Antipodes Audio AMSv5 Release Information

Well said, @PaulW . Can you IMAGINE the level of candor and support any customer would receive from Roon if Roon had released new software that presented issues? Heck, I’ve been waiting since October for one of their engineers to resolve an issue by which I cannot back up my data base via my network to save on my Mac! It’s as though they put their customers on ignore - the very opposite of what we see from @MarkCole and Antipodes. No doubt they will get this sorted out quickly enough.

@worknprogress , after reading your post, I went back to my Sablon audio USB, a cable I’d describe as very high quality and certainly NOT inexpensive at north of $1,000 US. Relative to my (what I regard as beyond exceptional) Cerious Tech Lumniscate AES cable it was for me, a significant step down in SQ. The soundstage wasn’t as wide, the music itself seemed quite laid back and lacked the dynamic expression of harmonics, detail and imaging as provided by Lumniscate AES.

I totally get and appreciate the need for USB when upsampling beyond 192 or for listening to DSD files. For me, these conditions don’t exist bc in general I don’t like DSD and don’t feel a need ever to upsample beyond 96, tbh. But that just me. Remember not all cables are created equally. I use Lumniscate for everything, and their power cords in particular are transformative.

Support from the manufacturer of my previous music server does not compare to the high standard from Antipodes in my opinion.

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I have updated my K50 to 5.0. On the dashboard I see an update is available. I’m hesitant to do it. Anyone else see this or have proceeded with it?

Ignore it. Updates are turned off presently.

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Thanks kennyb123. I thought it was a little too soon for updates. Just north of you in Vancouver area

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And yet it is there and so others who are not checking on this owners forum will click to update (as I did before coming back here to check). It seems as if it is trying to update to 5.0 and so merely reports that my Antipodes is already at 5.0.

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@DesertRat66 ,

I had some email communication with Bob Grost, Cerious Technologies, about a month ago regarding his power cords. I let him know I had some new equipment coming from Puritan Audio that I wanted to let settle in, and then I would reach back to him to schedule a phone conversation. Funny, I got up today planning to follow up on the last email to him to schedule for this coming week, and while at my computer to bring up that email I first scanned new emails and see the response from you to me regarding AES and USB and referencing Cerious Tech.

I find I still like my Sablon Bocchino palladium AES over my TWL USB with Squeeze, but find the TWL quite enjoyable and avoid the sounds of silence when higher rate DSD and DXD come up. I am a fan of Sound Liason music offerings and own most of the catalog. I prefer to order music in the native recording resolution and format. Earlier on they would record in DSD, but native now is pretty much DXD 352/24 or 32. They offer alternative format resolutions derived from these, but I have been purchasing, as I noted, in native.

I do not have Sablon USB, but have a couple of their 2020 ethernet cables. For me, I find they present a warm, robust midrange and bass. This is different than the Sablon Bocchino palladium AES, which I find more balanced through the spectrum. However, it came through lean, somewhat edgy and bright initially, but has evolved very nicely and currently sounds great on Squeeze. I think there has been improvement there since the recent Antipodes update. Very possibly the Puritan addition has played a part of this as well.

Very probably I will be purchasing a Cerious power cord in the near future.

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I think you will be blown away with the Lumniscate PC, @worknprogress What Robert Grost has confirmed to me when I asked, is that the Matrix v2 delivers about 85% of the performance found in the Lumniscate line for about half the cost. This is the best "value proposition for sure. So for example I am at peace with Matrix to power my Farad LPS as well as my two TeddyPardo LPS’s. But for K22 and K41 I felt they they deserved “the best.” I also use Lumniscate for my Tambaqui DAC as well as my Makua preamp. Robert will tell you that his PC’s are out impactful used with digital gray like streamers and servers, transports and such,

