Its been another month since i looked here for Wavestream news. One day we seem to be close ,ironing out the few last bugs and then,Silence. Any good news Paul ? Is it time to face the fact that the PWD MKII is a great DAC but not the one box streaming solution all us Bridge purchasers and PS audio envisioned.? Is it time to start thinking Rendu/Moon Mind/Orbiter/ Cyrus as our separate streaming answer?
We had the Bridge And our dedicated audiophile player- Elyric Music Manager. Now, no one talks about Elyric except to mention it is no longer the player of choice and is off the upgrade path, as he sits here now using IPENG HD as the player with his old Squeezebox Touch into the coaxial input of the PWD II, wondering how they were able to come up with such a rock solid product years ago for gapless streaming and internet radio.
Or is this one of the situations, where its best not to just come right out and say you should have taken that $700 you spent on the bridge and put it toward a renderer that never hiccups or freezes and just works every time and instead just let everyone figure it out themselves and eventually one by one abandon the bridge in place and purchase something that works? Is this where we are?
Lstack
Gosh, I hope not. I use streaming with the bridge as do many others on a daily basis without a problem. No, gapless still doesn’t work, but it’s a great sounding medium for many.
WaveStream is plugging along, sorry to say it isn’t happening as quickly as we’d like.
I do appreciate the frustration that gapless doesn’t work, never has, and without WaveStream or a V2 Bridge won’t.
There are close to 2000 Bridges in use with PWD’s in the world. Certainly some have absolutely legitimate gripes about some of the hassles making it work - hiccups and freezes recognized - but many of these problems can be traced back to the networks Bridges are running on. Still others can be traced back to one of the modules in the Bridge crashing.
It isn’t perfect but I don’t believe it’s as dire as some would have it.
Just my opinion. I’ll try and update more on WaveStream. We just had another release, bugs found, another release by the weekend.
I have been using the bridge as my primary music source since it became available and in general it works well and sounds good. I play CD quality and hi rez music and mostly just enjoy the music. Improvements to the PWD are now incidental to me and no longer my primary focus. I could name six flaws that could be fixed to make this a better product, but by now I just accept them. The primary functionality is good enough for me and SQ is actually excellent. In my case my room acoustics are now the weakest link and so my focus has moved there.
- Gapless 2. IPad eLyric crashes on a particular album. Just happens to be one of my favorite albums 3. Saved play lists don’t work for me they save but i never see them again. 4. Aif files are not supported 5. Track ratings 6. Some album listings don’t display well in eLyric . Could be a little smarter.
@admin You know Paul, I have been wondering about the same thing: How many of the Bridge streaming problems can be traced to the LAN’s & computers running them as opposed to the Bridge itself?
One of the reasons the W4S approach of a self-contained system is to avoid the LAN & Storage variable.
@macrel
I know this has been said here before but seriously, give Jriver a shot. Most of your list would go away. On my system, JRiver along with JRemote works like a dream. There is a learning curve but it’s worth it. Now gapless on the other hand …
@amsco15 That is true. JRiver is the way to go. Their 30 Day Free Trial period is the way to go. A friend of mine got 45 days free and then bought.
Thanks for the update Paul. I was not referring to gapless as my major concern. To me its the hiccups and freezes and going silent after a couple hours requiring resets to get it back that are most annoying. As far as the “maybe its the network or computer theory goes” , I use the exact same computer, network router and ethernet cable and just unplug it from the bridge and plug it into a $200 SB Touch and it will stream music nonstop without a hitch from my music stored on my computer or the internet radio stations until the cows come home without ever stopping for any reason. So it isn’t like this is some far fetched dream.
If I owned a high end amp which occasionally just went silent, or needed to be reset every few days in order to start working again , I would get rid of it no matter how good it sounded when it was working. To me a stereo from the most basic to the highest end is just an appliance , if it doesn’t consistently work, kinda like a $5000 high end range that occasionally doesn’t heat up and cook food, its out. Yes maybe i can pull the range out from the wall and pull the plug to reset it, and maybe then check its software version and let it reinitialize and allow it to realize its sole purpose in life is to heat up and cook things and be damn good at it, all without requiring me to take night classes to become an network communications engineer.
Yes, when its all in sync, and EMM or Jriver is the player and the Bridge is humming along, it does sound cleaner and less veiled than the Touch/Logitech Media Server combo as it should for 15x the cost. The main difference for me is when i unplug the bridge ethernet cable out of frustration because it locked up or went silent again or got out of sync and plug it into the Touch instead and change to the LMS , that is the last time the music gets interrupted and also the last time i need to do anything more than just turn it on to hear music.
