[nikon]

James

Couple questions ...

Does the BDP-1 require external DAC to function or can it be connected directly to a Bryston pre-amplifier

Does it require the MPS-2 for power or connect to A/C outlet

What will approximate price be at launch and when is approximate launch date

Any pictures - front and rear


Nik

[James Tanner]

Hi Nikon,

Yes it does require a DAC.
The power supply we are working on now and it will be internal so it will not need the MPS-2.
Hoping about $1800 list and should be early summer for release. 

I had the prototype set up at the Vegas 2010 show and I have to say the sound was exceptional even without the fine tuning we are doing now.

james

[whanafi]

Guess you need to add me to the confused. 

If it needs a DAC, presumably the great sounding music was the result of the DAC-preamp-amp-speaker combination rather than the BDP which would be feeding the DAC an unmodified and accurate data stream. 

Since a Squeezebox does that, and handles remote streaming over Ethernet, rather than requiring a directly connected storage device, what does the BDP actually do??

[James Tanner]

Hi,

The BDP-1 has 5 major parts to it:

1. Flash drive storage on the input (no moving parts in the BDP-1)
2. Industrial quality computer board
3. State of the Art Soundcard 192/24
4. State of the Art digital AES EBU output section (connects to our AES EBU input on the BDA-1)
5. Software to support the above.

This is a dedicated high resolution, low noise, low distortion playback system.

Streaming has major issues with hi-res files.

james

[Napalm]

[...]
Since a Squeezebox does that, and handles remote streaming over Ethernet, rather than requiring a directly connected storage device, what does the BDP actually do??

The shortest answer this:

The BDP-1 is the link between a hard disk and your BDA-1.

As for the Squeezebox, and given my recent experiences with Logitech, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

Nap. 

[sfraser]

Guess you need to add me to the confused. 

If it needs a DAC, presumably the great sounding music was the result of the DAC-preamp-amp-speaker combination rather than the BDP which would be feeding the DAC an unmodified and accurate data stream. 

Since a Squeezebox does that, and handles remote streaming over Ethernet, rather than requiring a directly connected storage device, what does the BDP actually do??

From the sounds of it the BDP should stream from a  Ethernet connected music source as well. The Squeezebox/SqueezeServer approach offers a lot more bells and whistles in regards to online services SQL based search's and plugins syncing multiple players together for parties  etc. However as Napalm alluded to, the Squeezebox approach is open source and some versions of code, particularly the nightly builds can introduce enough problems that it gets in the way of it's prime purpose, allowing users to listen to music. The squeezebox solution consists of a variety of player options ranging from a glorified clock radio to the $2000 transporter. These players (except the clock radio and boombox models) are connected to your receiver,preamp or external DAC much in the same way a CD player would be. Squeezebox's must be used in  conjunction with the squeezebox server which is a software service installed on a host somewhere in your house. The squeezebox's and Squeezeserver communicate to each other via wired ethernet or wifi. Squeezeserver service has been ported over to many OS's including  Windows,MAC,Unix,Linux etc. This service is the real brains behind the  squeezebox's , in fact it totally controls  the squeezebox's making the players not much more than a display screen, decoder and DAC that receives and decodes and optionally converts the music back to it's analog format. In my opinion  Bryston's approach as a minimalist approach, do ONE thing, and typical to Bryston,  do it very very well. The Bryston unit will read files from a directly connected USB source, or from host connected to it via ethernet, decode these files and output them to a external DAC. It will access these files very much in the same way your pc/laptop would access files from a directly connect USB thumb drive or ethernet connected file server. The nice thing, is that you could certainly use both solutions in your house, both accessing the same music files independently of each other.

[brucek]

what does the BDP actually do??

I sure don't claim to know much about marketing, but when audiophiles have to ask what your product actually does, then I think Bryston has its work cut out for it in the sales department.   

brucek

[Napalm]

[...] In my opinion  Bryston's approach as a minimalist approach, do ONE thing, and typical to Bryston,  do it very very well.[...]

I vote for this approach too.

I'm sick of all-in-one-shines-your-shoes-too stuff that doesn't do anything right.

I keep my fingers crossed that Bryston gets the firmware right from the first time. The last thing they want is a daily-patching nightmare.

Nap. 

[werd]

I vote for this approach too.

I'm sick of all-in-one-shines-your-shoes-too stuff that doesn't do anything right.

I keep my fingers crossed that Bryston gets the firmware right from the first time. The last thing they want is a daily-patching nightmare.

Nap. 

with all due respect napalm, i think you are complicating the BDP1. Its more of an audio device than a computer imo. It will probably run real stable even with diff OS changes and so forth.

[sfraser]

I sure don't claim to know much about marketing, but when audiophiles have to ask what your product actually does, then I think Bryston has its work cut out for it in the sales department.   

brucek

You could be right, but once the light bulb comes on and audiophiles  realize the flexibility it brings, having all your music at your finger tips without any sound degradation, in any room in the house, it may sell like hot cakes as well.

