JRiver MC Version 18

[Clive]

Hi Clive. First, welcome to the forum . I hope you don't get the idea from this specific interchange that I/we in this forum are against high-end or have a dogmatic attitude toward "prove it or not." We don't. I am an engineer and call myself an objectivist but have an extremely open mind about what we know and what we don't know. This discussion is not about "everything can be measured," "DBT is the only answer," etc. It is not about changing DACs and expect them to sound identical.

Rather, it is about something very specific and different: can the high variant PC traffic be tamed in a positive way by changes in the way the application reads samples from disk and output them. It is a given that apps like JPlay attempts to reduce traffic as the music plays by prefetching data. And its "hybernation" mode reduces background traffic. The issue at hand is knowing what I know, says that all of this may do nothing, or as I showed in the last analysis actually make things worse. In jitter for example, we don't care about megahertz jitter. We can't hear that. If you reduce that by a factor of 1000 then you now have jitter in KHz that can be audible. So less it not necessarily more.

Does this mean JPlay can't be making a positive contribution? No. It can. I am not here to rule it out. I am here to explain how the system works and diminish the intuitive sense we have that if something reduces activity automatically means the wind is behind them in having an advantage. That assumption will set one up for massive amount of placebo to be injected into the evaluation. Just like the example I gave in my comparison of Foobar and WMP. I thought the former used a direct pipeline and WMP did not (i.e. bit exact) and therefore may sound better. And sound better it did. Once I confirmed that the pipeline was the same, then that bias went away and so did the perceived performance advantage.

BTW, I have huge respect for Paul Miller and his work in analyzing digital systems. He is the only person testing and reporting on such in the world. It is an absolute shame we don' have more journalists like him. More of a shame is the fact that the articles are not online. Had not heard about his USB cable tests. I would love to hear more about that test. Can you describe more of it? I will go to the book store and see if I can find a hard copy too. Thanks in advance.

Hi Amir,

Thank you for your kind welcome. I should say a little bit about myself. I am unashamedly a subjectivist but I'm also not totally technically unaware, I've built a lot of diy projects and have a reasonable scientific grounding but I'm more commercially focused than technically focused. Since the early 1980's I've been a contributor to Hi-Fi News and then Hi-Fi World and more latterly to an internet magazine.

The Paul Miller and John Westlake examples I gave were not intended to be directly applicable to the JPLAY situation but they were indicators to my thoughts about some of the objectivists measurements played out on the forums being not necessarily up to the job. To an extent the examples I quoted were an allegory to your balls in a car example. I have a huge experience listening to very varied equipment, I like to think I'm not easily fooled; this is a British understatement .

The reverse of subjectivists being fooled by hype and looks is objectivists being fooled by inadequate technical measurements, both are clearly extreme examples. I believe temporal aspects are vastly underrated and I expect we will soon work out their importance, there will be a lot of egg of faces.....the Paul Miller USB cable test is just the start. I can't copy the text as the magazine article as it has only been out a few days. BTW I find DBT is one useful tool but it's limited, real life experience of a breadth of products is frankly much more useful and way more rapid in terms of useful conclusions, good DBT tests are incredibly hard to set up and execute without bias.

 

[jkeny]

I see - makes sense. You take issue with unsubstantiated technical claims. Fair enough.

The thing is that there are no unsubstantiated technical claims. These are generated as a strawman argument as follows - "well they claim that it changes the sound, therefore it must be measureable on the output - now show me the measurements that proves this". Of course when told that there currently isnt an adequate measurement to reveal the changes, there's a lot of consternation & avoidance of even considering the possibility that this might be correct.

How many people here have liked the sound of a device & said "oh but I don't know if I'm REALLY fooling myself - I need technical proof" - gone back to the manufacturer & asked for technical proof? Would you then give it back if none were forthcoming? It's ridiculuous. Do your listening tests in whatever way you want, nobody is trying to censore or cajole anybody (except of course, JRiver which is how this whole last part of this thread started). If you ask me I trust a manufacturer who let's you hear a product & decide for yourself without any pressure & doesn't have measurements to show rather than a manufacturer who openly bad mouths another product, implements messages in it's updates calling it a hoax & shows some dubious measurements that even they didnt carry out, somebody else did.

 

[amirm]

The thing is that there are no unsubstantiated technical claims. These are generated as a strawman argument as follows - "well they claim that it changes the sound, therefore it must be measureable on the output - now show me the measurements that proves this". Of course when told that there currently isnt an adequate measurement to reveal the changes, there's a lot of consternation & avoidance of even considering the possibility that this might be correct.