If you told us today that there is a V2 bridge available that is as rock stable as a Sonos or Squeezebox as a streamer , you would have my money this afternoon to overnight it to me. This isn’t about money its about reliability.
I drank the PS Audio “audiophile one box Dac/Streamer solution” cool aid like thousands of others, and thought here is the logical high end replacement for the Touch finally. Yes it sounds better, but the basic expectation of it needing to be at least as reliable as the device you are upgrading from, is its shortcoming.
Perfectly reasonable and well stated.
It continues to fascinate me that computers are so difficult to control; they only do what each low level instruction they receive tells them to. Yet, the control software in automobiles, mobile phones, personal computers, etc. routinely have major issues.
We became very spoiled with the simple logic circuits controlling CD and DVD players and the like. All audio equipment, as well as phones, etc., should work this well.
Others have suggested a new Bridge. This may indeed be the best route.
Elk said: It continues to fascinate me that computers are so difficult to control; they only do what each low level instruction they receive tells them to.
Funny, this is my wife's lament about me.
@lstack
I have owned the PWD with the bridge for a while now. Went though a bunch of steps to get it working. ELyric presented lots of problems but switching to JRiver and JRemote solved all the problems except gapless! I might have a hiccup once during a heavy listening weekend but it is always easily solved. Considering the potential failure points (computer, switch, wifi…) I consider streaming audio to my PWD very reliable. In my opinion, the only problem left to solve is gapless.
Agree with amsco15 - we are indeed waiting for the gapless solution via wavestream, but J River 19 with the Bridge is extremely stable and trouble-free. It is true that the interface could be a little simpler, but their help forums are great and it’s really not hard to get comfy with it. It does indeed work just fine, and I have really had zero stability issues even with their (almost) daily new builds of version 19. It took me a while to warm up to it, b/c I liked the simplicity of Elyric, but now I would not go back.
I don’t care much about gapless, but playlists that disappear and playback freezes do bother me. I’d return a record that skipped, I see no reason to accept that in a digital file playback. I did move to Jriver for Mac, but found that the remote iPad app was as troublesome as elyric. Oddly, it usually worked fine running from my iMac. But, the selling point of the DAC/Bridge was to take the computer out of the loop, right? I’ll concede the problem may be related to my network, and maybe someone who knows something about networking could troubleshoot that. But I don’t know enough about it, and I don’t have the time to figure it out and the desire to pay someone to figure it out (if I could find someone who really knew what they were talking about). I’m not an equipment geek who always wants to fiddle with the settings, I just want to listen to music.
So, for about the price of the Bridge I invested in, I bought a Sonore Orbiter. Hardly ever have a problem, iPeng works near-flawlessly on my iPad, and there’s no discernable difference to my ears in sound quality both in distributing music throughout the house (Klipsch in-ceiling speakers, PSBs in my office, KEFs in the main audio/video room).
Wish I had know that before I bought the Bridge, which I don’t believe was marketed as “Hey, this will probably work, unless your network isn’t quite right for reasons we can’t tell you,” but rather as a non-computer based solution to distributed digital playback.
The problem here is that the software industry is able to release less-than perfect products in which the bugs get worked out, sort of, in new releases that we may or may not have to pay for and consumers don’t seem to mind that. Or, rather, they’ve gotten used to it. As if they have any choice.
I agree that any other product in the hi-fi chain (a turntable, an amp whatever) that consistently had glitches for whatever technical reasons that could only be fixed by adding another vendor’s product might be cause for thought by the manufacturer.
Soyka0120, I do agree with you about the situation when using eLyric. I really liked it and thought it had great promise, but it is indisputable that it never quite got there. And by the time Paul & co. made the decision to start working with J River a whole lot of time had passed. As far as the network goes, I agree with you there too. Paul’s vision had lots to recommend it, but once you start integrating people’s home networks into your architecture, you open yourself up to a thousand possible problems that are very hard to pin down, and you end up having to be in the business of helping many non-technical end users get their networks right, which is not a good place to be. I am definitely not saying that PSA didn’t make a good few missteps, for sure they did. But at this point, with the admittedly not minor exception of gapless play not working, I do feel that the Bridge with J River is a very stable product, and should work just fine at any resolution on a reasonably robust network.
