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JPlay also offers three playback engines to choose from: River, Beach and Xtream. There is no processing, equalization or any signal manipulation with any of them. All three offer bit-perfect playback but utilize different caching algorithms. The difference is how each engine uses RAM. Note that Xtream uses considerable memory and as a result playback can be delayed by up to 20 seconds while music files are being loaded. For the most part I used Xtream.


Throttle (on/off) reduces background processes and systems threads to a bare minimum and further optimizes the user’s computer for sound quality. I set this to on. Overdrive (on/off) applies to Hibernate Mode (see below) and will push your computer’s CPU to the limit such that it may cause overheating issues with ultra-thin laptops or computers with poor cooling capabilities. I set this to on. Bitperfect Volume (-6dB, -12dB, -18dB, -24dB, -30dB) offers digital volume control for users without a preamp. I left this off.


Polarity (normal, inverted) allows users to compensate for music recorded in inverted polarity. I left this at normal. Bitstream (native, 24, 32) allows users to expand bit depth on 16-bit recordings provided their DAC supports 24 or 32 bits. Since it is generally recommended to use the highest bit depth your DAC/soundcard supports, I set this at 24-bit.


Hibernate Mode is arguably the most powerful feature which shuts down every non-essential process including I/O devices and leaves just enough computer resources to play music but nothing else. Once you have loaded an album, track or playlist into Hibernate Mode, you lose control of your PC until playback is finished. Your screen will go black, keyboard and mouse will stop functioning. Perhaps this feature should be renamed Possession Mode as losing control of my laptop certainly evoked thoughts of The Exorcist (minus the head spinning and green vomit). As there may be compatibility issues with some hardware drivers and anti-virus programs, there are various levels of Hibernate Mode with the best-sounding but most aggressive and hence least compatible FullScale down to the more compatible yet supposedly decent sounding ViaUSB. Since I had no issues running Hibernate Mode in FullScale mode I did not try the other settings.


I experimented with JPlay mini for several months and found it to be a solid stable program. Occasionally JRMC would crash when using the JPlay for JRiver plug-in. This usually happened when I stretched my computer’s resources too far or when I attempted to pause or skip a track. However this has been corrected in the latest version of JPlay which was sent to me just prior to publication.


Currently I store my music as WAV files on a 1TB external hard drive which attaches to my HP laptop via FireWire. I keep backup FLAC copies on a pair of WD My Passport HDDs. A 1m Transparent Audio USB cable connects my laptop to John Kenny’s excellent JKSPDIF Mk3 USB-SPDIF converter which in turn links to my Audiomat Tempo 2.6 DAC via a 1.5m MIT Magnum Digital or Sablon Audio’s prototype Panatella digital cable. Also used during this review was Calyx Audio’s excellent new statement Femto DAC which I’ll write about next.		   Sidebar: I asked JPlay’s developers Marcin Ostapowicz and Josef Piri to provide a little background info.

Josef Piri. "Personally I was into music long before computers. In fact I learned English thanks to music: I was so enchanted by the Beatles as a kid that  I absolutely had to know what they were talking about. I bought a dictionary, took the LP sleeve (yeah I'm that old) and looked up the lyrics word by word.


"Then in the 80s when CD appeared I was intrigued that every CD player sounded different. I even experimented with the now-defunct MiniDisc format: What I found puzzling is that often an MD copy (which is compressed with ATRAC which came long before the now ubiquitous MP3) actually sounded better than CD! I could not explain this at the time but now I realize it opened my mind to the possibility that digital transports may in fact be even more important than being 'bit-perfect'.


"I also experimented with different CD colors as I read somewhere that each had its own sound. By this time I was a professional software engineer and it sounded like complete nonsense to me. After all 'bits are bits', right? So I went and bought every kind of recordable CD I could find. To my astonishment I found that one particular brand of black CDs consistently sounded better than all others including the original! Unlike with MDs the recorded CDs were in fact bit-identical so in retrospect, this experience further reinforced my belief that being bit perfect is not enough. As mathematicians would say, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition.


"Many years later first computer-to-DAC interfaces came along. I bought one of the first 'high-end' computer audio interfaces, Empirical Audio's Offramp which in its first incarnation was actually just a modified M-Audio Transit (BlackGates etc.) powered by an  external battery. For the first time I started listening more to the computer than my SACD player.


"Like Marcin I also used Foobar initially. Later I found XXHighEnd which promised to be the first audiophile player: I tried it and indeed heard the difference as it was clearly better sounding than anything out there. I hadn’t been able to properly explain all those better sounding MD copies & black CDs but this time I was in my own field (I used to be a consultant for a top US software firm in the late 90s early 00s). I decided to try to understand what was going on here as all computer players were bit perfect by this time (Vista was already out and gone were the XP days of KMixer) yet every player sounded different!


"Long story short, I experimented a bit and made JPlay for my own selfish enjoyment of music. Despite JPlay being ultra-minimalist (it doesn't even have a GUI for Christ's sakes), we decided to market it with some convincing from Marcin. Getting everyone to enjoy JPlay's unique Hibernate mode takes a lot of our time. In the end it is all about enjoying the music. I had the unfortunate experience of seeing the country I was born in destroyed by war. It is my belief (perhaps naive) that people who get emotional enjoyment from music are far less capable of making war than people who are exposed to 'noise'."


