unitserve rips vs core rips

Trevor Wilson posted:

Hi all. The team are still working and a beta release was made to beta at 12.14 this morning. This particular release doesn't directly address the commentary above but I know the software team are on that already also, I expect them to be in touch this weekend. 

Trevor

Three comments.....

"I expect them to be in touch this weekend"...............

"The first elephant in the room " that I mentioned above...........

"the team are still working and a beta release was made to beta".....

Looks like there is a second elephant in the room !!!!..........called Beta

"Beta"      An early version of a program or application that contains most of the major features, but is not yet complete. Sometimes these versions are released only to a select group of people, or to the general public, for testing and feedback. This is the second major stage of development following the alpha version, and comes before the release candidate.

ISTM that we discussing a beta version of software that Naim are developing night and day, 7 days a week ? and that Naim, as usual, are more concerned about a beta version than many corporations would be about their full-blown product !!!

Chag... posted:

 

Just listen to the core and you Will be Very quiet.

How good is it then? How does it compare to US SSD? I can' wait.

Chag -

i am like you chad, i have not yet found the response: which better of core vs unitserve. I think we will not have quickly our response because there is a problem which the ripping software of the core. And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

Interesting thread.

fwiw - I tried to compare dbpoweramp ripped CDs to Unitiserv rippers CDs - and could not verify that the bits were identical / just used a HEX editor to compare but didn't get far.

having said that, the Unitiserv sounded better - but got better with a linear psu on the nas / and a linear psu on the Unitiserv.

lookinh forward to the uniticore - however I really believe it should have had two Ethernet plugs - so it could act as a switch too - one cable comes from wall into the uniticore and the other cable goes directly to a NDXxxx in the same rack...

Can we get a dbpoweramp ripped cd and see whether it sounds better on the Unitiserv or Core. ...

Keler Pierre posted:

Chag... posted:

 

Just listen to the core and you Will be Very quiet.

How good is it then? How does it compare to US SSD? I can' wait.

Chag -

i am like you chad, i have not yet found the response: which better of core vs unitserve. I think we will not have quickly our response because there is a problem which the ripping software of the core. And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

Bonjour bonjour!

given the firmware is being updated it might be a little premature to judge? Given naims history of tweaking firmware for sound quality (dac, nds,ndx muso etc) there is precedence. 

Mine sounds fine via Bnc to ndac/xpsdr but it is an engineering prototype not final production. Which arrives this week hopefully from my dealer. 

Merci Jon. When should we expect a rave, but well informed review as always, from Martin, Chris or yourself? 

Chag -

Keler Pierre posted:

Chag... posted:

 

Just listen to the core and you Will be Very quiet.

How good is it then? How does it compare to US SSD? I can' wait.

Chag -

i am like you chad, i have not yet found the response: which better of core vs unitserve. I think we will not have quickly our response because there is a problem which the ripping software of the core. And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

Vive la cuisse de grenouilles! With the best food, the best wine and the best landscapes around, just relax and enjoy the music. I am sure that many contributors of this forum are indeed very interested in the sound quality of the Core. But, with Naim about to deliver a major software update for the device, judgements on the Core's performance (and, I hope, also on its functionalities) would be too premature at this point. At this point it is more important to concentrate on providing Naim with detailed reports of (actual or alledged) deficiencies, be these in the Core's software design or in its implementation.

Hi all

on the question of which sounds better I would always say that the proof is in a audition where you appriciate the system your listening  - so you can make you own choice. 

Trevor

Chag... posted:

Merci Jon. When should we expect a rave, but well informed review as always, from Martin, Chris or yourself? 

Chag -

Entirely out of my hands mon ami! 

Keler Pierre posted:

Chag... posted:

 

Just listen to the core and you Will be Very quiet.

How good is it then? How does it compare to US SSD? I can' wait.

Chag -

i am like you chad, i have not yet found the response: which better of core vs unitserve. I think we will not have quickly our response because there is a problem which the ripping software of the core. And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

That's actually quite a rude thing to write Pierre, especially given that most of us have not yet even seen the Core, let alone have an opportunity to compare to a UnitiServe. I have only compared the ripps made by the two devices so I commented on that.

Yet you continue posting, practically insluting other people for not giving you answers you want to hear. Just in case you have not realised - most of the forum members will only post their comments if they have actually heard a product.

