PWT - Well that's cool!

Audio Components
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Back in 2017 I picked up a NOS Perfectwave Transport from the music room to feed the I2S input of my SGDC. I have always just used it as a transport, never connecting it to the internet, since I don’t have ethernet near the audio rack. Well I dug out a netgear wifi extender and set it up to connect to our main wifi router. Once that was done I moved it over to near the rack and simply connected the PWT to the one ethernet port on the extender. Within seconds it said ‘Internet: ok’ and brought down the cover art. Cool! Even cooler, logged on here to see if it showed up and automatically the album is in Playlist under My PS. OK, I know this is a feature that I haven’t been too motivated to try out in the past, but big props to PSAudio for 1) making this a trivial exercise, and 2) supporting a piece of kit (and artwork service) that is long out of production! :clap:

So, the manual says - “The rear panel SD card holds the cover art and song title information as it is acquired. In addition, the SD card is used to program new firmware in the PWT.” How many will it hold? Dumb question: So once on the card it will show the artwork without a connection?

One of these days I should burn a hires audio file to a DVD and try out that functionality! :grin:

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yes you should! It works fine and, assuming your system is revealing enough, will be a pretty good sound quality improvement.

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The card does not accumulate and store the information indefinitely. Rather, my understanding is that it pings its data source(s) for purposes of meeting the short term information needs related to what is currently playing. It has been a while since I had my PWT (I do have a DS DAC that has a similar SD card functionality) but, IIRC, you will lose the Cover Art if you disconnect the Ethernet connection while spinning your disc. Try experimenting to confirm.

Enjoy.

[Post Script: Hopefully, others will chime in to confirm or correct my understanding.]

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The PWT does accumulate and store the cover art and metadata for discs. Once that is resident on the card it will always display the cover art track list and artist info even when the internet connection is not present. The DMP stores the data on the sd card but will not display it without an internet connection. The programming of the DMP never was corrected to allow it to do so. I had mentioned this issue to Barry but by that time the DMP fell to the bottom of the priority list.

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Score one for the PWT :+1:

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I loved the functionality of my PWT. I wish I never heard the DMP. Which case I would still be using a PWT. The sonic performance of my DMP pulled me away from the PWT. The DMP is better now functionally than when it was released. It however still have some quirks so as far as functionality goes the PWT still outperforms the DMP.

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I’d really like to try hires with the PWT. Can you point me in the direction of how best to do it? It’s a bit confusing tbh.

I thought I’d add a DVD-A disc to my next order to try 24/96, such as this for only $2! https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/1730/Kenny_Drew-Undercurrent-DVD_2496
BUT this thread says PWT will not play DVD-A. DVD-Audio

BTW, is DVD-A dead?

I also downloaded the HDtracks Hi Res Samper (again 96/24), but now need to try to burn it to a DVD. What is the best way to do it on a mac? A search led me to Burn but the bug report here does not look promising: https://sourceforge.net/p/burn-osx/discussion/578948/thread/a24c9161ff/

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I am going to simply drag the .wavs from the samper to a blank DVD and hit burn in the finder and see if it can read that.

edit: it does! playing it now.

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Cool! I never tried that but it has been a while since I made a DVD. I always used the free program EAC(exact audio Copy) but I have windows. Mac is alien to me. If you like chamber music at all, try this site and his free sample downloads. Read a bit about him and how he records and enjoy the samples. Even if you are not into classical stuff, listen to some of them just purely for the sound! https://ultraanaloguerecordings.com/new/shop-digital-downloads/

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Update: I picked up these sealed DVD audio discs for the bargain price of $2 ea. to see if they would play in the PWT.

IMG_9771
IMG_97712448×2448 1.56 MB

Two are 24/96 and the other 24/192. Unfortunately neither of these types work. However, the content plays just fine if extracted as .wav and burned to a DVD (and sounds great!). I don’t think I will try to collect more since it’s a bit of a faff to turn them into a playable disc.

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I’ve burned tons of DVDr with hi Rez files that play flawlessly on the PWT. I just use windows and burn the wav files as a data disc.

For DVD-Audio discs I have used a program called DVD Audio Extractor and then burned these files to DVD for playing on the PWT

My PWT is something that they will have to pry from my cold dead hands

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12

I would have said that about my PWT but I turned it in in trade towards the DMP quite willingly after a few days with the DMP!

Dan, I’m sorry they didn’t work directly. They sure are a bargain price!

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That’s exactly what I did using a trial version of DVD Audio Extractor - worked a treat.

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Yes, a great tool. Extracts a lossless wav file and sounds fantastic through the PWT

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Now if only DVD Audio Extractor (which I love) would only do SACDs as well. Sigh.

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Yes, unfortunately every SACD is shipped with armed guards ready to fight and defend to the death.

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17

Have you tried creating DSD, DOP recordings. The PWT will play DSD as long as it is formatted as DOP.

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Yes, that does work very well. But of course we are back to the problem of extracting the DSD from an SACD, a difficult task.

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I have never extracted the DSD layer of an SACD myself I bought and downloaded a DSF album online and used Fubar to convert it to DOP.

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Hey guys! I have my PWT posted for sale in Marketplace if anyone would like one or, maybe, want a “backup” one.