Laptop and hard drive sit on a Gingko Audio Cloud 10 platform mounted on an Ikea Lack side table. Power is via a dedicated line separate from the one that powers my main rig. Filtering is provided by an Audience aR1p which is connected to a DIY power bar with a Sablon Audio Robusto power cable. Also in the power supply chain are CruzeFIRST Audio outlets and a Blue Circle 6X parallel filter.


I dislike having any WiFi, Bluetooth or other wireless devices operating in my music room. On some subliminal level I generally feel on edge and have difficulty relaxing. I could be imagining this as experts (usually industry types who have a financial stake in such things) say it’s impossible for wireless routers and the like to have any adverse effect on one’s psyche. Be that as it may, music just feels better without being bombarded by nearby low-level microwave energy. Having said that, I experimented with controlling playback wirelessly from my Blackberry via J. River’s sweet Web Gizmo app which allows users to access JRMC wirelessly with cell phones, tablets, other networked computers and the like. As JPlay is integrated into JRMC, I could play back music with or without the plug-in. Admittedly it was pretty cool selecting tracks from my crackberry and comparing stock JRMC with the JPlay for JRiver plug-in on the fly.


While JRMC was superior to iTunes, Foobar and Microsoft’s dismal Windows Media Player by mostly offering a cleaner more natural top end and greater harmonic richness, JPlay’s plug-in was better still. 		  Marcin Ostapowicz. "Love for music came much earlier than the passion for computers and sound coming from the computer. I was raised in a home with deep musical traditions. My father is a professional musician and teacher. I finished the first level State Music School with two instruments but this was also the end of my musical education as in the meantime I felt the love for a different keyboard and my education changed to informatics. However the values I carried from my home and musical school developed a great sensitivity for sound. I noticed the differences between various CD players very early and started to think how to exploit the potential buried inside the computer to reproduce music .


"The first experiments with sound coming from a PC started in 2004 when I discovered alternate drivers for Creative Sound Blaster cards like kx Project. I heard an improvement and this started my chase of the rabbit. At that time I used foobar2000 and ASIO plugin to bypass the destructive influence of the system mixer. I nearly got banned on the official foobar forum where asking questions related to sound quality is against their regulations (right now JPlay is described as an 'audiophile scam' there). I started to experiment on my own. I devoted every spare time I had to my hobby. I followed all discussions on foreign forums I could find. A few years ago I found the forum of XXHighEnd player where I met Josef. We got along well from the very beginning (we both have a thing for sound played from computers). Then it kicked off with hundreds of emails, code changes and new ideas which had to be listened to and compared. So the JPlay software was born."


With my preferred settings I experienced a more visceral fuller presentation with a more open delineated top end with less hash. This was particularly noticeable on cymbals and high strings. Musical textures were more apparent as well as a sense of greater openness or air. Bass was deeper (who doesn’t want more bass?) and more articulate and propulsive. In fact I thought the way JPlay handled the lower end of the spectrum was exceptional and significantly superior to what I usually hear from CD playback.


I also thought the noise floor (jitter?) dropped considerably allowing more musical detail and nuance to shine through. Furthermore I observed an improved sense of timing, flow and momentum—call it the toe-tapping factor. While I absolutely love JRMC 17 and highly recommend it, I could easily hear the difference when switching back and forth between the stock version and the plug-in. I simply heard more music with JPlay.


The sonic differences between the River and Beach playback engines were fairly subtle and produced results similar to the selectable digital filter settings of many DACs. However I preferred Xtream by a wide margin. It sounded even bigger, more open and transparent with more explicit dynamic graduations than River or Beach. It’s difficult to comprehend the reason for any sonic differences between the three engines since they are supposedly bit-perfect but simply utilize memory differently.

Playing around with the other settings I could reap even greater sonic rewards (or crash my system if I pushed it too hard) especially with FullScale Hibernate Mode’s superior tonal fidelity, more vivid dynamics and a sense of rightness or the ease one normally associates with spinning vinyl on a decent table. Playing high-resolution files i.e. 24/88 and up, the improvement in overall musicality was even more apparent. It was as if all the last few remaining shortcomings of digital had simply vanished. I have been playing Stéphane Devène’s Debussy Collection [Chandos 24-bit/96kHz WAV-download] nonstop since I downloaded it and continue to be captivated by the degree of tonal color, wide dynamic range and timbral correctness which are so much more clearly evident via JPlay.


Unlike many interpretations that wrongly treat Debussy’s orchestral works as misty impressionist syrup, Devène’s approach is all about transparency, nuance and elegance as Debussy intended. La mer, not das merde. Of all the settings I thought Buffer had the greatest impact in perceived sound quality. The lower the setting—especially DirectLink— the more natural the sense of flow and momentum allied with a tad greater openness and transparency. The Xtream playback engine and Hibernate Mode followed closely behind. However I would caution readers that the degree of improvement you may note and which settings to use will depend on your PC’s resources and how you have your computer set up. What worked for me may not work for you. JPlay’s busy forum can help as will Marcin and Josef who seem continuously online.