I wasn’t sure where to post this but as it concerns Player/Server combinations on my Antipodes here seems as good a place as any.
Generally my preference for sound quality is to use LMS (Squeeze) on the server in my Antipodes Oladra and Squeezelite (Squeeze) on the player board in the Oladra. However the controls for this are either iPeng or the web based Material Skin and these are a bit clunky even though functionally they work just fine.
My attention has been caught a few times therefore by JPLAY used as the controlling app on my iPhone but to use this I had to use MinimSever + MPD player and I have not been impressed by the sound quality of this server / player combination.
Lately though I realised I could use Squeeze (LMS) + MPD (loaded from the Settings page in AMS 5.0 ) in conjunction with JPLAY and this seemed to sound somewhat better.
However I confess that was no match in sound quality compared to abandoning JPLAY and going back to Squeeze (LMS) + Squeezelite controlled either by iPeng or the Material Skin web based controller (they both sound the same).
But then this morning I started wondering if I was missing a trick and whether I could use Squeeze (LMS) + Squeezelite but controlled by JPLAY. It was easy to try because I already had the Antipodes Oladra set up with the Squeeze (LMS) server app + Squeezelite player app so I just went into JPLAY’s set up and sure enough there was an option to change from the upnp player to the Oladra player already loaded with Squeezelite.
These screenshots are from the JPLAY settings page.
So now I am listening to Squeeze (LMS) + Squeezelite controlled by JPLAY (the configuration with the 6.52 time shown top left in the screenshot above). And of course the iPeng and Material Skin also work with this combination of Server and Player apps so I can compare sound quality between JPLAY and them and so far as I can tell they all three sound the same but with the added advantage of the extra things that JPLAY does and the other two do not do.
Will I stay with JPLAY? Well the problem is that it does not give me access to the LMS plugins such as BBC Sounds but because I can also use iPeng with Squeeze (LMS) server that isn’t an issue because I just swop to iPeng when I want to listen to a BBC Radio 3 classical concert. So probably, yes, I will use JPLAY most of the time with LMS on my server and Squeezelite on my player. One advantage is its better Qobuz integration (from my short time using it).
Is anyone else trying JPLAY with Squeeze + Squeeze?