Multi-channel DSD/DSF - OSMC - HDMI - Yamaha playback, not

[John Dvoracek]

I hope this is the right forum. Forgive any misuse of terminology, I am at times confused. Here goes ...

My Yamaha AX-750 specifications are to play DSD 2 to 5.1ch from the HDMI inputs. A SACD played in my Sony BluRay lights all six channels on the Yamaha, so that part works.

I rip the ISO of that SACD, extract a multichannel DSF, put that out on my Freenas NAS, start up OSMC on a Raspberry Pi2 connected to the NAS (RJ-45 cable) and the Yamaha via HDMI, select the track, and the audio is distorted and choppy and only 2 channels light up on the Yamaha. 2 channel DSF's play perfectly.

Any ideas on where the problem may lie? I'm just wondering if anyone knows this is possible or just impossible to do this way. Thanks in advance.

 

[MikeyFresh]

I hope this is the right forum. Forgive any misuse of terminology, I am at times confused. Here goes ...

My Yamaha AX-750 specifications are to play DSD 2 to 5.1ch from the HDMI inputs. A SACD played in my Sony BluRay lights all six channels on the Yamaha, so that part works.

I rip the ISO of that SACD, extract a multichannel DSF, put that out on my Freenas NAS, start up OSMC on a Raspberry Pi2 connected to the NAS (RJ-45 cable) and the Yamaha via HDMI, select the track, and the audio is distorted and choppy and only 2 channels light up on the Yamaha. 2 channel DSF's play perfectly.

Any ideas on where the problem may lie? I'm just wondering if anyone knows this is possible or just impossible to do this way. Thanks in advance.

I wish I had an answer for that but I don't have a multi-channel system of any kind, not helpful in this instance.

If you are sure that OSMC is multi-channel DSD compatible, then I would suspect a potential problem/hardware limitation with RPi2 compatibility, do you have an RPi3 that you could test it on?

 

[John Dvoracek]

I wish I had an answer for that but I don't have a multi-channel system of any kind, not helpful in this instance.

If you are sure that OSMC is multi-channel DSD compatible, then I would suspect a potential problem/hardware limitation with RPi2 compatibility, do you have an RPi3 that you could test it on?

Thanks. I finally found the right posts on the Kodi forum. Unfortunately the current consensus is "the playback of 5.1 dsf files seems to be completely screwed up. (stuttering, echoes, very low volume)". There is a glimmer of hope the developers may address this as interest increases.

 

[Srrndhound]

Re: Playback of 5.1 dsf files, I recently set up Kodi, initially to replace iTunes/ATV Gen1 CD music server which was deliberately obsoleted by Apple. Kodi filled those shoes very well indeed, after I figured out how to get the album art handled.

I did not see any easy way to get Kodi to handle my collection of 5.1 SACD and DVD-A discs, so I gave Roon's free 14-day trial a shot. Within a few days I was a convert -- bought the lifetime subscription. Roon handles the lot seamlessly, and is much more adept at incorporating audio file types and correcting tags. Plus its U/I is a pleasure to use. I still happily use Kodi for movies as it handles Atmos nicely.

Since I apply DSP post-processing (via a Classe SSP-800) for EQ and bass management, Roon converts the 5.1 DSD files into 88.2 kHz PCM on the fly. It converts stereo DSF to 176.4 kHz PCM. Theoretically my SSP-800's HDMI inputs can handle 5.1 at 176.4, too, but perhaps my lowly Win7 media PC is not up to that. No matter, the SACDs and DVD-As sound as good as ever in full surround.

 

[John Dvoracek]

Thanks. I looked at roon, but I couldn’t figure out a topography. My music is on a FreeNas network server, and I want to play it on my Yamaha receiver. There does not appear to be an easy way to add roon to the network server, and I really don’t want to add another box between the server and the receiver. Freenas allows virtual macines, but in BSD while there is no BSD roon piece. A few people have tried to create an Ubuntu virtual machine on freenas for roon, but none successfully that I could find.

 

[Srrndhound]

I'm not saying it is easy. But it looks like there are ways to make it work. These are links to Roon's chats on the ongoing progress of running Roon on FreeNAS.
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

But as you have a Raspberry Pi2 connected to the NAS (RJ-45 cable) and the Yamaha via HDMI, would you not consider putting Roon on that? The following link is just one such example.
Link 4

 

[John Dvoracek]

I'm not saying it is easy. But it looks like there are ways to make it work. These are links to Roon's chats on the ongoing progress of running Roon on FreeNAS.
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

But as you have a Raspberry Pi2 connected to the NAS (RJ-45 cable) and the Yamaha via HDMI, would you not consider putting Roon on that? The following link is just one such example.
Link 4

Thanks for the help. I came across those. Link 1 is wouldn't-this-work-ware. Links 2 and 3 have something working, but the directions are hardly well-formed and change some OS level and boot variables that can get you when new versions are released or you change something else. If I add roon to freenas, I wouldn't want to do anything to compromise freenas resources which setting up roon in a VM does. I am still pursuing this in the background trying to get a Ubuntu jail working into which roon-server would go. Alternately, there is some hope we can convince the roon team to release a BSD version that would install directly in a freenas BSD jail. BSD is not Linux, it is Linux-like. Link 4 got me excited at first, but it is for roon-bridge only, not roon or roon-server which is what I need running.

