Admins: Please move as/if appropriate…
Did not see this elsewhere on the forum – Here is a rave from Audiophilia:
Best regards,
Scott Ellis
Thank you, Scott!
Thank you for the heads-up on the review, Scott. It was quite good.
One point, however, on its content.
Unless they made a change from the original Bridge, it isn’t necessary to send .DSF files via DoP to the Bridge II. I have a set-up with an external hard drive attached to my PC and use JRiver to send the files wirelessly to my Xfinity Gateway and then via Ethernet to the Bridge. I do not check the DoP box in JRiver and the Bridge sees the file as DSD64 on the input side.
I honestly don’t know if there’s a difference in sound quality in sending the .DSF files natively versus in a PCM wrapper but to me simpler is usually better.
Bridge I did not handle DSD files at all; JRiver could not have played them without transcoding to PCM. B2 handles single-rate DSD via DoP. At least that’s what I learned when I got B2 a while back and how I run my setup (NAS via MinimServer with DSD played over DoP). The screen on the DS does distinguish between DoP and native DSD, so something’s going on here that I don’t understand. What exactly does an Xfinity Gateway do?
Addendum: I just checked the DS manual, page 1 under “DoP.” DoP is required when using any S/PDIF input, which includes the Bridge.
This is perplexing for two reasons. Firstly, if this wasn’t possible with the original Bridge, then how did I obtain the above photo from my DS DAC? Secondly, I’m not able now to reproduce this. The only difference is that the above was with JRiver 20 and I’m now using JRiver 21.
Weird! I’m confident of my recollections about B1 because I had to keep DSD files in a separate folder, not indexed by MinimServer. Otherwise if I accidentally tried to play a DSD file, things got very confused. Maybe Ted can explain since he uses JRiver as well as knowing DS inside and out.
The Bridges are more like I2S than S/PDIF as far as the FPGA is concerned and I2S inputs support raw DSD as well as DoP.
All paths to the DS that are bit perfect and have the required bandwidth support DoP (after all that’s the purpose of DoP.) I.e. if the Bridge doesn’t mess with the bits then the DoP can get to the FPGA just fine.
Therefor both Bridges support DSD via DoP.
Older versions of the DS’s OS’s didn’t display “DSD” vs. “DoP”. (The first versions didn’t support raw DSD anywhere so only DoP was possible and it displayed as DSD.) I believe Yale was the first OS that displayed “DoP” vs “DSD”, tho it could have been Pike’s Peak.
JRiver MC has explicit options for wrapping DSD in DoP, the options for DLNA and non DLNA sources are in different places. For DLNA you have to open JRiver MC 20 or 21’s options, select “… add or configure DLNA servers…”, select the BOTTOM advanced, and select “Bitstream DSD” (I no longer have JRiver MC 19 on my system to check where the option is in it.)
To the best of my recollection you can’t talk foobar2000 into wrapping DSD in DoP when using DLNA, but I could be wrong.
Tho I don’t know any of the specifics some (most?) DLNA servers support “transcoding” DSD to DoP, but could get very confused by DSD files when they weren’t configured to do that.
Thank you, Ted. The photo must’ve been from an older OS and so even though it was DoP the display was showing DSD.
Thanks Ted. My apologies if I gave wrong info about B1. Somehow I got it that way in my head, and I did use B1 for quite some time. Hopefully I’m not getting to the point where I’m having these 'senior moments . . . "
You may be thinking back to the PWD, which didn’t do DSD with Bridge 1 or any other input.