Disable Volume Control

Native decoding is but one aspect of native playback. You still need to configure LMS (or other processes) to not digitally manipulate the music too. By default Snakeoil uses hardware access to control your audio device so you’re safe. You only need to disable the Digital Volume Control (DVC) provided by LMS. Follow these steps to disable DVC.

From the LMS Settings, click the Player tab. You should see your Squeezelite player in the first drop down box (in mthis example, my player is called the KillerDAC). Click the second box Basic Settings, and select Audio from the drop down menu.

Set the four settings (three of them are highlighted by the arrow markers) to the following:

These settings will disable all form of DVC, and you should be playing in bit perfect mode. 

A caveat with squeezelite is will still open the device as 24 bit or 32 bits even when playing 16 bit material. With MPD and playing redbook material, you would see something like the following:

Meanwhile, when using Squeezelite, the format  entry will be S24_LE instead. This is normal I think, as the Accuphase DC-37 still identifies the stream as 16 bit. My guess is it’s 16 bit with 8 bits of nulls (or padding).

So there you have it, a few quick simple steps to achieve native playback. Your WAV file will no longer be transcoded as uncompressed FLAC and so on. For better or worse, now you know where your audio system stand, rough, raw and unmasked.

Let me know how you find this tweak in the comments below, or post in the forums.

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