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Streaming: Qobuz, DLNA, UPnP etc

beammeup said:
Tony am I understanding this correctly - you are streaming Qobuz (and now Tidal) using mconnect from your smart phone?
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Yes, mostly from an iPad Pro, but same thing.

James Evans said:
You could feasibly use a rasp pi with dig I/O hat to feed both your cdp and streamed content digitally via the pi to the single dac input on the DSX. I'm pretty sure the hifiberry digi I/O will stream via i2s from the pi and from optical/coax input to optical/coax out. So you could have LMS/material skin running on the pi acting as the streamer into the DSX, with the cdp digi out also running through that digi I/O hat. No idea how source switching occurs there though.
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Yes, that sort of thing is possible, but for me it negates the whole point of owning the DSX. I want to get it to work. The other thing is as broadband technology is improving all the time it will eventually work (as long as UPnP/DLNA remains a widely used standard). All I really need is patience! The world will come to it! There is also no pressure here at all as I have the Poly/Mojo2 for streaming anyway, swapping over only takes seconds (thankfully my preamp has loads of inputs).
 
Tony L said:
You do realise the DSX cost £7.5k when new? That price level may be chicken-feed to you, but it is outside my usual hi-fi spend-range. Just how much better it sounds than the still remarkably good Poly/Mojo is not insignificant. That is what I’m chasing, and sorry, but I can’t just go out and buy a Dave, or even a Hugo TT, and I suspect that is what I’d need to do to equal what I’m hearing here. I’m certainly going to continue pushing on until say a nice QBD76HDSD (the DAC upon which the DSX is based) crops up at a price I am prepared to pay.

PS I now have a Tidal trial!
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I've never said spend big, quite the opposite but it's irrelevant how much it cost if it not able to do what you want it to. Don't think I've ever spent more than £7k on one component either. My current digital front end is an ATC CDA2 & Innuos Zen Mini with LPS. Sounds great, I don't get Qobuz drop outs. Add it up, far less than £7k
 
Just had an A B on a few tracks and I do feel Qobuz has a slight edge, just a little more open, 3d and more dynamic, but very little in it really. Both are good and I’ll go with whichever works better for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll cancel Qobuz tomorrow just to give Tidal a chance. If I do go with Qobuz I’ll buy a year upfront as it is cheaper that way, and it makes no sense to do that right now.

I assume Tidal has fully dispensed with all the MQA crap by now? I can’t process that with either DAC.
 
Tony L said:
Changing the router doesn’t seem to have changed the latency issue. I’m still ‘grade C‘ on the ‘bufferbloat’ test (results here) and ‘average’ for gaming on the Cloudflare test (was previously ‘poor’).
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Again I don't think latency or bufferbloat is your issue.

If you are convinced that you are suffering from bufferbloat then the Draytek out of the box won't solve this. You need to look at how to use traffic shaping, sometimes the router packages this up into a feature called "smart queues" but that can actually cause more issues than it claims to solve

It would also be extremely unlikely that your ISP is the problem unless you are getting sub 10Mbps download and pings that swing wildly and are consistently in excess of 200mS (chances are pretty much zero)

You need to diagnose the connection from the DSX to the router and you really need a packet capture to do that.
 
Tony L said:
Yes, I’m sure there is a way of doing it (effectively adding a pre-fetch buffer/cache), but it would likely fall foul of all manner of DRM encoding. I bet that is why it doesn’t exist commercially!
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Nope that is done via traffic shaping, queues and limiting, Don't see how any buffering or caching would violate DRM as you are caching packets not music.
 
robs said:
Any dropouts on Tidal yet?
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Only done a couple of hours as I went out cycling earlier and its been flawless so far. That said Qobuz could go for hours on the right day too.

As above I need to do some proper network analysis to really get to the bottom of this as to understand it fully I’d need to recreate the exact conditions that cause the DSX to drop the stream. I just don’t have the tools to hand. IIRC my Pi5 has a ethernet port, but nothing else I use has! I’m still very much on a learning curve with this router too, so I’m not sure what analysis I can set up there.

I’m just going to see how Tidal runs for a while first though. No need to think about stuff if it actually works!
 
Tony L said:
Anyway, Tidal is up and running and hasn’t dropped out yet.
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Ah that's interesting.

Qobuz uses TCP to stream the media and TLS for the data and control, when I looked at a packet capture I did for my network I could see that Qobuz was breaking the music file into multiple TCP sessions but not always sending a FIN to close it. Normally not an issue as the receiver sees a new session and does a RST

It may be that your older DSX is not able to handle the TCP session being ended incorrectly.
 
I've not read all of this thread, but it sounds like the Chord DSX 1000 is a fine player, if a little temperamental on WiFi.

Given the WiFi issues, especially with Qobuz, was it not an option to pay to have the router position moved to somewhere you could hardwire Ethernet to the DSX 1000?
 
vacuum_tubes said:
Qobuz uses TCP to stream the media and TLS for the data and control, when I looked at a packet capture I did for my network I could see that Qobuz was breaking the music file into multiple TCP sessions but not always sending a FIN to close it. Normally not an issue as the receiver sees a new session and does a RST

It may be that your older DSX is not able to handle the TCP session being ended incorrectly.
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The way the DS drops Qobuz may be significant too. It just stops. Exactly the same behaviour as a stop command. Never any glitch or stutter, it just stops and I hear its relay click off. It hasn’t crashed, it will happily start again from the start of the track. It can’t ‘scrub’ through the track timeline either, whereas the Poly/Mojo can. I don’t know enough about DLNA to know the formal feature-set/spec, but it gets everything else right, e.g. resolution, gapless etc, plus displays the artwork.

