With the D100PRO I would be using the Hugo via coaxial S/PDIF. I had been using the Chord Hugo with an Audiophilleo 1 + Pure Power and also via USB via a Schiit Wyrd, the latter of which by itself brought the Hugo closer to the performance with the Audiophilleo without the expense. Time for an SSD or hybrid drive I guess.Īs my main DAC at the time of arrival, the Chord Hugo is let down by a lack of galvanic isolation on its USB input, allowing noise into the DAC and a bit of harshness coming out the analogue end as a result. Going by the activity light on my external drive case, it is reading the music directly from the drive rather than caching it. The irritations weren't over then, as I discovered that if you are browsing folders during playback, the music can start skipping if you have a slow drive. The problem was that if remote software is being used to control the D100PRO, the front panel controls and remote control no longer function. ArkMC on the other hand wouldn't read a directory that had more than a couple of hundred of files or folders in it, and 8player was slow to read more than a couple of screens of files from a directory, I split up my library once again into multiple folders. Occasionally 8player would lose its connection with the server, which if in the middle of playing music, would make it impossible to turn the music off without either re-connecting to the server, or turning off the server at the power switch. These allowed me to both browse and play back files on the unit - effectively remote-control it, with much better results. Since the D100PRO’s front screen only shows 5 lines when browsing, I took the advice inside the manual and downloaded 8player and ArkMC onto my iPad. Sometime later, I batch-converted my entire library through X Lossless Decoder (XLD) into FLAC and put that on the drive to use. So after waiting 4 hours for a few hundred gigabytes of music to copy, I can’t play most of it. Eventually, after a lot of mucking about and frustration, I copied all my HDTracks, Linn, Society of Sound and other FLAC files to the drive and used those instead, as well as the SD cards that I use in my portable players. This was fine, except it turns out that the D100PRO doesn’t support ALAC or AIF files above 44.1kHz, despite supporting everything else. I figured the easiest thing to do was to copy my Music folder from my Mac to a spare hard disk, formatted as FAT32 or ExFAT (the latter now supported in the latest firmware). It noticed the D100PRO as well, but wouldn't load the library, showing an error instead. I also tried JRiver Media Center on my Mac. I thought I'd scored lucky when Windows Media started loading files from it over the network, but then it stopped at about 250 files and didn't load all but a few into albums or show the artists for them. I had a shot at loading up a Windows 7 virtual machine, which instantly recognised the D100PRO as a media device. Airplay is also limited to CD Quality if used from a Mac. Since we’re now two whole versions of Windows later in what is current, this is a surprise. However, if not Airplay, network shares only set up to work with NTVLM1, which is now only found in Windows XP or Windows 7, which are the most common in China. The D100PRO can accept an SD card or FAT32-formatted hard drive or thumb drive plugged in with music, or it can stream music from networked attached storage or a computer. However getting it to play music turned out to be something of a problem. Plugging in and setting up the D100PRO was straight-forward. Ideally one will control it with DLNA software on an iPad, or stream to it using Airplay, especially if one has a lot of music. ![]() This becomes all the more necessary if the screen is used to browse folders, as knowing that the channel buttons can jump a whole screen up or down is important when it only shows 5 lines. As I'd had positive experiences addressing noise and vibration in various components, the attention to detail in this manner I greeted positively.Īlong with the server itself is a universal remote control which, due to the excessive number of buttons on it requires consultation with the manual to make sense of initially. Along with fairly comprehensive instructions that suggested that the best sound quality would be achieved after the front screen had switched off suggested a company familiar with audiophile nervousa of the type that wont relax until the basic tweaks are taken care of. ![]() Opening up the box revealed a fairly standard, but attractive aluminium device, unusually with three pointed aluminium feet underneath. ![]() And so it was that Mary from Soundaware contacted me about sending me both the M1 Esther DAP and the D100Pro music server for review. (Updated November 2016 with Airplay functionality.)ĭanny from Dita Audio tipped me off that I should check out Soundaware and that they had some pretty clever technology.
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