Best options for Hi-Res Audio

General Discussion
1

Merry Christmas everyone.

I have a Vero 4K connected to my Yamaha receiver via HDMI and I’m interested in playing or streaming Hi Res Audio without spending a fortune.

I presume that the Vero 4K will pass PCM audio via HDMI and therefore the DAC in the Amp will do the digital to analogue conversion? Is this correct?
i.e. I won’t need to buy an USB DAC or use the DAC in the Vero 4K?

Is there any advantage to using the DAC in the Vero 4K and passing the audio out via the headphone socket or the optical out?

Once I’ve worked out the best way to connect this all together then I’ll look at the best streaming services to use on Kodi.

2

Correct.

No if you have other DACs available. The analogue out will only ever be stereo and the optical out will never be more than stereo (up to 96k IIRC) uncompressed or a compressed format (DD or DTS) for multi-channel.

HDMI does up to 8 channels (7.1) at up to 192k.

3

Thanks for your help! I’ll just use the HDMI connection.

Do you know the best way to stream hi res audio from the Vero 4K?
I see there is a Tidal app for Kodi, but you need a DAC that supports the MQA format to get the Master quality audio. Also, there appears to be a Qobuz app for Kodi that is no longer maintained.

From reading it seems a lot of Audiophiles are having to use a PC to stream the hi-res audio over their home network, but I’d rather not have to do that!

4

Optical will be stereo, up to 24 bit 192 kHz.

@shukerr, you may also have a look here: Audio hardware and software configuration - #22

HDMI is quite fine for hires playback - being the only interface supporting lossless surround PCM it’s unbeatable in that category anyway. All audio that can’t be passed through (everything except DTS and Dolby formats) will be passed as PCM by Vero.

5

If you mean, how do you get your new Abby Road bluray to play,

  1. you can browse to the iso of the full disk (from video section) and just play it as a bluray
  2. you can extract the mt2s and convert them to mkv (and play as video)
  3. you can extract the mt2s and split it into separate mka files, and play them. (or just take the mkv, rename it as .mka, and kodi will “see” it as an audio file, complete with chapters.
  4. you can extract, and convert to flac, although you’d be down-coverting the DTSMA 8chan to something lower in that process.

If you have DVD-A, then you’d need to rip the mlp files out (google for tools to do that) and convert them to flac.

if you have SACD, then you’d also need to rip and convert to flac (google for tools to do that)

If you have DVD (or bluray) with dts or dolby tracks then you are probably best off just extracting the DTS/AC3 streams (into a .wav (or .dts) file for the DTS stream, or into an .ac3 file for dolby), and playing those streams as-is.

if you have DTS-CD, then just rip those like you’d rip a regular CD (into .wav files), which will then contain the DTS stream.

Noting that when it’s time to index your music, flac is the only option that really handles tagging well. Anything else you’ll likely be wanting to create .cue sheets for the metadata (which kodi does a pretty good job of picking up for things like date, genre, artist, album title)

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