How many people here have liked the sound of a device & said "oh but I don't know if I'm REALLY fooling myself - I need technical proof" - gone back to the manufacturer & asked for technical proof? Would you then give it back if none were forthcoming? It's ridiculuous. Do your listening tests in whatever way you want, nobody is trying to censore or cajole anybody (except of course, JRiver which is how this whole last part of this thread started). If you ask me I trust a manufacturer who let's you hear a product & decide for yourself without any pressure & doesn't have measurements to show rather than a manufacturer who openly bad mouths another product, implements messages in it's updates calling it a hoax & shows some dubious measurements that even they didnt carry out, somebody else did.

You talk about a strawman and in one sentence later go ahead and set one up by generalizing this discussion to all products and all claims??? We don't care in this thread "how many people have liked the sound of a device." We are not talking about the sound of a device we can't analyze. We are talking about a plug-in to a media player which uses the *same device* as without the plug-in. It is a tweak and specific one since the tweak is unable to fully control what it attempts to control.

As to anyone being free to do what they want, clearly that doesn't sit well with you seeing how we are arguing because Jriver called the plug-in a hoax. They can't say that but you can say it sounds good? What happened to everyone having the views they want?

 

[amirm]

The reverse of subjectivists being fooled by hype and looks is objectivists being fooled by inadequate technical measurements, both are clearly extreme examples. I believe temporal aspects are vastly underrated and I expect we will soon work out their importance, there will be a lot of egg of faces.....the Paul Miller USB cable test is just the start. I can't copy the text as the magazine article as it has only been out a few days. BTW I find DBT is one useful tool but it's limited, real life experience of a breadth of products is frankly much more useful and way more rapid in terms of useful conclusions, good DBT tests are incredibly hard to set up and execute without bias.

I most definitely allow for termporal aspects. Indeed, I have written an article on the challenges of detecting small differences that can be content and hence indirectly present temporal challenges. See: http://www.madronadigital.com/Library/AudibilityofSmallDistortions.html

And yes, I would not trust a die-hard DBT/objectivist with their DBTs because they tend to be believe so much in the answer they seek that in the process, implicitly set up biased experiments. They search for a negative answer and naturally once they find one, they fully accept the results. Here is a good read of how objectivists tend to set up faulty tests: http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/abx_testing2.htm

If you read the test, you see that they used a relay to make the AB switch. That rely made a different sound in one direction than the other. Had it not been because of the famous Professor Vanderkooy catching that, it would have been entirely possible for the tester to game the system and with it blow a big hole the arguments of objectivists by passing an "ABX" test. So yes, setting up such tests is very hard. Most people should not be allowed to create them including the people who ran this test case. They potentially generate poor data that people then run with it. That said, the subjectivist that was tested in this case, did shout pretty loud from the top of the mountain how he was able to hear fantastical differences and so had to walk away with a bloody nose when he could not and in such a public manner no less.

So at the end, we see that the extreme views of either party may be hard to defend.

 

[Clive]

As to anyone being free to do what they want, clearly that doesn't sit well with you seeing how we are arguing because Jriver called the plug-in a hoax.

It's not really fair to denigrate JPLAY by calling it a plug-in, yes it can be seen as that but in fact it's a fully functional player which can be used by 2 other other players if desired. It so happens that it sounds best as a standalone player. It does not provide media library functionality. What I find interesting is that I find, and so do others, that Jriver on its own sounds more appealing that Foobar when configured as bit perfect. I conclude I'm either deluded or we are missing a vital metric.

 

[amirm]

How about the contention that WMC and Foobar sound identical? Doesn't this imply all bitperfect server programs (incl say Jriver and Media Monkey) should sound identical?

Yes, it implies that for sure. We had claims of FLAC and WAV sounding different. That got tested and the results out of the analog port of the DAC was null. Do we keep believing that the difference exists because one does more work than the other to get its bits out? Not saying there is zero possibility of difference. But what our starting position should be as we get into the discussion.

I see - makes sense. You take issue with unsubstantiated technical claims.

No, it is more than that. Take whatever job you have for a living. If I am not in that field, surely you would see through a lot more claims that are not real than I would, yes? Someone may tell me to eat some herb and it cures my ailment. My ability to determine that to be a hoax is far less than someone in the related medical field. It just happens that computer audio is my profession. It is not just a hobby. It is not what I read online. It is not what I have casual experience with. This is what I did for a living. That knowledge enables me to see the possibility of them doing some good here, but also the fact that it could do nothing or make it worse. The same knowledge tells me that they should have long time ago tested and characterized their performance. They have either done this and the data was no good and hence the reason they don't disclose it. Or they don't know how to test what they have built which really does not sit well with me. If I had such a hypothesis as they do, the first thing I would have done is tested the idea in a generic fixture. Change the CPU load up and down and measure. Then follow that with some kind of listening test. This is simply good hygiene when it comes to product development. Set a target and measure if you get there. Don't make your customers go and figure it out for you! 'cause one of them will come and show that it makes no difference at all in an analog null test down to -90 dB. We can talk about what we can not cannot measure but a null test has a life and power of its own that can't be dismissed with that talking point. If they had their own data that showed objectively to make a difference, then they could counter with that. As it is, we are here with score 1 for the people saying it is a hoax, and them zero with nothing to counter.