Hello all. I was going to sit this conversation out. My update went fairly smoothly (Team Dumb-luck I guess). The biggest obvious problem was artist photos. Album art was mostly sorted, but artists were all over the map. A few re-starts seemed to correct this for the most part. However there have always been a few errant albums that seem either mis-placed alphabetically or have completely unrelated images (fairly certain Charles Mingus is not a white guy playing classical guitar).
In the past I have been able to ‘force’ artist images to load by placing correct images in the storage/pictures folder and pointing to that folder via Server Settings/Music & Artist Info/Artwork Folder.
Oh boy, not this time. I went to that settings window, clicked on the appropriate folder, saved my settings, and now artist artwork is all over the map. If I could undo this setting I would, but it appears that once clicked, I cannot ‘unclick’ the folder in the Settings window.
I’m going to try again in a little while and go over my notes from when I first invoked this setting months ago. In the meantime, everything sounds really good.

I am seeing this with Squeeze on my iPad, but my iPhone seems to get it right. I find that closing the browser tab on my iPad and then clearing the website data can help get it back but then it seems to lose its mind when I advanced to a letter. It’s almost like the browser can’t keep up with displaying so many artists so it substitutes a the wrong art.

That seems to describe it.
A quick note extending this comment. I was able to go into Settings and delete the file path to the Pictures folder (highlight with cursor and delete). I then re-started the server, cleared my browser cache and started up the Solutions window (do we still call it that?). For the most part that cleared things up. There are still a few errant artist images which mostly have to do with multiple artists sharing the same name.
The first few times things loaded (I’m mostly using a laptop and desktop so I haven’t worked things through on my iPad or iPhone yet), the images were very slow to load. That seems to have cleared up.
Oddly, I originally updated the AMS via a hard-wired desktop. The artist and album images were completely scrambled. Less than an hour later I shifted to my laptop to listen to some music, and while the desktop was still a mess, my laptop was more or less fine. Same browser software, same OS, same music server.
In my case, I’m guessing some combination of browser cache and the update got in each other’s way. But I think I’m going to have to give this some more time before I can conclude anything. In any case, I hope this helps the folks at Antipodes as they trouble-shoot.

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I just played one of my reference tracks through Roon/HQPlayer. My reaction was WTF? How the heck is it possible that this sounds this bloody good? No smearing at all. I’m blown away.

I just purchased the HQPlayer 5 upgrade license.

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Kenny, intriguing, what settings are you using for HQP5? Is it on ‘pass through’?

Something has definitely changed, I’m still on Roon/Squeeze and it is, from memory, significantly better than Squeeze/Squeeze on AMS4, which was my previous best combination. Key uplifts are: air and space around instruments, bass tight and not in the slightest overblown, presence of instruments more defined, vocals fuller and more natural, balanced soundstage… I don’t want to change anything in case it changes, but if I get bored of this, Sq/Sq is next…

I have mentioned in another conversation that I have recently been using this track to compare server and player apps. It is a very revealing track. Within the first few seconds the sound of the piano often gives the game away. Does it sound like a real piano or like a polite recorded version?

Then as the other instruments come in the sense of depth of space and separation between the instruments comes into play.

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I’m pleased to hear that everything has been sorted out to your satisfaction, and I appreciate your gratitude for sharing that here. Indeed, Antipodes deserves full credit for delivering such a significant update.

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Thanks for sharing. So after listening this album does the new Squeeze to Squeeze sound better in your setup :wink: ?
I ran out of time to sit down and listen.

Hello,
I updated tow days ago, (from Italy), no problem at all. The only thing that changed was my IP address, with the previous version 4.something I had 192.168.1.242 now I have 192.168.1.247. What is the reason of the change? Also I cannot see any longer the K22 on windows explorer like I did before the update.
The new UI is better than the previous one, more user-friendly.
Regards from Cusago - Lombardia - Italia.

sinc-L initially but also experimenting with sinc-MG. TPDF for dither. I’m not saying that it’s better than Squeeze. Just saying it’s better than what I’ve ever heard from it.

I used HQPlayer as well to play some of my PGGB’d tracks with passthrough. Again, the best that I heard from this application I suspect AMS 5 is the rising tide that lifted all boats, but it seems that maybe HQP 5 is improved over HQP 4.