For those for whom gapless is important and who use PCs (sorry–I’m more of a Mac guy myself when I have a choice), consider giving foobar2000 a try. I installed it, along with the UPnP renderer and streaming plug-ins, last weekend and it played much more reliably than JRMC (which, admittedly, is om some ways more full-featured as a server/player, although foobar seems to do some things JRiver doesn’t). With the streaming plug-in it will play to the PWD gaplessly. I programmed three hours of gapless 176/24 flac files. It stopped in the middle of songs twice (just had to reselect the song for it to restart) but otherwise played flawlessly and without gaps. So far I have not had any problems with 96/24 and below. This is on a first generation Core i3 desktop running Windows 7 64 home premium. I used monkeymote4foobar to control it on my iPad. Monkeymote cost $3 but foobar2000 itself is free. Worth a try IMHO, at least until (and unless) Wavestream becomes usable. Foobar is at foobar2000.org and the plug-ins are on the components page (download and install the two plug-ins that start with UPnP, although I’m not sure you actually need the renderer one to stream). Others on the boards are much more knowledgeable about foobar (and have been advocating it for some time–wish I had tried it earlier but I really did not want to have to learn yet another program) but I was able to set it up without a lot of difficulty.
Maybe I am not quite the computer/ networking/expert you guys are or maybe my bridge is defective. I have no problems with the sound quality or the bridge or Jriver or Jplay right up until it freezes or goes silent. Even then , I have been resetting for so long that I have the PWD/Server/router/network switch rebooting quite down to a science now and can usually restore it back to running within about 10 to 15 minutes… every one of which is one too many. I have no interest in a stereo that needs to be approached with a toolbelt on…Its easier to leave the SB Touch connected since all it knows how to do is play music. You turn it on , it goes and it never stops streaming until you press the stop button. It doesn’t care about a heavy listening weekend or month. That is the kind of reliability and seamless interfacing I expect when i pay 15 times the amount the Touch cost.
Just because yours never stops or freezes or hiccups doesn’t mean that all the people with the hundreds of bridge posts saying the same thing as me or a myriad of other quirks, are all having a mass delusion. Lots have already given up and just bought a different streamer that just works and are plugging into a PWD II input and I suspect that is where i am heading next too if a few more months of no Wavestream occurs
Maybe it happens once in a week, maybe a couple days in a row then fine for another week. I used to think the silent server would close the loop and solve the instability, then it was Wavestream to push the music to the player. That was all over a year ago. Now I am starting to think that its time to just use the PWD as a Dac and move on as others have to a different external streaming solution.
lstack said: Just because yours never stops or freezes or hiccups doesn't mean that all the people with the hundreds of bridge posts saying the same thing as me or a myriad of other quirks, are all having a mass delusion.
I hope you do not think we do not believe you. There is no question many are having significant problems. Sadly you are one of them.
Others are just sharing their experiences. Keep in mind a number of them worked hard to get to the point where their playback system is stable. They understand and can relate to your frustration.
If only we knew what to do to resolve problems on each system and configuration.
I never bought a Bridge because of these issues and have a PWT.
I’m in the same situation as Elk; I’m very happy with a PWT but waiting for bridge issues to be sorted.
Maybe I can help with your network issues by describing where I’ve got to, having no knowledge of networks when I begun. I started into computer audio by buying an Apple TV (ATV) to play iTunes music stored on a remote computer using a wireless network. Very flaky to start, improved when I added an Airport extreme (AE) wired to the computer to do wireless transmission. Still many dropouts, ‘will-not-start’, and ‘cannot-find-library’ issues. At this stage there were 3 computers, a cable modem/hub, an AE, and an ATV all transmitting/receiving, as well as 4 iDevices (phones and iPads). I then got a second AE which I placed within wireable distance of the hifi, and set this up in bridge mode. Better performance, but still gave occasional dropouts etc. Next I rationalised / simplified the whole network by getting a couple of ethernet switches: I placed one near the computer and wired it the prime AE and the computers so I could switch off their wireless transmission. The other switch I wired to the AE acting as a bridge, to the ATV (and switched off its wireless transmission) and other audio/visual devices requiring an internet connection. The final step (and the most complicated) was to turn off the wireless transmission in the hub supplied by my ISP, and also the router functionality in the hub (I’d found that the IP addresses assigned to my collection of devices was a real mishmash). I connected a single wire from the hub WAN port to the prime AE WAN port. This AE became the sole router in the network, with a connection from a LAN port to the switch providing the internet connection route for all other devices.
This learning curve process happened over a period of about 3 years. The result? Absolutely rock solid network performance and faster response when accessing a very large iTunes library.
Hope this helps. I’m sure much of the detail will be irrelevant to your situation but I’d recommend the general approach.
Enjoy the music,
David