to the RPI, Cubox-i and Udoo Quad.

There is also a blog post explaining some of the above features, but it's already outdated as I have added stuff after that:

http://archphile.org/blog/details-on-upcoming-archphile-version

Cheers,

Michael
 
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