1) Because I have the Marantz, I do not have a suitable DAC.
2) Don't have an Android, I do have three high spec PCs.
3) Me no understand technology.🙄 I could however make media player work as I wanted, so stopped there.
4) Wired connection, because I can, and then I do not need to bother with wireless. Old skool!
^
(1) There are so many USB DACs out there that it's scary. I have them from Nuforce uDACs, Burson Play, Nuforce HDP, Topping DX, M-Audio stuff, RME ADI2 FS Pro, etc... some of the older ones are Firewire... but for the last eight years I've been buying only USB-2 devices. Once the Audio World woke up to asynchronous USB-2 the gates were opened to 24/96 non lossy data.
(2) Connect your source (PC, Mac, Android Tablet) directly to the DAC ( and AD/DAC) via USB. For Android you need a USB-OTG cable. Some devices need a Windows driver which is readily available by the manufacturer. Android and Mac, being Unix based, don't need no stinkin' driver!
(3) For 2024, I intend to play with my Raspberries. I just got a Raspberry 5, which is overkill, I think I'll use a Raspberry 4. Either build a DIY hat or go with a commerical DAC. We'll see.
(4) Technology. This is DIY Audio... why stop at using an overpriced commercial product when you can be spend a million dollars of your time and keep the Bill Of Materials low? An Android tablet from Costo runs under 200 bucks, less if you get it on sale ( just got one recently ). The SD card runs another 40 bucks. It sure beats the PC and it's SILENT...
(5) I brought up the wireless network connection because all tablets offer only one USB port and so you have to choose between charging or plugging the DAC. I've tried the USB/Power dongles and they are a crap shoot. So, normally I will run the Android tablet off the battery and then use it's wireless to connect. BTW, my Android phone and tablets all have a 512GB secondary uSD card. I use it for many things, including downloading 24/96 music from Tidal. I also have lots of music in the NAS servers, which I mount... those I play with foobar and VLC.
(6) J also have four Windows PCs directly wired to DACs via USB. One of them, the HT set up has a USB to an ASUS Sonar U7 and a copper digital connection to the Emotiva decoder.
I do try to keep things simple (!!) but when faced with lots of female plugs, well, it's hard not to use lots of cables... ;-)
(1) There are so many USB DACs out there that it's scary. I have them from Nuforce uDACs, Burson Play, Nuforce HDP, Topping DX, M-Audio stuff, RME ADI2 FS Pro, etc... some of the older ones are Firewire... but for the last eight years I've been buying only USB-2 devices. Once the Audio World woke up to asynchronous USB-2 the gates were opened to 24/96 non lossy data.
(2) Connect your source (PC, Mac, Android Tablet) directly to the DAC ( and AD/DAC) via USB. For Android you need a USB-OTG cable. Some devices need a Windows driver which is readily available by the manufacturer. Android and Mac, being Unix based, don't need no stinkin' driver!
(3) For 2024, I intend to play with my Raspberries. I just got a Raspberry 5, which is overkill, I think I'll use a Raspberry 4. Either build a DIY hat or go with a commerical DAC. We'll see.
(4) Technology. This is DIY Audio... why stop at using an overpriced commercial product when you can be spend a million dollars of your time and keep the Bill Of Materials low? An Android tablet from Costo runs under 200 bucks, less if you get it on sale ( just got one recently ). The SD card runs another 40 bucks. It sure beats the PC and it's SILENT...
(5) I brought up the wireless network connection because all tablets offer only one USB port and so you have to choose between charging or plugging the DAC. I've tried the USB/Power dongles and they are a crap shoot. So, normally I will run the Android tablet off the battery and then use it's wireless to connect. BTW, my Android phone and tablets all have a 512GB secondary uSD card. I use it for many things, including downloading 24/96 music from Tidal. I also have lots of music in the NAS servers, which I mount... those I play with foobar and VLC.
(6) J also have four Windows PCs directly wired to DACs via USB. One of them, the HT set up has a USB to an ASUS Sonar U7 and a copper digital connection to the Emotiva decoder.
I do try to keep things simple (!!) but when faced with lots of female plugs, well, it's hard not to use lots of cables... ;-)
Ba-Ha! I think my NAS is one TB. I found a working one in a thrift with 4, 1 TB drives, for $5. Couldnt sell it for much more than that, as everyone wants 100 TB - for some reason. There are so many movies latent on the 4 TB unit, I'd never get through them all in this lifetime. I guess I'm just not much of a a fan - of movies, that is. Spending a million $ of my time however...to make this piece of junk work again...
Aurender, best money I ever spent. Tried numerous other solution, rasberry Pi, Mac and PC with solid state and SSD HD, different software, etc, but the Aurender beats them all. As a source it is as good as a very good SACD on my Esoteric X-03. It is excellent as a streamer as well…
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I have a pile of cd's to rip but no hardware to do it with. I would like a streamer that I can connect to the internet and run off my phone. But I doubt I can find one that will rip and store my cd collection too ( probably akin to looking for a crossbow with a sausage maker attached). In my book, bluetooth is for the campfire or pool side. Don't want to go off half cocked which is easy to do in hifi.
