Hi, I don’t think the outputs have been confirmed as yet by @Paul.
We have heard the AirLens will be compatible with other DACs, and it will have I2S out.
@Paul, would you be able to confirm the expected outputs?
I forgot to tell you that along with listening with speakers I also used the headphone output on our BHK Pre. I normally don’t use this output, I have a separate headphone setup. But, I thought it might be helpful to really lean in and listen for change.
It took a few songs to recalibrate my expectations of what the opticalRendu sounded like through the Pre vs my headphone rig that I use most every night.
The outcome was the same as it was through speakers. I listened to Muddy Waters Folk Singer DSD 64, Art Blakey Moanin’ 192/24, and Espen Erikson Trio Never Ending January 48/24 several times and I favored the Rendu with each recording.
Regards
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That would be a big bummer. Very much hope @Paul’s optimism is right and we see the AirLens / Direcstream DAC combo out in June / July.
My that was a busy evening on the old AirLens forum! I ranted above already about how PS Audio needs an app that runs the AirLens… mainly to select streaming content, but hopefully also to pull from NAS drives, like many competitors already offer for years now… and that will control coming generations of PS Audio product (e.g., that does volume control on a PS Audio preamp). The forum denizens have already tested everything out there and can tell them which companies / apps do what well and which ones do what poorly. Do some benchmarking, keep the initial features simple (leave Roon to Roon) so that they can be delivered, but think future PS Audio ecosystem expansion and get on with it. There are smaller companies that have delivered more already. The AirLens is not even a Roon or UPnP endpoint, it is a mindless in-between point. At least based on the updates PS Audio communicated last month. And so folks here in the forum are buying other streaming kit now.
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Classical music has its own special problems when creating your database of music. The important thing is to consider very carefully how you want to navigate through its structure to find a particular work that you want to play. The metadata stored in each track contains details of the music contained in the track. It is copied by DBPoweramp, say, from standard libraries available on the internet and the quality of the data is very variable. Anglicisation of foreign names results in variable spellings of names of composers. So you might get Prokofiev, Prokofief or Prokofieff stored in the “Composer” tag. And it’s not unusual to find the “Artist” tag set to “Ludwig van Beethoven”, say, instead of the pianist “Vladimir Ashkenazy”, or should it be “Ashkenazy, Vladimir”. These choices affect the order in which tracks are listed alphabetically when searching. After ripping a CD, you therefore need to check the metadata and edit with a tag editor such as Mp3tag or TagScanner to ensure consistency with your general filing scheme. Note that your music collection is usually explored via metadata tags rather than the physical file structure of the tracks in the computer file system. In my music library, I file a CD containing two symphonies as two separate albums. Likewise, a symphony that is accommodated on two CDs is filed as one album. A 3-act opera is filed as 3 albums. I find music first by searching for Genre, having over 30 custom genre names such as “Concerto-Piano”, “Concerto-Violin”. Make up your own! After the Genre comes Composer. I set the physical file structure on hard disc to mirror the logical structure of the database so that similar searching via the computer file system is possible.
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Well, to give Paul credit, he never promised to solve classical music tag editing with MusicBrainz. I think this subject got hived off a while back as well. Might be in the forum under “ripping CDs” or other related taglines.
I cleaned up this thread by deleting the bickering posts and those clearly off-topic.
As a number of you noted, the “ignore” function can be a wonderful thing.
If I missed anything or you think I removed something useful/valuable please let me know.
Post on!
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Where is this wonderful Ignore button? Asking for a friend.
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Thanks!~
What Baldy posted is the ignore for a topic.
If you want to ignore a specific user, click on that person’s name/avatar and elect ignore as shown below:
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Oh, even better! Oh boy, it’s just like Christmas, or is it halloween?
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It is a great feature.
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@Elk is there also an opposite tool? I mean a function able to notify when a specific user has posted something.
When Paul or James are posting something I often read their answers and news (rumors) and it would be interesting to find their posts without surfing through a lot of threads.
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Not sure which updates you read, but that’s all wrong.
Sorry, that was just my long-wait unfulfilled frustration talking with a play on words. I know that technically it is to be an “endpoint”. But needing something else to send it a signal… like a Roon core or some other UPnP source… and then needing a device with a DAC to receive the signal from the AirLens, makes it an “in-between” point…
Yes sure, but that’s what a streamer is.
Paul initially wanted to combine the SW core into it, but that was dropped.
Much to my pleasure as I looked out for exactly what’s offered now.
Understood this is fine for folks running Roon or another music core on a separate device. And there are likely to be various apps that can push data to the AirLens at some level of quality. But the feature set of devices generally referred to as “streamers” is usually longer and there usually is a specific app solution provided to use streaming services and even to pull larger files (e.g., DSD, with which PS Audio is associated) from a server.
Questions posed to PS Audio: “Are they protecting in any way for an app to be used in the future to have the AirLens pull files from a NAS?” And basically, “As a PerfectWave and not a Stellar product, just how upgradeable will the AirLens be?”
My understanding is that the AL will support connections to NAS devices. And this has always been the intention.
What led you to believe otherwise?
Paul’s answers to my questions led me to believe otherwise. It depends perhaps on what you mean by “support connections”. For me, it is more like “enables connections”. Streamers like a Bluesound Node or a Silent Angel M1T or a… and the list goes on… come with not only an app but also RAM and chips onboard the streamer that let’s them scan the music files on a NAS.