Thankfully, the trial version will play ~2 minutes of uninterrupted audio before inserting ~5 seconds of silence. According to the manual, there are even "advanced settings" called DriverBuffer, UltraSize, and XtreamSize which I did not bother playing with since I presume they're deemed less important if one has to go into the Registry to adjust. Note that for all these tests, I had "Throttle" turned ON which is supposed to increase priority to JPLAY (and hence diminish task priority of other processes). There are four "engines" - Beach, River, Xtream (Kernel Streaming only), and ULTRAstream (Kernel Streaming & Windows 8 only) - I am unaware of how they are supposed to differ. ASIO, WASAPI, Kernel Streaming.), along with specific parameters like buffer size.
Within JPLAY settings, one can then specify the actual audio device and which driver to use (eg. Therefore, for ease of testing, I'm going to be using JPLAY through foobar2000 as an ASIO output "device". By itself, it has a very bare-bones text-based interface. Remember that JPLAY is essentially a "playback engine" using its own buffering algorithm and runs as an Audio Service under Windows. Well, let us put this program and various of its settings on the test bench and see what comes up.ĪSUS Taichi ( *running JPLAY/foobar*) Win8 圆4 -> shielded USB (Belkin Gold) -> TEAC UD-501 DAC -> shielded 6' RCA -> E-MU 0404USB -> shielded USB -> Win8 Acer laptop Likewise, there have been some heated discussions over on Hydrogen Audio regarding this program. Mitchco has already used the DiffMaker program to compare JPLAY and JRiver about a year ago but was not able to detect a difference. Since the keyboard is turned off, the computer comes back to life after the music has completed playing or if you remove a USB stick during playback! Realize that this makes the computer even less interactive than a disc spinner!
To address these "issues" JPLAY even has a mode where the screen gets turned off, OS processes are halted, drivers turned off, etc. Sure, computers can be complicated, but is it possible for these factors to affect audio output significantly enough to hear and common enough to worry about with a modern USB DAC like in my test set-up? Maybe, but like many subtle things in life "reported" to be true, it's hard to know with confidence unless systematically tested. ASIO, WASAPI, Kernel Streaming) all have some kind of effect on the playback audio quality (usual digital whipping boy for bad sound quality is of course the dreaded jitter).
If you browse around the JPLAY website (or hang out on various computer audiophile forums), you run into suggestions that process priority, memory playback, task switching latency, driver type (eg. In this installment, I'll focus on JPLAY (most recent version 5.1) which has been highly promoted around many of the audiophile web sites like 6moons, EnjoyTheMusic ("First Step to Heaven = JPLAY"!), High Fidelity (Polish), TNT-Audio, recently AudioStream plus all the hoopla around the terribly misleading series of articles on computer audio by Zeilig & Clawson in "The Absolute Sound" in early 2012. Welcome to Part II of the "Bit-Perfect" roundup for Windows. There's something happening here, What it is ain't exactly clear.