I personally am exclusively interested in the claims of some users of the software that it makes their system sound better. If after an evaluation of the software I would concur with them, I would not really care what is happening under the digital hood. I would even give them a pass if it turned out they deliberately created a technology smokescreen to push more units - as long as the software delivers the goods - better sound.

Wouldn't it be good that sitting here, and right now, we could be looking at before and after measured performance that showed them to make a difference? It is all goodness, right?

Having said that, I am acutely aware of my own susceptability to placebo effect (and the power of suggestion) and do not trust my senses one bit....

"You are a good man Charlie Brown."

 

[dallasjustice]

Jplay is a Hoax

Here is the warning message I got:

 

[amirm]

I see the hoax remark but can't read the text all that well. Can you please post the link to the foobar author mentioned there? Like to see what he has to say.

 

[dallasjustice]

I see the hoax remark but can't read the text all that well. Can you please post the link to the foobar author mentioned there? Like to see what he has to say.

I couldn't get the pop up to come back. I presume the link in it regarding foobar was this one:
http://help.foobar2000.org/troubleshooter/components/482398a390566e59

 

[audioguy]

What am I missing here? Why does JRiver seem to have their panties in such a wad over JPlay? I use JRiver and am perfectly happy with it. A friend, who has a much higher resolutions system than I, use JPlay becasue he thinks it sounds better.

This seems akin to, for example, Jeff Rowland running ads that you should not use brand "x" amps with their preamps, you should only use Rowland amps.

Sometimes this is really a stupid hobby!!

 

[Clive]

What am I missing here? Why does JRiver seem to have their panties in such a wad over JPlay? I use JRiver and am perfectly happy with it. A friend, who has a much higher resolutions system than I, use JPlay becasue he thinks it sounds better.

This seems akin to, for example, Jeff Rowland running ads that you should not use brand "x" amps with their preamps, you should only use Rowland amps.

Sometimes this is really a stupid hobby!!

This is a weird situation. Jim of Jriver is even censoring Jriver/JPLAY discussion on his forum by deleting posts. This is not in a spirit of openness. There are those who believe from a technical viewpoint that bit perfect cannot be improved upon and there are those who believe such tests are not sufficient. There is a large number of people hearing what they believe is an improvement in sound with Jplay. They cannot be ignored. As for saying "JPLAY is Hoax":

1) let's understate it: there is considerable doubt over this statement, the tests referenced do not appear to be anywhere near sufficient

2) JPLAY is a fully functional player - how can this be a hoax? - it plays music without the need for Jriver or Foobar

3) I don't know about US law but some countries would deem the statement my Jriver as libelous

4) what's even stranger is that JPLAY is not competitive with Jriver, indeed it may bring sales to Jriver as JPLAY is not a media library. There are some who've been using Jriver who now refuse to buy any more Jriver updates due to Jriver's antics - so their dubious and frankly unprofessional strategy is actually going to cost them money.

It's strange how people with very similar interests (ie music lovers / audiophiles) can argue over what any normal person would see as really fine detail. Jriver/Jim - please get on with life, embrace openness and chill.

 

[edorr]

This is a weird situation. Jim of Jriver is even censoring Jriver/JPLAY discussion on his forum by deleting posts. This is not in a spirit of openness. There are those who believe from a technical viewpoint that bit perfect cannot be improved upon and there are those who believe such tests are not sufficient. There is a large number of people hearing what they believe is an improvement in sound with Jplay. They cannot be ignored. As for saying "JPLAY is Hoax":

1) let's understate it: there is considerable doubt over this statement, the tests referenced do not appear to be anywhere near sufficient

2) JPLAY is a fully functional player - how can this be a hoax? - it plays music without the need for Jriver or Foobar

3) I don't know about US law but some countries would deem the statement my Jriver as libelous

4) what's even stranger is that JPLAY is not competitive with Jriver, indeed it may bring sales to Jriver as JPLAY is not a media library. There are some who've been using Jriver who now refuse to buy any more Jriver updates due to Jriver's antics - so their dubious and frankly unprofessional strategy is actually going to cost them money.

It's strange how people with very similar interests (ie music lovers / audiophiles) can argue over what any normal person would see as really fine detail. Jriver/Jim - please get on with life, embrace openness and chill.