Stuart Frazer said:
Given the WiFi issues, especially with Qobuz, was it not an option to pay to have the router position moved to somewhere you could hardwire Ethernet to the DSX 1000?
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It isn’t WiFi at all, The DSX is connected via a cat5 cable. There’s links to the Chord site, manual etc in the first post.
 
I see. Are Chord not able to advise?

Given that this is an older product, designed to run-on older and less speedy internet infrastructure than we have now, you'd think the solution would be fairly straightforward! Aghhhhhh!
 
Stuart Frazer said:
Given that this is an older product, designed to run-on older and less speedy internet infrastructure than we have now, you'd think the solution would be fairly straightforward! Aghhhhhh!
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The key thing is it is a DLNA local area network renderer. It’s intended use was to play back a music library stored on a local UPnP server. It works flawlessly in this context. There is a reprint of a HiFi News review of it here (BlueBird Music) which gives some context and explains what it is.

It was never intended as an internet streamer, as internet streamers were barely a thing when it was designed. It is also an outlier in the Chord range, they never made another. There is no Dave equivalent. I guess the nearest current models are the Hugo/2Go and Mojo/Poly, both of which are designed to be portable. This thing certainly isn’t. I suspect it wasn’t very successful as most folk would have bought the technically similar, but more versatile and less expensive QBD76HDSD, and chosen a third-party network front-end of their choosing (Pi or whatever). It is an interesting product, possibly one of those odd abandoned paths in hi-fi. I’d maybe file it next to an Elcassette if I had one, but if I had one of those I’d find a way to use it too!

The thing I like about it is the way it sounds. It is a total sledgehammer; just such a big, powerful and tight sound. It kicks! It almost reminds me of the first time I heard a Krell, it has the same kind of bass thwack, slam and unflappable thing. It is very ‘flat earth’ too, nothing analytical or sterile. It pushes stuff along.

PS It’s still going….
 
I don’t want to count any chickens, but it seems really solid with Tidal. I just ran SpeedTest on my iPad whilst it was streaming a 24/96 file and it didn’t care in the slightest. The one thing it doesn’t seem to do is the cover art, but I run it with the screen off so don’t care in the slightest about that. Maybe it is the TCP session thing @vacuum_tubes suggested.

PS The DSX is based around the StreamUnlimited Stream700 front-end. Datasheet here. I think several other audiophile network players used a variation of this too.

Edit: other players using a version of this; Project Stream Box DS, Musical Fidelity M1, Krell Connect, YBA MP100 and I’m sure many others. No hi-fi company can afford to develop this sort of stuff!
 
@Tony L in your original thread I stated that i have the Chord CodeX (the model below the DSX), I have no problem streaming local HI-Res files on my local network. I even use the mconnect app and my codex shows up as a DSX which I would olny assume that the software is identical.

The issues you are having can only relate to your intended use. Ignore the fact it retailed at a large price a decade ago. It does not work for you. Just move on.
 
Tony

If this all doesn't work out and you like the Chord dac try a WiiM Pro streamer as a front end via optical. You'll get a modern and stable streaming front end for peanuts. I use one with my Mojo2 in zee bedroom for initimate listening 😝

J

PS Avoid the WiiM Mini as it's not as good as the Pro with streaming.
 
I’m far from convinced it isn’t working! As stated I’m in absolutely no rush. If a QBD76HDSD turned up at a reasonable price over the next year or two I’d maybe buy that and move the DSX on, but it has worked flawlessly with Tidal for hours today. I move very slowly with hi-fi. I’m as far from the frantic box-opener mindset as one can get, so this journey may take some time.

The bottom line is I’m in a far better position than I started from. Whilst I loved the DPA PDM3 I had previously the DSX beats it in a straight CD DAC fight, which is all I used the PDM3 for. As such I’m slightly ahead already, plus I’ve got a streaming solution that works most of the time. Tidal testing is still ongoing, it may possibly be better than Qobuz, time will tell. I also have the ability to stream local files, even though this aspect is of very little interest to me. Add to that the fact I also have the Poly/Mojo and I’ve even got a backup strategy! There are no downsides to this picture.

FWIW I actually find people’s reactions quite interesting as it highlights just how far I am these days from being a traditional hi-fi consumer. I move slowly and learn stuff. I know every single screw and washer in my TD-124, a fifteen year journey, every resistor, valve and capacitor in my Leak amps, a ten year journey, the compression driver alignment, bolt tightness etc of every aspect of my Tannoys etc. I really don’t mind taking time to learn and really understand stuff, it is half the fun IMO. I’m sure the DSX will be here for a good few years yet! I wonder if one can run Doom on a Stream700 board…

PS No optical. It has one 10/100 Ethernet port and one BNC coax. That’s it. The Apollo-R owns the BNC.
 
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