HiRes audio playback on Debian
Posted: 2025-01-17 04:22
I am thinking about writing a short HowTo on this topic. If people are interested. I have searched these forums and found very little on this topic.
Firstly, I do not care if you think no one can tell the difference.
I spent a lot of time using pw-top in a terminal and my SMSL USB DAC with a display to test and verify all the ideas that I could before finally finding one solution that actually works. The standard Pipewire config just pumps everything out at 48kHz and resamples sound to fit. For locally stored files Strawberry Player will work well with some tweaks to Piperwire conf files. But it can only stream if you do some dodgy stuff with files lifted from your Android phone. Not a real solution for streaming. None of the streamers supply a Linux desktop app to use their services to the full extent. They all support a browser based web player.
So on to streaming. Any Chromium based browser will resample to 48kHz. But you can lower that to 44.1 to avoid resampling CD quality sound. You set Pipewire to default to 44.1 and set your Tidal or Qobuz to CD quality and then use a web player and it will playback at 44.1 without any nasty resampling. All good, it sounds fine. But the moment you try to play a FLAC file at 24/96 you find it resamples back to CD or 48kHz if you have a standard Pipewire config. . There is an app called Tidal-HiFi that works well as long as you limit your ambitions to CD quality. There is a flatpack app called Qobuz on Linux and it has the same issue. It will resample everything down to CD or 48kHz.
Enter Firefox. Firefox is not like Chrome or its siblings. It will happily passthrough HiRes FLAC files to an external DAC. Tidal in their lack of wisdom gray out anything higher than CD quality when you use the Firefox browser as a web player. Why? Who knows, but it is not for technical reasons. Qobuz on the other hand has no problems and when you play a 24/192 file the display on the SMSL verifies it is really decoding 192kHz. You can open a terminal and run "pw-top" which monitors the audio stream and it too verifies that it is 192kHz all the way with no resampling. I have not tried Amazon Music. Spotify only supply compressed music.
Has anyone else gone down this rabbit hole and maybe has another solution? I have cancelled my Tidal subscription and moved to Qobuz. For now I am happy using Qobuz and Firefox and an external USB DAC and some good speakers. I also have Grado headphones that run from the DAC which is also a headphone amp. It works and I have proper HiRes audio under Linux.
Firstly, I do not care if you think no one can tell the difference.
I spent a lot of time using pw-top in a terminal and my SMSL USB DAC with a display to test and verify all the ideas that I could before finally finding one solution that actually works. The standard Pipewire config just pumps everything out at 48kHz and resamples sound to fit. For locally stored files Strawberry Player will work well with some tweaks to Piperwire conf files. But it can only stream if you do some dodgy stuff with files lifted from your Android phone. Not a real solution for streaming. None of the streamers supply a Linux desktop app to use their services to the full extent. They all support a browser based web player.
So on to streaming. Any Chromium based browser will resample to 48kHz. But you can lower that to 44.1 to avoid resampling CD quality sound. You set Pipewire to default to 44.1 and set your Tidal or Qobuz to CD quality and then use a web player and it will playback at 44.1 without any nasty resampling. All good, it sounds fine. But the moment you try to play a FLAC file at 24/96 you find it resamples back to CD or 48kHz if you have a standard Pipewire config. . There is an app called Tidal-HiFi that works well as long as you limit your ambitions to CD quality. There is a flatpack app called Qobuz on Linux and it has the same issue. It will resample everything down to CD or 48kHz.
Enter Firefox. Firefox is not like Chrome or its siblings. It will happily passthrough HiRes FLAC files to an external DAC. Tidal in their lack of wisdom gray out anything higher than CD quality when you use the Firefox browser as a web player. Why? Who knows, but it is not for technical reasons. Qobuz on the other hand has no problems and when you play a 24/192 file the display on the SMSL verifies it is really decoding 192kHz. You can open a terminal and run "pw-top" which monitors the audio stream and it too verifies that it is 192kHz all the way with no resampling. I have not tried Amazon Music. Spotify only supply compressed music.
Has anyone else gone down this rabbit hole and maybe has another solution? I have cancelled my Tidal subscription and moved to Qobuz. For now I am happy using Qobuz and Firefox and an external USB DAC and some good speakers. I also have Grado headphones that run from the DAC which is also a headphone amp. It works and I have proper HiRes audio under Linux.