So here I am still using RAMdisks for both XXHE and playback drive, because I tried it for Win8 when everyone was experimenting with it, liked it better there, and just kept the same arrangement without really doing any comparisons once everyone (me included) went back to Win7 for most/all listening.

The music lives on a USB2 drive (was Firewire with a Mac, but my Win machine doesn't play nice with it in that configuration for some reason) with the usual cheap wall wart SMPS.

So, a couple of questions:

- Would a USB3 drive rather than the USB2 drive to store music (with a cheap wall wart SMPS) make a difference, since I am not using the music storage drive as the playback drive?  Any suggestions re easy, inexpensive alternatives to the cheap wall wart SMPS?

- Peter, any reason you have both galleries and a playback drive?  What is the difference, if any, between the functions each performs?

Those last two Dirac pulse reconstruction graphs are just really, really nice at bringing home your point.

So here's something I was thinking of when I asked the question about grounding:  Is it at all possible for noise to enter the DAC through ground on the outputs?

Does this also keep noise off of ground (at least from being transmitted through or getting into the DAC via ground)?  But then one would have to provide separately for noise coming from the mains into other parts of the system, I assume.

I'm guessing this will not help my situation at all (AQ Dragonfly DAC plugged into regular USB port).  Are you folks saying this would help the NOS1?  Are you feeding it from a regular USB port or a PCIe sound card with a USB output??

Juan's post points out two things, one my thought, the other from the guys I'm always going on about, Mapleshade/Omega Mikro.

My thought: It is easy to hear differences between pieces of equipment, cables, etc. (though Peter says, and NOS1 owners appear to concur, that the NOS1 is intended to and does minimize such differences).  What must be guarded against is to hear every difference as an improvement, for that way lies madness - A>B>C>A and around we go.

From the Mapleshade/Omega Mikro guys: Particularly with expensive "overbuilt" power cables and filters, a common failing is that they filter everything so well, including the music, that they drain the life from it.

Thank you Peter, that is as always very helpful.

Since I have another project I can use the filter on, I will likely build it anyway, and I may do some listening with it connected and not.  (Though first I will listen for a good long time without it.)  As you say, one must always be very careful, especially when thinking about whether one is hearing an improvement and not just a difference.

Luckily, I'm not inclined to listen for stuff like "more bass."  That way lies madness!   

I always think, "Who ever walked out of a Pavarotti [or Stones, who I've actually seen, Pavarotti not] concert raving about 'more bass'?"  I listen for more "reality," elusive as that idea is.  But I know the sound of a real acoustic guitar, piano, or Jordi Savall playing the viola da gamba.  And even more, I know when listening to something like that drum track you sent around a while ago that musicians play with each other, and if you hear good musicians who suddenly don't seem capable of playing with and off each other in a way that creates drama and joy, then something is quite wrong. 

But hey, I am as capable of making mistakes as anyone else (maybe more than most!), so I will be careful if I decide to do comparative listening.

Trying to decide whether the extra work involved in making and installing a PSU filter in a DAC I'm putting together is worth it.  Just posted a new thread in the General forum of Computer Audiophile asking about it.  This note is an invitation to anyone here (especially all of you DIYers) to drop by the thread and give me the benefit of your knowledge and experience, either there, or here if you prefer.

Thanks in advance - much appreciated.

I have no idea at all whether any of this is great or cr*p, or how much the non-free stuff costs, and you probably already know about each of these.  But just on the off chance there's something of interest, here are a couple of links:

http://www.listeninc.com/us/products/sc_randd.html

http://www.qsl.net/dl4yhf/spectra1.html

And a collection of links -

http://www.radio.imradioha.org/PC_Based_Test_Gear.htm

My title bar and the border of my cover art are both red, so that is not the cause of whatever occurred in my case.

I will see if it ever happens again, and if so, will try to log.

