Qobuz streaming tipping point

Posted by: Simon-in-Suffolk on 23 June 2018

it’s finally happened... thanks to this forum somone had mentioned Qobuz streaming into their Naim streamer via Bubble UPnP Server... and being the sort of chap I am I thought I’d give that a go... and I posted a few remarks about it at the time.

Several weeks later I have noticed something... my family and I are only really using Qobuz for CD resolution playback... my local NAS isn’t being used apart from the occasional hires playback... but for CD res there is no real quality difference... using the streamer proxy appears to make Qobuz sound like local streaming... and I know technically it is the same because of the local proxy protocol break.. but they say you need to trust your ears and heart rather than brain when it comes to these things...

Therefore it is probably fair to say this streaming proxy server has transformed my recorded music listening experience... it really is that good... now will I still buy CDs?... yes.. as there are some rare masters not available via streaming and also if I really love a particular recording/master I will buy it... because over time I notice occasionally some  items get de listed from the streaming catalogue... but other than that it seems to be Qobuz now for CD res.

Another little plus... I can flip over to the Naim app... the album/track is shown as playing.. and I can open Rovi for info... and interestingly this way the Rovi accuracy is nearly 100% compared to the sometimes hit and miss with my own rips via dbpoweramp.

Now yes I do a few things... I use the proxy on a RPi2 micro server  .. I also, and this is probably quite significant, I use a decoupled DAC from the renderer...(separate DAC to my NDX).. this allows me to stream FLAC with no real impact to SQ... so I don’t need any transcoding complexity... yes in the limit doing a/b listening tests I can detect an everso slight difference this way... but I couldn’t say one was better SQ than the other.

So there we have it... I thought I’d share... now waiting for our village to be Superfast enabled (the fibres and cabs are in - just waiting for the final cab activation this summer) ... I should then be on between 30 to 40 Mbps download according to my calculation up from my current 3.2 Mbps... and then I can try hires streams hopefully via this method... interesting times.

Posted on: 08 July 2018 by Simon-in-Suffolk

strange i have no such issues - are you using iOS or Android? I think if there is a conflict it will be some where in the underlying OS. If only one track at a time is playing - this points to an issue with your UPnP Bubble Server setup .. have you got Gapless enabled and the streamer selected as an OpenHome renderer on the Bubble config page?

Posted on: 08 July 2018 by KRM

Also, the Naim app only shows the current track ( and mis-names it) when a Lumin playlist is playing. Is this to be expected?

Posted on: 08 July 2018 by KRM

iOS 

Posted on: 08 July 2018 by Simon-in-Suffolk
KRM posted:

Also, the Naim app only shows the current track ( and mis-names it) when a Lumin playlist is playing. Is this to be expected?

Yes - as the Naim app can only read the playlist from the streamer. When using BubbleUPnPServer and Lumin (or equiv) the playlist is stored on the Bubble UPnP server and 'pushed' to the streamer a track at a time. Naim reads the streamer and Lumin reads the Bubble server

Posted on: 08 July 2018 by KRM

980D24A1-C2A7-4AAF-9E45-CADA51D7625DOk, that’s good. Lumin still stoping after each track finishes, sadly  Track 2 in the playlist is playing, but you wouldn’t know it from the information at the top o& the screen.

Posted on: 08 July 2018 by gert
KRM posted:

Thanks Gert,

Do you mean I should clear the playlist Lumin before opening the Naim app every time I move from one to the other?

 

Yes, exactly. I really recommend to do so. Otherwise it can have some side effects like I have explained.

You can try it yourself: Add some tracks in lumin and start to play the first track. Then stop it in lumin (lumin does not offer a real stop. It is just a pause function, I think). Now start one track in the naim app and wait until it reaches its end. (You can fast forward to near the end if you do not want to wait.) The effect is: After finishing the track, bubble upnp server thinks, that its first track (the first track of the lumin playlist) has finished to play, so it starts the second track of the lumin playlist.

But the problems you do have with the same track is repeated or advancing to the next track does not work, sounds more like an issue with gapless playback. If you have a new generation naim streamer (like nova, etc.) you should not enable the gapless checkbox in bubble upnp server for this streamer. The new generation unitis do not support gapless playback if the playlist is controlled from outside the streamer. If you have an old generation streamer (like a uniti 1, uniti 2, superuniti, etc.) external gapless playback is supported and you can and should enable the checkbox in the bubble upnp server.

Greetings
Gert

Posted on: 09 July 2018 by gert

KRM, one additional information: As long as you do not start other music in the naim app you do not need to clear the lumin playlist. You e.g. can use the naim app to envoke album information or fast forward inside the currently playing track. Also you can skip to the next track with the naim app, too. (This looks like "current track has finished" for the bubble upnp server so that it tells the streamer to play the next track.)

Posted on: 09 July 2018 by KRM

Hi Gert,

Thanks for suggestions. Very much appreciated

It got worse this morning so I rebooted everything. Sadly, I need to run a script in Putty to reboot bubble. Will give it a try tonight.

Posted on: 09 July 2018 by KRM

Well, unplugging the Pi and rebooting Bubbleupnp did the trick. I think Gert is right that it’s best not to jump back and forth between apps. Also, I’ve ticked gapless (can’t believe new Uniti products don’t support it).

As I was saying, it sounds pretty much same as through the NDS directly. Perhaps Qobuz sounds better, or, and here’s a thought, what it really needs is a nice expensive Ethernet cable 

Keith

Posted on: 14 July 2018 by Wolfgang

@Simon: Thank you so much for this post. Very helpful

@all: I booked a 30 day free trial of Qobuz an asked for sublime+. They gave me a 5 days of testing and it sounds great. Now I am streaming HiRes flac trancoding to wav. 

Greetings from Berlin

Wolfgang

 NDX 4.6 - Supernait 1 - Monitor Audio 703 PMC - AudioPhysiks Luna - QNAP 419 P II - Asset UPnP R 6.1 - BubbleUPNPServer 0.9 -

IPad 10.5 - Lumin app

 

Posted on: 15 July 2018 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Just to say I got the transcoding finally working on BubbleUPnP Server by using a correctly compiled and linked version of ffmpeg