Black Omega - The Audiophile Player 4Ur Audio-files.
Perfected over 25 years, Black Omega is an open-source music player designed for audiophile renderings of your audio-files with bit perfect accuracy.
Got a multi-channel 5.1 audio file you want to play through your attached A/V surround amplifier then Black Omega is for you. Supporting multi speaker configurations from mono, stereo, quadraphonic up to full 7.1 surround systems Black Omega is able to fully utilise your beloved setup to the maximum. Employing the dedicated left and right speakers Black Omega extends the stereo sound stage to all speakers; including a dedicated LFE channel for your subwoofer.
Capable of playback of up to 768kHz and 32-bit depth, Black Omega is designed to support the playback of any modern High Resolution soundtrack on your high-end DAC at the track’s recorded frequency and bit-depth; bit perfect and seamless. With over 25 years of development history Black Omega provides:
* Playback of up to 768kHz and 32-bit depth.
* Pure integer mode for lossless formats.
* 64-bit double floating point precision for lossy codecs.
* Custom MP3, MP4-AAC and Vorbis Ogg lossy codecs tuned to 64-bit perfection.
* Custom WAV, FLAC, ALAC and AIFF lossless codecs.
* Support for musepack and wavpack codecs.
* Support up to 7.1 surround sound audio files and systems.
* Exclusive Integer playback via MacOS’s HAL layer.
* Seamless track transition.
* Smart selection of DAC mode.
* Intuitive and simple to use interface.
Pure Integer Mode
Lossless codecs, such as WAV, FLAC, ALAC and AIFF, encode their PCM audio data in integer format. Coupled to this audio data is rendered to the DAC hardware as integer samples. In contrast, lossy codecs, such as MP3, MP4 and Vorbis, encode their PCM samples as floating point numbers. Pure integer mode reads integer encoded samples from lossless codecs and directly renders this to the DAC hardware thus guaranteeing the purity of bit perfect playback at the correct bit resolution.
Smart Matching of DAC Mode
Every DAC has different capabilities; supported playback frequencies, bit depths and number of output channels. In turn every audio file has its own playback frequency, bit depth and number of audio channels. Ideally, the DAC should be setup to play at the frequency and bit depth of a given audio file. e.g. A 16-bit track at 44.1kHz should be rendered to the DAC as 16-bit audio data at 44.1kHz. As opposed to 24-bits, as this would require an upscaling operation on the original data.
Black Omega’s smart matching algorithm addresses this problem. By knowing the hardware DAC’s capabilities the most appropriate playback mode is used for each given audio track. Then, if required, our high quality resample filter adjusts the playback frequency to match the DACs playback frequency.
Extended Stereo on 7.1 Surround Sound
Utilise all your speakers, wither via HDMI connector to an A/V Surround Amplifier or via a 7.1 sound card, Black Omega extends the stereo sound stage. Firstly the left channel is sent to the assigned left speakers and the right channel to the assigned right speakers. Secondly an addition centre channel is mixed from the left and right to be rendered to the assigned centre speaker. Then a dedicated LFE channel is rendered, using low-bandpass filters, that is played through the subwoofer.
Custom Codecs
Black Omega started life as an MPEG Layer-3 decoder back in 1998. Since then it has expanded to include our own MP4, Vorbis Ogg, WAV, FLAC, AIFF and ALAC decoder implementations. As such every detail in the audio decoding and playback pipeline has been obsessively engineered to ensure purity and perfection.
It is with this attention to detail that makes Black Omega an audiophile player for your audio files.