If you want to read wild conjenctures and speculations I am certain there are other fora which will happily oblige.

Adam

Keler Pierre posted: And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

If we knew the answers, I'm sure we would give them to you. But almost no-one in the UK has actually got their hands on a Core to listen to in their own system, so I think that is why you don't get any answers yet!

best

David

Keler Pierre posted:

And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

 

This must be terrible to go through life that way (and I don't mean as a Frenchman).

What is the current status of Core ?

Has it been released on gereral sale, or is it in a pre-release format in the hands of (a few) volunteer candidates ?

Don Atkinson posted:

What is the current status of Core ?

Has it been released on gereral sale, or is it in a pre-release format in the hands of (a few) volunteer candidates ?

Dear All,

In Naim R&D we have been following this thread and felt it was time to respond, as there is some misinformation and wrong assumptions.   I have also been in contact with the author of the EAC library, Andrea Wiethoff and designer of AccurateRip to review this thread and sanity check a few other areas.

On CD red book ripping there is no absolute 'music audio samples of track 1 start here', unlike reading a file from a computer hard drive or CD data disc.  It varies on a per disc pressing master basis, but typically a large amount of silence is mastered in on start of track 1 and there are silence boundaries between tracks. 

With a gapless album the exact point of where track x ends and track x+1 starts is consistent (there are no lost samples), but based on where the chop between tracks is done, a few samples will end up on one side or the other of the transition point.

 So to visualize it:

 With one offset:

|  Track 1  |  Track 2 |

|00abcdefghijklmnopqr00|

With a different offset:

|  Track 1  |  Track 2 |

|0abcdefghijklmnopqr000|

 Appreciating the TRUE physical start of a CD is extremely hard to resolve, based on how CD as a physical format is defined and it can be skewed +-75 sectors when the disc is mastered and pressed.   When the AccurateRip system was created, Andre experimented with a wide range of CD's and came up with a relative offset compensation system that seemed sensible.  Since doing that there has been evidence based on someone using professional CD mastering equipment that the calculation is actually 30 samples out, but in practice it does not matter.    Samples intended for end of one track can end up on the start of the next one.  This will be typically digital silence or tape hiss and its a tiny period of time (for example a 6 sample delta is 136usecs).   Offset compensation is only really needed if you want to do a comparison system of rip x from drive y, is the same as rip x from drive z. It doesn't mean the actual rip reflects the original master files on start/end transition points - just that it’s always the same for the same CD.  

 With the Naim servers we aim to ensure that the offset is close to theoretical CD pressing offset.   In Core we believe this resolves as:

+48 sample drive offset - (30 samples + 6 samples) = ~12 theoretical real world sample offset.    On Serve it is ~18 real world samples.  That is why there is a difference if you compare the two.   Please take into account the far more larger real world factors mentioned above though.

 Sample offset does not affect the sound as it's a case of the stereo samples for one period are just offset by (4 bytes x numberSamples) in memory.  In practice the whole track is not held in memory, it’s being paged in to circular buffers, where the current read vs write positions could be anywhere on each time it plays based on what has played before.

 Examples where 'a' is current read position, 'q' is current write position:

Circuilar Buffer ->  |opq      abdcdefghijklmn|

Circuilar Buffer ->  |     abdcdefghijklmnopq |

 So to summarize and key facts:

1. Your rips are good. The audio is correct and all you are seeing is logical offset differences where Core is slightly different to Serve.
2. There are no samples lost on gapless material. Just look at the next track to find them.
3. In CD extraction the offset of the rip is a logical value and typically is not precisely aligned to the physical disc offset.
4. A traditional CD player will chop off many samples when doing next/prev/goto track x, hence no music is placed on these track transition points for compatibility sake.
5. When differencing WAV files remember each sample is 16bits (2x 8 bytes) and they go in Left, Right pairs. So 4 bytes per stereo set of samples.

If you would like any extra clarifications our help desk can provide further information, but naturally feel free to chatter between yourselves here.

Best regards

Steve Harris

Software Group Director

Many thanks for the update Steve. It clarifies a few issues and helps us to remain patient and wait for what seems to be another great Naim product.

