Foobar Wasapi Drivers' title='Foobar Wasapi Drivers' />Were gonna JPLAY in the sunshine A holiday in the sun. Its what many of us dream of after months and months of the nine to five. The aim To rid ourselves of the stress and tension of modern life. We might take a week by the pool in Thailand or two weeks hiking in Switzerland. Foobar Wasapi Drivers' title='Foobar Wasapi Drivers' />However wherever we choose to unwind, we to hope to return to our daily lives feeling rested still ourselves but looser of joint, with less tension in the shoulders, more relaxed. When we feel as good as this, life seems to come more easily. Digital audio isnt all that different. Poor sounding rigs sound nervous and tense. Getting DSD to work on a PC with Foobar2000 requires the installation of three driversyour DAC Manufacturers custom driver, the ASIO output driver, and the SACD. Foobar Wasapi Drivers' title='Foobar Wasapi Drivers' />KOH foobar2000DSD. There can be a hardness in the treble or a rigidity with micro dynamics reflexiveness. This can lend The Blue Niles Stay a little too much stridency or make Prefab Sprouts Cars and Girls sound a tad thin or cause us to soon tire of Mercks intense IDM mixes. An Audio. Quest Dragon. Fly Black hooked into a basic Mac or PC cannot hope to sound as effortlessly easeful as a high end streamer pushing ones and zeroes into an Aqua La Scala MKII. Better setups sound as they have spent time by the pool, sipping cocktails, enjoying the occasional massage and soaking up the sun. With decent hardware, music seems to flow more easily. In other words, music sounds better rested. Vacationed, even. Remember the V word well be coming back to it. Aural satisfaction doesnt fall entirely to the DA converter but also to what we feed it streamerserver and how digital cables. I know this because of many years of listening experience and not just the theory that informs product engineers intent to lower jitter and electrical noise. DACs, streamers, USB cables, SPDIF cables even Ethernet cables they all make a contribution to how smoothrough, uptightrelaxed, easeful or not is the audible result. String several better sounding digital audio products together, each one adding single digit performance, and they sum to a larger, much better sounding whole. Roon with JPLAY. The audible differences between network streamers andor servers dont only fall to their hardware configurations but also the software installed. The very same PC running Windows 1. Microsoft for the user experience and NOT digital audio sound quality, is unlikely to sound as good as a Linux distribution that has. Audible differences can be also be heard at the application level. As previously argued on these pages, playback software should be seen as as a component like any other. Catch up on those thoughts here. For music playback software, choice matters. On an 1. 1 Macbook Air running OS X El Capitan, I like the sound of Roon quite a bit. Thing is, I like Audirvana a little bit more. The latters overall gestalt sounds a shade more easeful and tonally richer. On functionality and UX, the scales tip heavily in favour of Roon. Both apps do Tidal and library management but only Roon does network streaming. Only Roon has the extensively hyper linked meta data layer that spans Tidal. Only Roon has the interface that demands to be touched. If only Audivarnas well vacationed audible vibe could be spliced into Roon. Hold that thought. Alas, Mac OS formerly OS X isnt where the touchscreens live. For hands on computers not tablets that run desktop apps we look to Microsoft. For Roon playback over USB AND a touchscreen interface, I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 i. Ghz, 4. GB RAM, 6. GB SDD. It runs Windows 1. My Intel NUC also runs Windows 1. Adding a touch screen monitor doesnt require expensive third party drivers. Support for getting hands on quite literally is baked into the OS. With the NUC USB lassoed to a music library HDD and Vinnie Rossi LIO DAC module to operate as Roon server and endpoint, the Windows machine cant quite compete with the Audirvana v. Macbook Air. Thats as I heard it through KEF LS5. Sennheiser HD8. 00. S headphones. How to elevate the sound quality of the NUCKazoo. Enter JPLAY 9. Windows world. Developer Marcin Ostapowicz explains JPLAY is a highly optimized playback engine. It does not install its own USB drivers. JPLAY Driver is the playback engine. Its appears to the OS in the form of a driver, because this way it can be easily integrated with any software player or any app that has support for ASIO output. But JPLAY is not only JPLAY Driver. It is also JPLAYStreamer which is our own implementation of the Open. Home standard and essentially converts a PC into a network rendererstreamer. There is also the minimalistic JPLAYmini which is a standalone player with text GUI and basic features, but it sounds pretty damn good. Lets get started. Installation of JPLAY is like any other Windows app wizard based. I recommend choosing Alternative Intel CPU version in the installer if youre going to use a NUC. Also, I recommend you to tick optimize for Single. PC option in the installer if youre not going to use dual PC mode, says Ostapowicz via email. Side note according the the JPLAY website, Dual PC Mode is for serious audiophiles where two PCs connected via LAN sees one PC fully optimised for music playback whilst the other handles playback control beyond the scope of this review. JPLAY settings are accessible from the system tray. On this our man from Poland says, For output settings in the settings panel I recommend you choose KS Kernel Streaming, Engine Ultra. Stream and DAC Link at 4. Hz, which should sound good and work fine with most of the DACs on the market. PC Buffer at 1. 0s and the rest of the settings at default. With JPLAY installed and the LIO DAC set as the output device, I started with JPLAYMini and worked backwards through the other operational modes. Select one or more files in Windows Explorer or other music playback app, hit copy Ctrl C, pull up the JPLAYmini window and hit the spacebar. Music The interface might be a no frills affair only good for those with keyboard and mouse but the soundMore easeful in its delivery than Roon. Less rigid in its joints than Foobar. JPLAYmini. For smartphone or tablet control we move to JPLAYstreamer and Open. Home. With JPLAYstreamer already running on the NUC as our endpoint, server and control apps must be optioned. For file serving I went with Minimserver as per JPLAYs recommendation and although well detailed on the JPLAY website, installation is a long way from a one click deal install Java install Minimserver and configure it so that FLAC and DSD are converted to. FFMPEG for optional ALAC, AAC and MP3 file support. Whilst Minimserver carries out its initial library scan we point its output at JPLAYstreamer. Form 15G In Word Format here. For playback control, JPLAY recommend Kazoo for i. OS, Windows or Mac OS but for Android, Bubble. DS Next gets the nod. Microsoft Security Essentials Multi Language Media. Running on my i. Phone, Kazoo tells Minimserver which files to pass on to JPLAYstreamer for handoff to the LIO DAC modules USB input. Here we have a controlplayback triangle, just like Roon. One that can be executed across a home network but in my setup both Minimserver and JPLAYstreamer sat on the same device a NUC and, later, the Surface Pro 3. JPLAYstreamers playback is gapless and Kazoo on an i. Phone 6. S Plus proved responsive enough. One can even browse by folder nice. However, next to Roon, its UI looks positively archaic no meta data layer, no radio, no pulling up long forgotten favourites. Jumping between connected artists is done in ones head, not the app. Oh Tidal integration is only available to Android Bubble. DS Next users. But the sound.