Hi Peter, recently the wallpaper with the cover art stopped working here, all else works fine. The wallpaper worked well until I unplugged the laptop, including the external hard drive, and moved it to another room. I opened XX intending to play music on the internal harddrive but forgot to change the music root in xx. The program hicupped and I have had this problem since. Just letting you know. Most of the time the lid of the laptop is closed so it really makes no difference to me.

Thanks for the replies. Telstar, how can one know whether the S3 suspend mode works well beforehand? On my current setup, everytime the computor goes into sleep mode when I forget to turn it off,  I always have to restart or XX won't work. Obviously, I don't know much about computers so thanks for indulging me.

Roy, I was wanting to use the Juli@ as an inexpensive means of getting music to my DAC, via spdif. Using the Juli@ as the sound device, are you able to us arc prediction upsampling?  How does it sound?

Started looking at desktops to replace my laptop but I am not a techie and have questions. Also funds are limited so I've been looking at the web sight of a big box store, Costco, where they give you options for configuration.
First, whats the best processor for XX? The choices seem to be Core 2 duo, Dual-Core (pentium) and core i5 or i7.  Does it make a difference if its dual or quad if choosing Core 2?

Secondly, to get the music to the dac I was considering a Julie@, though I will make sure the computor has a firewire port for possible future upgrades ( who knows, maybe I'll win that lottery) to some NOS Dac I keep hearing about.  . Is something like a Julie@ necessary if the computer comes with a SPDIF output?

Any other considerations I should be aware of. This computer would be used for music and downloading movies to output to the TV.

Lastly, though I am getting great sound from my laptop, better than from my cdp's, I've just run into too many situations where I have to keep fiddling around (almost literally) to get XX to work. So far I've never been concerned with cover art cause I alway close the laptop lid when playing XX. I will miss that aspect of the laptop.

Geeze, I'm not sure what's better anymore. In my system I basically have two 24/96 dacs. The first, an M-Audio Audiophile usb, I use to convert my usb connection to spdif (it sucks as a dac). From there it goes to an older MSB Gold link III. I have no idea how good (jitter free?) the conversion from usb to spdif is. The MSB has a toggle switch for upsampling which allows me to upsample to either 96 or 132K. To date, with every version of xx I have used, the upsampling to 96k is turned on; this setting very much reduces what I perceive as digital harshness. However, with all types of music, I have to leave the Q1 setting of xx at 14 or I reintroduce what feels like digital harshness back into the sound (lately Ive been at 30,30,0,0 for the other Q settings). To my very uneducated ears this setup has blown away an elite series pioneer cdp and a camelot merlin transport I have used in the past. One could say I have become very used to, perhaps even addicted, to this (distorted?)sound.

Along comes 9y-4 with arc prediction upsampling which I am able to use at the double setting. At this setting, I am now able to turn off the upsampling of the MSB and I am, for the first time, able to change my Q1 setting from 14 to 4 and the sound seems to just get better (not sure if this will work for classical music). With this set up the sound is  different but I'm just not sure if its always better. When I have the volume at divorce inducing levels (as my wife will tell you, the system is in the living room) 9y-4 is better--I can go significantly louder before the sound begins to seriously distort. However, at quieter levels my 9y-3a setup, MSB doing the upsampling, seems more "present" or maybe slightly louder is the best way to describe it. Another way to describe the difference is that the 9y-4 settup sounds more refined but subdued, more like a studio recording, and when the MSB does the upsampling the sound feels less dry and more "in the room", or more like a live recording. Does this make sense?

At this point I'm on the fence. Am going to just listen to 9y-4 for a while and see if I'm moved one way or the other. (Am sort of suspicious that the usb to spdif conversion is probably compromising the 9y-4 setup.)

Oh, I haven't compared 9y-4, without arc prediction upsampling, to 9y-3a.

Great list Russ, thanks. Can invert, alt-I, be changed while a track is playing, just wondering?

Thanks for the advice, Peter. Unfortunately, when I told my wife that my music Guru is insisting on a new computer for music playback, both she and the dog walked out of the room......Hopefully, in the not too distant future we will overcome these obstacles. 