I had never bothered to look at this thread before because I'd never experienced XXHE stopping.  I have now, though, twice in the middle of songs about 6 minutes in length, and just as Bert says, XXHE acted as if the songs had ended.  I tried again with the same songs and they played through.

Settings as in my sig - notice no phase alignment.  Interesting because the thread had somewhat emphasized phase alignment, but I personally never experienced these stops until a couple of days ago when I ran XXHE without phase alignment.  I do have an external USB drive as the music source, though I'm using a RAMdisk as the playback drive.

A note about -3a and PC speed settings:

Back when I had 12GB of RAM, slightly slower speed than what I have now, I was overclocking my CPU to 3.7GHz.  Then I upgraded to 16GB of RAM that was rated a little faster.  When I used BIOS Auto settings on the Asus mobo to run the memory at max speed and lowest latency, it brought the CPU back to 3.07GHz.  Interestingly, on the Win Performance Index the CPU rating did not go down at all, and subjectively the computer seemed just as fast.  Also, this was at the same time I first used RAMdisks on which to install XXHE and for Playback Drive (which I still do), so it seemed advisable to use the BIOS settings that were best for memory speed and latency, as long as the CPU didn't seem to be disadvantaged by its slower setting.

When setting XXTweaks to "Ultimate," it tells me that it's going to run my CPU at 3.07GHz (exactly what it already is), and asks whether that's OK, and of course I say yes.  It runs with no problem, and no difference in cooling.

Interesting to me that XXHE doesn't want to speed up the CPU at all.

First, -3a is for me definitely better than -2.  It is not so much an amazing objective leap (because I liked the sound I was finally able to get after some tweaking with -2), as it is the more subjective type of thing I experience when it's all really right: I want to hear this track, then that one, then the next and the next, etc.

It did take me just a little tweaking to get there, by playing with the SFS and Q settings, which you'll see in the sig.  It may indeed be true these (SFS in particular) don't change the sound as much as before, yet I found SFS=2 did not give the music quite enough "body," and 2.2 was just the very slightest bit too controlled.  Similarly, neither Q=16 nor Q=18 was exactly right, but Q=17 with a factor of 2 and SFS=2.1 was about as close to perfect as I can imagine hearing with XXHE at the moment: yes, accurate, but not just that - all the joy is there, too.

Listening to several tracks from Rickie Lee Jones' "Flying Cowboys," -2 gives the right high extension on her voice, cymbals, etc., but -3a does that and also provides more upper midrange body and expressiveness, as well as giving the right rasp and growl to the saxophone.  -3a also gets the subtle Doppler of the toms on "Love Is Gonna Bring Us Back Alive" just right, making me wanna get up and boogie.

Ah, and also, probably because Phase Alignment is off, I can play as loud as I like (or as loud as I've tried, anyway, Dragonfly volume at 50, XXHE at 0 attenuation) without tripping my amp's protective circuitry.

Enjoying my music a lot,

Jud

I had the same error as Bert and Maxi last night.  Maxi apparently is properly activated, Bert apparently isn't.  I'd like to be as sure as I can that, given -3 *looked* to me as if it was properly activated (red font on the title bar, red border for cover art), -3a is also.

With that as prologue, the following questions:

- Should I just unzip -3a over -3 in the same folder?

- If I do unzip -3a over -3, should I go ahead and activate -3a, or would it already be activated?

So BTW - and my apologies in advance if this is something that has been explained repeatedly before or is in a tooltip I should have paid attention to: Does "Q" have anything whatever to do with the Q of a filter?

Also: Might be interesting for folks to look at the iZotope SRC thread over at Computer Audiophile.  Has some interesting stuff, and speaking of "sparkle," I just lately made a comment in that thread that talks about how we are trying to describe (in that case, and partially also with XXHE) digital filter effects so inadequately with language from back in the analog days when all we knew about changing was frequency response and a little about time ("transients" and such).

Well, we've had hints of laptops and wifi....

XXHE broadcasting DSD over wifi for Win8, Mac, and Linux laptops?

And the splitter bar doesn't move?