Chag -

Steve - the findings I have provided are nothing to do with CD offsets as far as I am aware .. I assume you  are correcting posts that were talking about CD offsets etc. You can private mail me if you want more information - but my finding using debug tools have shown that WAV files produced independent of offsets are incorrect (in my opinion as information is lost) compared to other rippers- and do produce sample discontinuities in some cases, noticeable with continuous CDs  - again I assume you are looking into this - again if you want more information from by debugs please feel free to  contact me privately - and the differences I measured were greater than 48 stereo samples

Thanks Steve for looking into this and for your reassurance that offset differences won't matter. I'm still at a loss though to understand where the differences I can sometimes hear could come from. I know I have an overactive imagination, but when others hear even more of what I'm imagining... 

Best regards,

Jan

Stevesky posted:

In Naim R&D we have been following this thread and felt it was time to respond, as there is some misinformation and wrong assumptions.   I have also been in contact with the author of the EAC library, Andrea Wiethoff and designer of AccurateRip to review this thread and sanity check a few other areas.

 

Sanity? Why did you have to throw SANITY into the mix?

Thanks for the information and participation Steve, and Naim, and Andrea too.

It does still look to me as though small (240 byte) blocks of actual music data, not necessarily just lead-in zeros, can be lost with a Core rip, in particular if the rip is gapless, so has no lead-in zeros in which to absorb the loss. This is visible if you look at the bytes, although it is not, as far as I can hear so far, audible. I think I'll leave it to Simon or others with a technical understanding of these matters to decide how significant this is. I imagine an update to fix this is feasible?

What this does not address is Jan's original observation that Core rips sounded different to US rips. Is the jury still out on that one?   

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Steve - the findings I have provided are nothing to do with CD offsets as far as I am aware .. I assume you  are correcting posts that were talking about CD offsets etc. You can private mail me if you want more information - but my finding using debug tools have shown that WAV files produced independent of offsets are incorrect (in my opinion as information is lost) compared to other rippers- and do produce sample discontinuities in some cases, noticeable with continuous CDs  - again I assume you are looking into this - again if you want more information from by debugs please feel free to  contact me privately - and the differences I measured were greater than 48 stereo samples

 

Hi Simon, 

From the various checked that we did last week we have seen no evidence so far of substandard rips.  For example we did Core vs dbPoweramp vs EAC vs two different Unitiserves and apart from offset and a subtle WAV header / tagging difference the audio data part is identical across all of them.   We also tried different drives.  

As you're part of our beta test program feel free to open a thread up there and we can go through various samples.   Unless a disc is damaged the rip should be bit perfect.  

Best regards

Steve

Will do...

Adam Zielinski posted:

Keler Pierre posted:

Chag... posted:

 

Just listen to the core and you Will be Very quiet.

How good is it then? How does it compare to US SSD? I can' wait.

Chag -

i am like you chad, i have not yet found the response: which better of core vs unitserve. I think we will not have quickly our response because there is a problem which the ripping software of the core. And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

That's actually quite a rude thing to write Pierre, especially given that most of us have not yet even seen the Core, let alone have an opportunity to compare to a UnitiServe. I have only compared the ripps made by the two devices so I commented on that.

Yet you continue posting, practically insluting other people for not giving you answers you want to hear. Just in case you have not realised - most of the forum members will only post their comments if they have actually heard a product.

If you want to read wild conjenctures and speculations I am certain there are other fora which will happily oblige.

Adam

oh adam, i was just joking with chad, not insulting people . there is no problem for me, relax man.  i have understood that it is not the moment to have a comparaison on sound quality with the core, given what you have found in this topic.  And i want to say you have all done a good job with studying these different rips.  so take a good piece of frog, with vodka perhaps, and relax.

Bart posted:

Keler Pierre posted:

And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

 

This must be terrible to go through life that way (and I don't mean as a Frenchman).

i was joking 

Keler Pierre posted:

Bart posted:

Keler Pierre posted:

And also we are just french guys, good enough to eat frogs....so our questions don't interest this english forum. ( je plaisante).

 

This must be terrible to go through life that way (and I don't mean as a Frenchman).

i was joking 

Joking is good. Many of us take ourselves too seriously much of the time.

(Personally I prefer escargot, hopefully with a well-chilled Loire wine to follow that lovely buttery, herby, snaily taste.......)

best

David