 

[MikeyFresh]

There is a glimmer of hope the developers may address this as interest increases.

I see mention of this on another forum, apparently LibreELEC is 6-channel DSD compatible over HDMI, albeit down sampled to 24-bit/96 kHz PCM, however it is said to actually work and sound good.

 

[Srrndhound]

96 kHz seems like an odd output for a DSD>PCM converter. Usually it is 176.4, 88.2, or 44.1 kHz. Something that divides easily from the "DSD64" sample rate 2,822.4 kHz.

 

[Chasewood]

MikeyFresh asked me to share my experiences with Media Players and a Control Point for playback of the Mulit-Channel (MC) and Stereo SACD rips I have done.
The relevant parts of my home theater system are: an Onkyo TX NR-3030 reciever with 7.4.2 speaker configuaration, a windows laptop as an HTPC, a Sony UDP-X700 disc player and a WD4KUltra Network Addressable Storage (NAS) system. They are all Ethernet connected through the same router.
I have the multi-channel rips in a single folder duplicated on the HTPC and NAS. The stereo rips are likewise in their own folder duplicated on the HTPC and NAS.
The NAS comes with a Twonky DLNA server. I have Kodi and Serviio running on the HTPC.
My observations are:
1) Twonky processed the ripped files, so I could play the files in the stereo folder from the NAS directly to my Onkyo reciever. The MC files would play on the reciever, but played in stereo only.
2) On advice from a contributor to the SACD rip thread in this forum, I learned that it was possible that my Sony X700 could act as a renderer and provide MC feed to my receiver over HDMI. SInce I already had that connection configured to play Dolby Atmos, I tried playing raw files from the HTPC through the X700, and that worked.
3) I then needed a media player to organize my collection.
3.1) Twonky feeds the MC and stereo rips to the player, but the files in each folder are not sorted in the same order as on the disc. That is particularly irritating when playing classical music with multiple movements.
3.2) I am a big fan of Kodi, and I use it I for many applications, including managing my ripped CD's and FLAC files. Kodi is amazingly rich, and provides capablities such as displaying album art, fan art, lyrics, visualizations, as well as the usual playlists and so on. Using drive mapping, it is straightforward to access files on the NAS from Kodi running on the HTPC. Unfortunately, with the flexiblity and richness, Kodi can be bewildering to configure and, although I applied the SACD addon, I could not find a way to get Kodi to feed the ripped SACD files to the X700.
3.3) A user in the the Sony help forum reported similar problems with other Media Servers. She said she had success with Serviio and I saw that Sony endorses Serviio on its website. I installed Serviio on my HTPC, directed the ripped SACD folders to it, assigned my X700 as a renderer, and everyting worked, pretty much first time. There is a problem though. If I am looking at a view other than Folder (e.g. Album, Artist, etc.) for some of my albums, not all of the tracks are visible. Not sure what do do about that, but it's not a big issue as I tend to play from the folders anyway. Another issue is that accessing files on the NAS is possible but far from straightforward with Serviio.
4) MikeyFresh had recommended Mconnect as a Control Point to use on my iPad. I did so and that also worked. Mconnect displays album art. Very few of my files had album art after ripping, so I used Bliss to add it. That worked. Now all my rips display album art on Mconnect. The only issue with Mconnnect is that it can only display what is available from Serviio, so I have the missing tracks issue there also.
Unforunatley, album art does not display on the the TV when it is acting as a display console for the X700 and Sony support has confirmed that it will not do so.
I have had excellent help from MikeyFresh and others in this forum, and also when chatting with Sony support. The remaining issue is the missing tracks. It seems that falls mostly in what Bliss is supposed to do, so my next step is to ask Bliss support if they have any ideas about the disappearing tracks.
That's where I am right now. Hope this helps somebody at some time.

 

[iamjameshof]

After all this time, there is still no way to output DSD from a computer via HDMI, apparently. I still use the workaround of sending it via USB (using Foobar and/or JRiver) to a nice S.M.S.L. M500 DAC.