Product name: JPlay
Manufacturer: JPlay
Cost: 99 euros. (Currency conversion)

Reviewer: Nick Whetstone - TNT UK
Reviewed: September, 2011

I think, or at least I hope, that we have all by now realised that digital audio is just as subject to the influences of the playback system as analogue audio. In this review I'll step-aside from the controversy over digital cables and look at playback software.

It appears that with the arrival of computer-audio, we now have a whole new set of variables to go along with the ones in our hi-fi systems. Apart from the hardware, it appears that the operating system, and the play-back software can and does affect the quality of the music coming through the speakers. Of course, how large that effect is will depend on the quality of your hi-fi to reveal subtle changes. In my own experience, I have found that I prefer to use Ubuntu (when I can) for music played from a computer (actually it's played from some type of storage such as a hard drive, but the computer provides the means of getting from the storage to the hi-fi). This may be because there are a lot of processes in a Windows operating system that can adversely affect the music play-back. I improved matters with Windows XP by stripping back the operating system to the bare essentials but if you use the computer for other jobs, that isn't very practical.

You will hear different play-back software touted as sounding better or worse than the competition. Generally, I have found there to be little difference between the most popular programs such as Winamp, Foobar, and JRiver Jukebox, although a lot depends on how the computer is set up, and whether it uses plug-ins such as ASIO. So when TNT was contacted by somebody asking us to try playback software that they claimed took things a stage higher, I jumped at the opportunity to try it.

Now life is never simple, and after corresponding with the folks who produce JPlay, it transpired that to use their software to best effect, you need a computer running Windows 7, and preferably 4 gigabyte of RAM. The best I could offer was Windows Vista (on a laptop) with 2 gig but we decided to give it a try.

The program called JPlay has a small enough file-size to be sent by email, and installation is as straight forward as with any other software. My first problem was that I couldn't get Vista to see the music on my external hard-drive. If you are reading this Mr Gates, I would suggest that Vista is so poor as an OS that it is not fit for purpose, and you should offer everybody with it a free, or heavily discounted upgrade to W7! Anyway, for this review, I copied some test tracks onto a USB stick and then transferred them on to the hard drive of the laptop.

While I am on the subject of operating systems it should be stated that JPlay will not work with Windows XP (or earlier operating systems) primarily because they don't have what is known as large page support.

Using JPlay is fairly easy but be warned, it uses a very basic interface as the development and focus has been on ultimate performance rather than ease of use. I chose to choose music from a list in Windows Explorer, then move to the JPlay window, and then press the space bar which commences the play-back of the copied track. This worked perfectly for individual review tracks, and while you can copy more than one track at a time, how many you can copy depends on the size of allocated RAM, as JPlay first copies a track to RAM so that it is played from there rather than a moving hard-drive.

JPlay also has other features that are designed to get the very best play-back. One of those features is to put the computer into hibernate mode while the music plays. This shuts down all processes going on in the background so the computer can 'concentrate' all its resources on the music play-back. Unfortunately, on both the versions of JPlay that I tried, my laptop simply went into hibernation, and the music didn't play. Whether this is totally the fault of Vista, or the software I have no idea but apparently this mode does work on Windows 7.

There are a number of other settings that you can adjust in JPlay mainly by the pressing of a key that is listed next to the option. The key toggles the setting or option, so turning them on or off is quite easy.

So - how does it sound? Well I find all these tweaks/upgrades to a computer play-back system make quite small differences but in fairness, I must say that even with Vista I could hear familiar tracks sounding better defined, with more texture, and tighter bass. I used JRiver Jukebox as a benchmark and could clearly here the improvement when switching to JPlay. I was told by Josef at JPlay told that the performance is even better with Windows 7.

There's not much to add although I did make a few notes. First off I noticed that the performance with JRiver Jukebox was improved if I played the tracks from the USB stick instead of the hard drive. I have found that when using Ubuntu as well. So part of the improvement with JPlay is obviously down to it copying the music from the hard drive to RAM, although it is doing a lot of other tweaks as well. I look forward to the time when large solid-state hard drives are affordable, and we can store our music on those. But this review also got me wondering if we will see a computer and operating system created to exclusively play music.

Would I recommend JPlay? I have slight reservations about the cost seeing as it has a very basic interface, and limitations compared to the popular play-back software. Then again, people pay far more than the cost of JPlay for a cable that probably won't do as much to improve the sound quality. I would certainly suggest that as things stand, JPlay will be best appreciated by those who run Windows7 rather than Vista. But if you do run the latest operating system, and you want to find out how much more you can squeeze out of computer-audio, then why not download the trial version and try it for yourself? It's honestly quite easy to install and use.