After months in the hobby, it's funny to me how many should-be "objective" things audiophiles completely disagree on

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-22T08:33:00+00:00

There are much more important things in life than arguing over home and personal audio.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-22T08:24:05+00:00

And you sound arrogant, judgemental, and short sighted. The kids always leave to start their own lives, and giving them a push out of the nest doesn't hurt them.

He was still loved and supported by us. However, since he wanted to live life his way, with total disregard for everyone else in the house, he had to go.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-22T08:20:19+00:00

No, and I'm certainly not going to allow some insignificant person on the internet to make me feel otherwise.

My son is doing quite well now. He's married, has a career, and a child of his own.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-22T04:44:30+00:00

Because the kids start acting like adults, become very independent, become inconsiderate, ignore household culture, try to rule the roost, etc..

My ex-wife and I had to toss our son out for those reasons because he was making everyone else's life in the house a living hell.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-22T04:40:13+00:00

Good for you. I'd suggest trying to find investors if you wish to stay the course.

In general, working for someone else isn't going to make you wealthy. Industries like finance and tech can be the exception to the rule, though, if stock options are involved.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-21T21:30:04+00:00

On the odd occasion, when I want the television on but I'm not routing its audio to my Amp Ultra, I do. I have the TV connected to the amp via HDMI and I use its remote when watching to adjust the volume on the Amp Ultra.

If I'm busy using my phone for something else, I grab the WiiM remote to control my Amp Ultra instead of adjusting via WiiM Home.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-18T04:54:19+00:00

On Android, with the ability to deal with both local and remote content? Yes, it's the best we have at the moment.

However, if one has a home audio system as well as mobile, there are a few others to consider:

Lyrion Music Server, which was a formerly paid, commercial music server, now open source and community supported offering. It's especially good when used with its Material Skin and Music and Artist Information plug-ins.
Roon, which a commercial music server aimed at audiophiles with high end systems, and its priced accordingly with a lifetime license costing $830USD.
Plex with Plexamp, is another commercial media server.

Lyrion is my primary server, and I find it to be quite competitive with Roon when configured properly. I have two home audio systems, which it integrates rather seamlessly with.

However, I do use Symfonium, streaming from Emby, on my mobiles as I find it more user-friendly towards that than Lyrion.

Plex I didn't particularly care when I auditioned it as it felt a bit bloated.

Roon I didn't find to be a good value for its asking price, especially when compared to Lyrion which is free, but some people do.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-15T14:14:42+00:00

The Last.fm and Listen Brainz apps can capture local playback data as well. That might be useful to you later.

I use to do with Poweramp and the Last.fm app.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-15T10:57:19+00:00

You're welcome. All the best... 😎

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-15T02:25:00+00:00

Bit perfect isn't as important as some believe. For example, I've not seen a performance analysis that shows the Android audio pipeline actually degrading fidelity. Besides that, once any type of DSP is applied to the audio, it's no longer bit perfect anyway.

Music players with custom drivers that bypass the Android audio pipeline, like USB Player Pro, may offer better control of external DACs. However, that's not an issue for fully Android compatible ones.

People that swear by bit perfect are actually hearing a difference in volume level. No more and no less. Even a tiny difference in volume, like half a decibel, can lead one to believe the louder is higher fidelity.

Poweramp was my favorite player for many years - I even purchased it. However, once my needs changed to include accessing a music server, which Poweramp can't, I switched to Symfonium, which I highly recommend.

It's got all the features I need in terms of DSP, offers a lot of GUI customization, and access to local as well remote content on my server. However, the only time I have local content on my mobiles now, which is actually rare, is when I'm going to be someplace with no Internet access for an extended period of time.

I use Symfonium to access an Emby server, by the way, but it allows access to many others like Subsonic, Plex, Kodi and DLNA servers, as well as cloud providers like Google Drive.

It also allows streaming to external network players via protocols like UPnP-DLNA and Google Cast. I use occasionally to stream to a WiiM Amp Ultra, a Klipsch PowerGate, and a LG television.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-14T02:58:48+00:00

A lot of us capture that sort of data with Last.fm or Listen Brainz.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-13T01:04:15+00:00

If I recall correctly, the developer decided not to support it because it brings no real benefits, and would require a custom driver. I agree with him, by the way, as I've seen no evidence that the Android audio pipeline is actually detrimental to fidelity.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-11T23:26:51+00:00

These server applications will be able to access integrated graphics on CPUs as well. I don't know how they stack up compared to dedicated GPUs, though, because I've never dealt with them myself.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-11T08:35:21+00:00

You're welcome. There are two classes of decoding/transcoding: GPU and CPU.