Bluesound vault does all of that. I really want a crossbow with a sausage grinder attachment though
Windows Media Player rips CDs.
Forget the streamer, IMHO they are expensive POS marketed to audiophiles that have no clue.
Just use a PC to rip the CD and you can use that as a streamer.
Alternatively, either share the PC's drive, or get an NAS and use that in your LAN. Then use your phone or tablet to load those files, as well as Internet, and then get a nice DAC and you're set.
You can also get a secondary SDcard for your phone/tablet ( * ) and copy those files into your phone/tablet.
That's how I got it set up at home... and I have like 500 LPs stored in my Samsung phone (512GB card), plus my two Samsung tablets as well.
Simple, it's very simple.
(*) Obviously Apple and the newer High End Samsung phones are out of the running with this. Such bulls**t...
I have a pi400 serving music, 38,000 tracks, to any web client or to a slave raspberry pi.
The Pi is not such a bargain now, mini Intel seems to be better, but the pi400 is sweet.
DAC is a Apple USB-C (via an adapter to USB-A) as they are awesome and £9 a go.
But for testing stuff - an old iPod Touch, as it has no earth connection, totally isolated, and the audio is good (unlike my cheap Moto e6, that throws out an almight amount of 450kHz it seems).
I have done away with a PC in leu of a laptop, tablet or phone and none of those have cd drives. Clearly I need to look into this further. I used to store music on an SD card in a lap top that had a cd drive and run it through a Schiit modi dac into my system. Worked great. The card went bad along with the laptop and I got away from digital music for a time. But it is definitely time to get with the program again.
Buy an external CD/DVD drive, download exact audio copy from - https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ , this will rip your CD's to wave files.
Download a music player like AIMP - https://www.aimp.ru/ , it has a built-in audio converter, convert your wave files into Flac. The audio converter uses ffmpeg. You can batch convert the wave files to Flac in one step rather each track individually.
For those using Foobar2000, I stopped using when I found out it was adding distortion to my audio playback. It may not be a lot of distortion, but its audible on the Sound Lab ESL speakers. Switched to using PlayPCMWin or else HQ Player.
PlayPCMWin has an interesting option to pre-attenuate PCM before sending it to the dac. It only offers three choices though. One of them sounds better than others. It is the -6.02dB attenuation option. The other two options are -2dB and -4dB. These are useful for preventing intersample overs in the dac, and or for setting the input level to an FPGA based DSD modulator. The thing that is special about -6.02dB as opposed to something like 4.00dB or 6.00dB is that 6.02dB implies exactly a divide by 2 mathematical operation. That being the case it can be accomplished by using a bit shift. In that case the bit pattern of the PCM remains exactly the same, its only shifted but otherwise unchanged. It means there is no numerical approximation needed for the volume level attenuation.
Other than that I am using an experimental Andrea Mori DSD dac setup, but with Acko Labs clocks at the moment. Soon I am hoping to try a prototype of what is probably going to be the "Sonic Empire" version of Andrea's DSD dac efforts. I am told its the best sounding DSD dac they have made yet. Already the version here now is far ahead of anything available from companies like Topping. These DSD dacs are probably quite a bit closer to Bruno Putzeys Mola dacs. Really exceptional sound is possible if the dac boards are well integrated into a system.
PlayPCMWin has an interesting option to pre-attenuate PCM before sending it to the dac. It only offers three choices though. One of them sounds better than others. It is the -6.02dB attenuation option. The other two options are -2dB and -4dB. These are useful for preventing intersample overs in the dac, and or for setting the input level to an FPGA based DSD modulator. The thing that is special about -6.02dB as opposed to something like 4.00dB or 6.00dB is that 6.02dB implies exactly a divide by 2 mathematical operation. That being the case it can be accomplished by using a bit shift. In that case the bit pattern of the PCM remains exactly the same, its only shifted but otherwise unchanged. It means there is no numerical approximation needed for the volume level attenuation.
Other than that I am using an experimental Andrea Mori DSD dac setup, but with Acko Labs clocks at the moment. Soon I am hoping to try a prototype of what is probably going to be the "Sonic Empire" version of Andrea's DSD dac efforts. I am told its the best sounding DSD dac they have made yet. Already the version here now is far ahead of anything available from companies like Topping. These DSD dacs are probably quite a bit closer to Bruno Putzeys Mola dacs. Really exceptional sound is possible if the dac boards are well integrated into a system.
Not only does windows media player rip CDs, but it fills in the tag data and names the tracks, which is important if you have a library. You need an internet connection so it can look up that information. Otherwise, you need "MP3tag" to enter and edit the file tags. You will want to check the file type and data rate because it may default to 128kbps MP3, which is marginal quality. I'm not sure media player sets the cover art in each file, just one for the album folder, so you may need MP3tag anyway. A small 300x300 image is not a big overhead.