 

Well, I guess my processor, 2x 1.4 ghz, would be slower, but I sure don't understand how it could be so much slower. Using xx to play three 24/96 violin concertos (9 tracks, 1.4 gigs) takes a full five minutes for the flacs to process before any sound begins. I bought these tracks from Linn Records right after purchasing xx  and figured that converting them to wave files made the most sense given the time it took to get them to play.

I just noticed that I too am having problems with the sound abruptly stopping when playing the larger flac tracks.

However, these same files "manually" converted to wave files and then played in xx work without problems.

I didn't know that you could convert the files by right clicking on them, thanks!

Though I don't know if it will work, one thing you might want to try is to convert the flac files to wave using a program like dbpoweramp, a free download. I did this with the Marianne Thorsen violin concertos of Mozart that I purchased from Linn Records (they sound incredible). Letting xx convert the flac to wave when playing the flac file just took too long. I did not notice any difference in sound quality by converting the file to wave with dbpoweramp and then playing the file with xx.

Maybe just try converting one of the shorter "long" files to see if this will work. My guess, a very uneducated one to be sure, is that the problem is the result of xx having to convert such a huge flac to wave before it plays.

Just checked and all the files used for testing for the switching problem were, indeed, 24/96.  :heat:I would be REALLY embarrassed if they weren't!

  You are correct; it is a 16/96 file and it plays here when the 9y DAC setting is set to 16/96. Sorry about that. As for the speed it is correct here; it is mostly a very fast piece. As for the sound quality, it doesn't sound too good, artifacts and all; however, the way it is played is very good. Because it played in 9x at the 24/96 dac setting, I too thought there might be a link to the switching problem. Back to the drawing board......

Thanks! It will be on its way shortly.

Well, I get an INVALIDARG error when I play a homemade 24/96 file with the 9y series. No problem playing the file with 9x-7. Its a home made file from a cassette tape that I converted to a 24/96 wave file using Audacity. It's a rather huge file. I looked everywhere but  couldn't find the cd for sale. ( Dvorak's Violin Concerto in A Minor, with Ruggeriero Ricci on violin with the London Symphony; I have other versions with other players but they pale in comparison. Anyone know where this can be gotten digitally?)

Anyway, I will  send the file to you if that would help (You really should hear it!). I'm itching to play it with 9y-3a, but don't need a quick fix; it's not like I'm playing Dvorak every day........ 

Right, after selecting the track and making it full blue, I then right clicked to get the delete option. This always worked in the past. I must say that it did seem that xx "hiccupped" just prior to it giving me the file no longer exists message rather than the delete option. Immediately before this I did have a problem loading the playlist with the trak I wanted to delete. Two or three times when I selected the playlist and clicked on the load button, the last album I played loaded in the playlist field instead of the playlist I actually intended to load. This never happened before. Finally, after i got the playlist to load correctly (I think I shut down and restarted the computer) I was unable to delete the track as I previously described, which also never happened before.

The other day I went into explorer and deleted a home made 24/96 file. It was originally a compressed windows media player file that I converted to a 24/96 file using dbpoweramp. I then re-ripped the track as a 16/44 wave file from the original cd. I opened xx and loaded a playlist that had the deleted 24/96 track in it. I then highlighted the trak and right clicked on it to delete it from the playlist because that 24/96 track no longer existed; I was going to add the 16/44 version of the track to the playlist.

When I right clicked on the deleted 24/96 trak in the playlist I expected to be given the option of deleting it from the p[laylist, which is what I wanted to do. However, I kept getting an error message that the trak no longer existed without being given any option to delete the non existing trak from the playlist! I finally went into the DATA folder, opened the playlist and edited it out. That worked but it was a bit cumbersome. I guess the way to do this is to delete the track from the playlist before deleting it from the computer?

On the other hand the four vintage Mullard El84's that I just put in my amp, together with 9y-3a have left me unable to get off the couch. 

Yeah, embedded explorer. Of course I've been clicking away all day too and it hasn't happened.....but, as I recall, it mostly occurs when then external drive has to wake up after going to sleep.