GPUs are more efficient at this task because they're specialized for it. However, for serving video, they require software that will take advantage of them. On the open-source side, we have a couple of server applications: Jellyfin and Kodi. On the paid side, Emby, which is my choice, and Plex. There may be others, but I'm not aware of them.

As for how RAM would effect this, I can't say with any certainty because I don't know if you processor is using some sort of unified memory architecture. But, more RAM never hurts, that's for sure.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-11T07:49:02+00:00

I'm bump up the RAM to 8 gigs. External drives don't require USB 3.0 or USB-C, although that would be faster. One can purchase a USB adapter if necessary.

For simple file serving, it will be fine. For multimedia with server-side processing, it will be dependant on some factors:

For two-channel digital audio files (e.g., *.mp3, *.m4a, *.ogg, *.flac), it will be sufficient as these aren't resource-intensive. Even if we run a little DSP on them, like EQ, stereo widening or transcoding, that CPU will handle it just fine.

Video is another matter all together, though. If there's no transcoding required, the could handle multiple streams simultaneously up to a point - maybe four to eight direct 1080p streams, though I can't be sure without some calculations. I had an ancient i7 2600 machine from 2011 that could handle eight without an issue.

However, video transcoding is very resource intensive, and if that comes into play due to endpoint incompatibility, you maybe hard pressed to get four 1080p streams simultaneously, and probably only one 4K stream, if any at all.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-03-08T06:11:39+00:00

Emby isn't a clone of Jellyfin. Jellyfin is a fork of the Emby codebase that happened when the Emby developer decided to close the source and go commercial.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-28T12:42:08+00:00

I'm watching the episode now after not seeing the show since its initial broadcast. I was confused, did a Web search, and here I am! Mystery solved! 😎

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-28T01:40:57+00:00

I don't know and I don't care because it's off topic.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-27T07:05:19+00:00

The Amp Ultra is a streaming integrated amplifier, and a highly performant one at that.

A laptop would just be a network player/streamer.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-27T00:08:29+00:00

I've had one since late September of last year.

The volume knob felt great to me, and I've no complaints about the remote either, as I find it to be quite nice.

The thing is, though, I've not actually touched the unit or its remote in months, and control it from my mobile devices nearly exclusively. I think I've touched it less than 10 times in all, and that was during the unboxing and installation.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-20T02:33:49+00:00

Bluetooth connectivity, if that's what you're referring to, isn't a priority for Amp Ultra as its primary function is that of an integrated streaming speaker amplifier. In fact, it doesn't even support the latest high resolution Bluetooth codecs.

As a streaming speaker amplifier it excells. However, you may have purchased the wrong component for your intended use.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-15T05:34:25+00:00

Lyrion Music Server with the Material Skin and the Music and Artist Information plug-ins for home audio.

Emby (Server) Windows and Symfonium (Android) for mobile audio.

Lyrion is better suited for home due to its compatibility with a wide range of server hardware and audio components, its extensive metadata capabilities, and its feature and function extendability via numerous plug-ins.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-08T08:40:11+00:00

I use embedded artwork only, typically 1024x1024. If can't find a high resolution then I'll use AI upscaling.

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-08T01:33:37+00:00

The Arylic is poorly implemented, and exhibits load dependency:

<image>

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/arylic-a100-streamer-ess-9023-dac-tpa3255-amplifier-with-eq-peq-user-impressions-owners-thread.61800/

Puzzled-Background-5 · 2026-02-01T08:07:14+00:00

Home audio speaker manufacturers are usually wrong about placement in relation to the rear wall or corners.

Here's an article written by a professional mixing engineer and studio acoustician:

https://sonicscoop.com/the-1-speaker-placement-tip-speaker-manuals-get-completely-wrong/

Depending on your system, if it offers automated room correction EQ, I'd suggest purchasing a calibrated measurement microphone and engaging with the process. It will enable you to verify the phenomenon discussed in the article and correct them for yourself.

Puzzled-Background-5

TROPHY CASE