Having recently acquired the appropriate hardware, I'm finally getting around to ripping my SACDs and creating DSF files. Depending on what hardware combinations I'm using, converting DSD to PCM at 44.1 or 88.2 or 176.4 is easy and works fine. There are a couple of quirks I'm curious about, though:
1. Max2Play running on a Pi is able to convert DSD to PCM, but apparently no other ARM LMS version can do that. Did the Max2Play folks figure out a proprietary solution? I didn't have to do anything special to make it work, just added the DSDPlayer plugin and was off and running. Has no one else tried to implement this for other ARM platforms because it's a colossal pain? (I don't have anywhere near sufficient skill to look under the hood and figure this out myself.)
2. Three of my players are Wandboard Quads running Squeezelite under Debian. I've used the -e DSD switch in Squeezelite, but as far as I can tell any server always tries to send unconverted DSD, so it never works. S/PDIF light goes out and at least once I've actually had to reboot to get it working with PCM again. Has anyone else experienced this and/or discovered a workaround? Other Squeezelite parameters (specifically limiting to 96k) are respected, but "No DSD!" isn't.
3. Since the Pi-like computers that are everywhere now generally have HDMI, is there any way to get them to send DSD out via HDMI or is there a hardware/firmware limitation getting in the way? I tried this a while back with a Pi and got silence, though it was an older model.
None of this is intended as criticism of the many people who've worked for years to keep the brilliant Squeezebox system alive, I can just get a bit obsessed with this sort of trivia even though I have workarounds. I'm also not one of those people who swears DSD is better then food, sex and sleep combined, I'm just trying to work with the files because they're already there.
Thank you for any insight!
1. Max2Play running on a Pi is able to convert DSD to PCM, but apparently no other ARM LMS version can do that. Did the Max2Play folks figure out a proprietary solution? I didn't have to do anything special to make it work, just added the DSDPlayer plugin and was off and running. Has no one else tried to implement this for other ARM platforms because it's a colossal pain? (I don't have anywhere near sufficient skill to look under the hood and figure this out myself.)
2. Three of my players are Wandboard Quads running Squeezelite under Debian. I've used the -e DSD switch in Squeezelite, but as far as I can tell any server always tries to send unconverted DSD, so it never works. S/PDIF light goes out and at least once I've actually had to reboot to get it working with PCM again. Has anyone else experienced this and/or discovered a workaround? Other Squeezelite parameters (specifically limiting to 96k) are respected, but "No DSD!" isn't.
3. Since the Pi-like computers that are everywhere now generally have HDMI, is there any way to get them to send DSD out via HDMI or is there a hardware/firmware limitation getting in the way? I tried this a while back with a Pi and got silence, though it was an older model.
None of this is intended as criticism of the many people who've worked for years to keep the brilliant Squeezebox system alive, I can just get a bit obsessed with this sort of trivia even though I have workarounds. I'm also not one of those people who swears DSD is better then food, sex and sleep combined, I'm just trying to work with the files because they're already there.
Thank you for any insight!