[srb]

You could be right, but once the light bulb comes on and audiophiles  realize the flexibility it brings, having all your music at your finger tips without any sound degradation, in any room in the house, it may sell like hot cakes as well.

I may have missed it, but how would the Bryston solution address having your music collection available "in any room in the house"?
 
Steve

[sfraser]

I may have missed it, but how would the Bryston solution address having your music collection available "in any room in the house"?
 
Steve

What i mean is if you ripped your entire music collection to FLAC format and stored it on a NAS/PC that was connected  to your linksys internet router/switch etc, the music would be accessible via any other network device connected to the router/switch. Now if you had two stereo's in your home, and each had a network connected BDP unit, each could access the music on the NAS/PC. Instant access to your entire digital music library. Realistically, for most people, you may own one BDP connected to your "high end" Bryston system in your main listening room. You may also have a Squeezebox boombox in the garage and squeezebox radio in your kitchen. You might also have speakers connected to your ethernet connected home office computer. Each one of these devices can access your NAS/PC music library.  You might find your next "CD" purchase might be online directly from Amazon, or maybe the artist themselves who will allow you to download it directly in FLAC format from their web page. Or you could visit the "live music archive" web page  which host's thousands of live concerts from "tape friendly bands" and download a live concert for free in FLAC format, add it your your library and listen at your leisure.

[brucek]

Each one of these devices can access your NAS/PC music library.

But most of us that are computer savvy already have their music available on their network to each system in the home - it's simple computer networking. Most of us have computers with high end audio cards (either external or internal). We already use FLAC format with a software ripper such as EAC, where it will correct scratches, etc, using error correction to obtain a perfect copy, then playing back with a player such as Foobar2000 using WASAPI (API exclusive mode) for Windows 7 or Vista, allowing bit-exact output, then ensuring we have a high end audio card feeding a decent DAC, will results in a sound that will rival any good CD player.

This BDP device basically only adds value to the existing audio card you are presently using to get the digital music file turned into PCM so it can feed your DAC. I see no reduction in complexity.

I'm sure it will sound swell, I'm only questioning its marketability.

brucek

[James Tanner]

I may have missed it, but how would the Bryston solution address having your music collection available "in any room in the house"?
 
Steve

Hi Folks,

Yes what we are trying to do is, as someone already said – “do one thing and do it really well”. 

So the concept initially is to provide a ‘Digital Box’ (BDP-1) that will playback a digital file in “NATIVE” format all the way up to 192/24 and reproduce it in as accurate a way possible given the current state of digital audio and mate it with our current BDA-1 DAC. This is a very specialized approach rather than the Swiss army knife approach and  I realize that those that are looking for an ‘all in one’ or ‘multi-tasking’ type system (multiple libraries, shared files, streaming, etc.) for their home would not find this approach acceptable but for those that want the best possible digital playback available this offers a valid solution. The idea will be the BDP-1 player will cosmetically match the BDA-1 DAC so they operate as a pair.

So in my set-up at home right now I have the BDP-1 (digital player) connected to my BDA-1 DAC though the AES EBU connections. Then the BDA-1 DAC is connected balanced out to my BP26 preamp in. On the input side of the BDP-1 Player I have Cat 6 cable physically connected back to my router (in another room). I then have a 500 Gig USB drive connected to the back of the BDP-1 player through a USB connection and another 16 Gig USB Thumb-drive connected to the USB connection on the front of the BDP-1 Player.  So I have 2 sources of digital files available through physical connections (not wireless). (By the way no moving parts, no fans and no noise)

I access and manage those files on the USB drives in 2 ways – with my ‘itouch’ remote…. or on my web browser (Firefox) through any computer on the wireless network. So the wireless part and router and network connection is only for the purpose of accessing and playing back your files not streaming or sharing files from one room to another. I have about 4000 songs (44.1 to 192/24) on the 1 USB drive and I use the 16 Gig thumb-drive for quick access to my favourite songs… or if a friend comes over he just downloads his favourite songs on to his thumb-drive and we plug it in and away we go!

So the digital file is produced, ripped, managed etc. elsewhere and our job is to play it back as accurately as we can once you feed us the file. Think of the Bryston Digital Player like a CD Player but instead of plugging in a CD to play you are using a USB thumb-drive or USB hardrive to access the songs.  This is the same system I used in Vegas and people could not believe they where listening to a thumb-drive as the music source.

