Snakeoil OS: The Blog

Question

Xavier says on 15 Oct 2019:

Flac decoding doesn’t sound as good as playing .wav file. On my system, it’s fairly obvious.

Would it possible to have MPD doing this?
Step 1: Decode FLAC as wav file and store that into RAM Disk
Step 2: Play from Ramdisk the .wav file

This would be a great addition to SnakeOil.
As far as I know, no other tool do that.

Full story »

A curiosity happened in late September 2019. This was when I added the Ryzen 5 as the Snakeoil development server. The network between my NAS and the Ryzen are changed as such:

In an attempt to simplify my home setup. I have decided to purchase 2 dual port 10Gbps NIC - one for my NAS, and the other for the new Ryzen. These network cards will be connected at 10 Gbps to my main switch, and also a direct connection between the NAS and the server itself (dedicated iSCSI connection).

iSCSI is works like a SATA cable, but it’s connected via normal networking equipment rather than between your SSD and motherboard. Now for some reason that still eludes me, the iSCSI data just refuse to work properly with Jumbo Frames on.

So in an attempt to troubleshoot the problem, I have disabled Jumbo Frames throughout my entire network. Unfortunately with a MTU of 1500, the sound I get from my Hifi just do not sound right.

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So I purchased a new AMD Ryzen 5 3600 system a month back. This is the 3^rd generation CPU from AMD based on the Zen architecture. The following components form the foundation of the next development machine, replacing the old Xeon from circa 2017.

This is a modest system, all up costing about $1500:

• AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (65W TDP)
• Asus Prime X570-PRO
• 4x 16GB 3200 GHz DDR4
• 250GB NVMe
• Bronze 850W PSU

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Power cables, a touchy subject with Audiophiles. Audiophiles are roughly separated into 3 camps when it comes to power cables.

1. They make a difference, those who don’t think so are not listening
2. They do not make a difference, those who think they do are not measuring
3. People sitting on the fence looking over in glee

Goes without question I am in camp #1. Power cables make a difference. /thread.

But the arguments continue. The second most common take down from the other camps is that expensive power cables is no different to any power cable you brought at a local store.

There is no point getting better power cables than what you can buy from a local store because you have tens of metres of “normal” in wall cabling, and kilometres of grid cabling. In other words, the power cable is not the weakest link on the grid. There is little point getting after-market/audiophile power cables when everything on the grid is of poor quality.

Is this true? Let us take a closer look!

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