Well, I tried a variety of things to mitigate stuttering with 192/24 tracks, with varying degrees of success.
1. Mount BDP-1’s USER share via SMB
2. Edit: MPDPLAYBACK.SET
3. Add: buffer_before_play;30% (I tried 15, 20, 25, 30% w/ different effects)
4. Add: audio_buffer_size;16384 (I increased this value from 2048, 4096... 16384 w/ different effects)
5. Reboot BDP-1
This will add the line below to /etc/mpd.conf to increase playback buffering which seems to be required to remove stuttering at the beginning of 192/24 tracks (this was universal across all of my larger, high-res tracks). Playing back an album would be smooth, but tapping on a specific track would sometimes result in a stutter at the very start of the track.
See:
https://linux.die.net/man/5/mpd.confbuffer_before_play <0-100%>
This specifies how much of the audio buffer should be filled before playing a song.
Try increasing this if you hear skipping when manually changing songs. ... exactly the symptom I am hearing.
The default is 10%, a little over 1 second of CD-quality audio with the default buffer size.
audio_buffer_size <size in KiB>
This specifies the size of the audio buffer in kilobytes.
The default is 2048, large enough for nearly 12 seconds of CD-quality audio.
Finally, I’ve noticed that using AES out, instead of USB, reduces the stuttering effect (and also solves the problem of changing sample rates and the delay incurred with my DAC - using AES, it’s instant, but with USB there is a slight delay, which can clip the start of the track).
In the end, I was able to reduce, but not completely eliminate, stuttering effects w/ larger audio files when skipping around an album. Not sure why this is a problem when in the past the BDP-1 never exhibited stuttering.
I think the BDP-1 + MPD playback was such a surprise for me, when I first auditioned the box, because it's a well-designed appliance with a low powered CPU with minimal software and processing. Great combination, but I think larger high-res files are maybe pushing it past what it was designed to play. I wonder if the issue is with newer versions of MPD on the BDP-1 - I haven't tried going back to earlier versions, since that's a time-consuming change (requires resetting the MPD db and rescanning everything).
I have to think about my upgrade path; for now I will just motor on with the the BDP-1 and Roon (where everything just works, though I am not as pleased with the sound).