Possibly in the future we will offer a third box which will act as the storage box for the files and tie that in to the system so it becomes a plug and play concept.  I am hoping solid state storage drives will come down in price soon?

james

[a1p1]

So the BDP will only work with the BDA?  If so, why?  The BDP is intriguing but I'm very happy with my current DAC and have no plans to replace it. Is the AES/EBU output on the BDP more than just a digital output?
Thanks
AP

[James Tanner]

So the BDP will only work with the BDA?  If so, why?  The BDP is intriguing but I'm very happy with my current DAC and have no plans to replace it. Is the AES/EBU output on the BDP more than just a digital output?
Thanks
AP

The BDA-1 will work with any DAC as long as it has an AES-EBU input.  AES-EBU is the best way to do it if the best performance available is the goal.

james

[nikon]

I view the BDP-1 as a BCD-1 with no moving parts. You have no control over the quality of the commercially produced CD you purchase for use in the BCD-1. You do have control over the quality of the CD that you 'duplicate' for use in the BCD-1 as you do over the quality of the digital files for use in the BDP-1, limited only by the media and gear used for 'duplicating'. The only difference I see in approach between the two devices is the on-board DAC in the BCD-1. If the BDP-1 were available with an on-board DAC, with the same output options as the BCD-1, priced the same as the BCD-1, the implementation of either device in a Bryston system would boil down to simply being a choice of which media you wished to use - IMHO. 

PS I just traded my BCD-1 in anticipation of the BDP-1 - FWIW. 

[whanafi]

Not sure why it is necessary to attack one manufacturer (Logitech) to justify another (which hasn't released a product yet)

There also seems to be some confusion between "streaming" and "having files available over Ethernet", when they are the same thing.

Ultimately the BDA-1 as a DAC needs to receive a digital data stream at its input, and produce an analogue signal at its output. 

Providing that digital data stream is a digital player.  Since we are ripping CD's to digital files, and buying high-res music from download sites like HDtracks, the other issue is how to manage all those files in an end-user friendly way.

The choices today are software on a general purpose computer like a Mac or PC, with all the issues of soundcard quality, noise, and the inherent limitations of the USB port as a digital interface. 

Or one can use specialized equipment like the Transporter and Squeezebox Server combo that organizes the files and presents them unmodified as a digital output to an external DAC, or decodes them internally and presents them as an analogue output for use by a pre-amp.

Why anybody would chase nightly builds of the software is beyond me.  The current release is stable, has been refined over 10 years, and does the job it is supposed to do.  It may be disappointing that it is not expensive or exclusive, but hey, its all about the music.

What really surprises me is the choice of AES/EBU as a digital interface.  According to Sean Adams who built the original Transporter, S/PDIF is superior, and he explains why in this extract:

1. XLRs are horrible RF connectors. In order to send a square wave fairly faithfully the interface must support a bandwidth many times higher than the frequency of the square wave. For the signals in question that is getting well up into the RF spectrum where the XLRs are terrible. The impedance varies radically with frequency which will cause all kinds of bizarre reflections. The choice of XLR was a very poor choice.

2. Output voltage. The S/PDIF electrical spec is 0.5V into 75ohms, but the AES/EBU is 3-5V into 110 ohms. Think about that for a second, what happens when you put 5volts across 110 ohms? You get almost 50mA of current flowing. This means the driver sitting in the source box has to be able to dump between 30-50ma into the cable. That causes huge current spikes in the power and ground pins of the driver chip which is going to cause big noise spikes in the power and ground planes of the board. If you are not extremely careful that is going to cause significant jitter in the output signal.

All modern high speed interfaces use less than 0.5V signal.

As far as I can tell the XLRs were chosen because studios had lots of microphone cables and wanted to use them. Because they are such lousy RF transmission lines they had to go with high voltages to make sure there was some signal left at the end.

You're think of the word clock feature.

AES/EBU doesn't fix anything in s/pdif, it makes it worse. It uses wiring and connectors that lack the bandwidth and impedance matching for RF signaling. Just because XLRs are suitable for analog audio doesn't make them good for high frequencies. It's included on Transporter frankly because of legacy expectations, and perhaps in a pro environment you might need it for one reason or another (got the cable handy, used up all the other inputs, etc) but I don't recommend it.

TOSLINK (as observed at a receiving device) is always worse, like +100 to 200 ps regardless of how good the source is. Coax is the only way to go if you care about jitter, although optical has the advantage of being inherently isolated which could help in a system having EMI or ground loop problems. That's why you get both

[Napalm]

[...]
There also seems to be some confusion between "streaming" and "having files available over Ethernet", when they are the same thing.
[...]

I beg to differ.

"Having files available over Ethernet" means to me a network file system (like NFS). The client "sees" all the files available and can initiate reading any of them at any time, at the maximum speed allowed by the network/disk bandwidth.

"Streaming" means that the client doesn't have access to the file system, but only to a real time data stream sent by the server (like in RTSP or RTP protocols). This poses several problems when high quality playback is sought (like in you're not allowed to skip any frames for example).

Nap. 

[whanafi]

OK, see what you mean.  I thought people were confusing wireless as streaming and Ethernet as somehow "better"

How would you characterize the Squeezebox family then?  They run a session to the server as a client, which can be implemented in hardware or software. 

I have never seen any issues moving the data between my NAS and the TRANSPORTER on 802.11g or the NAS and a Squeezebox Classic running 10BASE100.