Incredibly stupid. First they are implicitly telling all their customers that use Jplay and hear (illusory or real) a difference they are suckers that fell for a hoax. Not smart.

Second they do indeed expose themselves to potential legal action. The message says, using JPlay may degrade sound quality. This amounts to acknowledging using JPlay can change the sound. Even if the impact is random and not predictable, this still leaves open the possibility it can also improve sound. I'm not a lawyer, but I would thing that if sued, they would have to prove in court JPlay can only have either no impact on sound quality or degrade it. If they cannot do this (which obviously they cannot) their statement is libelous.

 

[dallasjustice]

If they cannot do this (which obviously they cannot) their statement is libelous.

Truth is a defense. If it were that obvious it would be self evident. I would enjoy watching a courtroom battle over this. Maybe Matt Ashland is fomenting a legal battle so he can present his truth defense. The ball is in Marcin's court now.

 

[Julf]

Incredibly stupid. First they are implicitly telling all their customers that use Jplay and hear (illusory or real) a difference they are suckers that fell for a hoax. Not smart.

Not smart from a commercial point of view, but perhaps intellectually honest?

Second they do indeed expose themselves to potential legal action. The message says, using JPlay may degrade sound quality. This amounts to acknowledging using JPlay can change the sound. Even if the impact is random and not predictable, this still leaves open the possibility it can also improve sound. I'm not a lawyer, but I would thing that if sued, they would have to prove in court JPlay can only have either no impact on sound quality or degrade it. If they cannot do this (which obviously they cannot) their statement is libelous.

I don't even play a lawyer on TV, but my understanding was that the claim was not that JPlay might degrade sound quality, but that it was a hoax (in the sense of offering no real improvement despite claims that it does). In that case, the JPlay people would have to prove that it isn't.

 

[edorr]

I don't even play a lawyer on TV, but my understanding was that the claim was not that JPlay might degrade sound quality, but that it was a hoax (in the sense of offering no real improvement despite claims that it does). In that case, the JPlay people would have to prove that it isn't.

The screenshot posted by DallasJustice claims it may degrade sound. While may be true, you can never prove this to be the case and at the same time categorically disproving the possibility is may improve sound.

 

[edorr]

Truth is a defense. If it were that obvious it would be self evident. I would enjoy watching a courtroom battle over this. Maybe Matt Ashland is fomenting a legal battle so he can present his truth defense. The ball is in Marcin's court now.

Truth is only absolute defense against libel and defamation. He can sue for tortuous interference. Truth is NOT absolute defense against tortuous interference.

"Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when a person intentionally damages the plaintiff's contractual or other business relationships."

 

[Julf]

The screenshot posted by DallasJustice claims it may degrade sound. While may be true, you can never prove this to be the case and at the same time categorically disproving the possibility is may improve sound.

I finally managed to read the screenshot (it is pretty fine print). I think the claim, "[JPlay] adds a layer of sound processing that can degrade sound quality", is reasonable in the context (I assume you only get that popup when JRiver detects JPlay being used as a JRiver add-on). In that situation, it does add a layer of sound processing, and it *can* degrade sound quality.

 

[Julf]

Truth is only absolute defense against libel and defamation. He can sue for tortuous interference. Truth is NOT absolute defense against tortuous interference.

"Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when a person intentionally damages the plaintiff's contractual or other business relationships."

Ah, but I think that arguments works both ways. Isn't JPlay's claim to improve on the sound of JRiver a tortious interference with JRiver's business, by implying that JRiver's sound quality is less than perfect?

 

[edorr]

Ah, but I think that arguments works both ways. Isn't JPlay's claim to improve on the sound of JRiver a tortious interference with JRiver's business, by implying that JRiver's sound quality is less than perfect?

Of course not. To improve the sound of Jriver using the JPlay plugin, you would still need to own a JRiver license so there is no interference between Jriver and it clients. Even if Jplay advocated ditching JRiver completely and using just JPlay by claiming it sounds better, this would not meet a legal standard of tortuous interference, because this is what companies do all the time; claiming their product is a better mousetrap.

 

[dallasjustice]

Truth is only absolute defense against libel and defamation. He can sue for tortuous [SIC] interference. Truth is NOT absolute defense against tortuous [SIC] interference.

"Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when a person intentionally damages the plaintiff's contractual or other business relationships."

You are correct that he can sue for whatever he wants. Would a tortious interference claim with these facts make it very far in a Texas Court? Don't count on it. One of the elements for such a claim is that threre's a valid existing contract with which the Defendant interfered. In my case, there's no contractual interference with Jplay. I've already paid the fee to Jplay and I am not demanding a refund due to the pop-up warning I received from Jriver.

You are incorrect with regard to the truth defense for a TI claim wherein the TI claim is also based on a libel claim.