I am. And I do.

Anyone looking for an as-new pair of Quad 2905 speakers at half the retail price???

Mani.

Great post Jud.

I don't know why, but I've always been more fascinated with the ADC stage than the DAC stage. (I don't do the lotto, but if I did and won a few tens of millions I would get a team together and build the world's best ADC.) If a recording were encoded 'perfectly' then I think there would be no need for multiple filters - Arc Prediction would be all we need. Done. However, this just isn't the case...

Mani.

Actually here's a snippet of a 2009 TAS article with Richard Fryer and Keith Johnson of Spectral Audio that got me thinking:

Richard Fryer There was lack of understanding among our peers as to why we spent so much time on a CD player. Don’t they understand that CD is now a heritage technology? This is where the music is. They dismiss it because many of the recordings are poor. I’m sorry, but there’s musical history in there. Although we’ve gone past the CD, it was obvious to us that we needed to pull out all the stops and do an “Apollo program” to build the finest reproduction of 16-bit digital.
Keith Johnson My instinct is that ultimately high-resolution will be a coming media, but when and what form it’s going to take is questionable. I’m wearing a record company hat [Reference Recordings] because we’re seeing this interest in it, and it does work. It’s got something a little better, but in my experience it’s not something that’s going to bash you in the face as being different, unless you’re using a converter that has taken into account what we have done in the SDR-4000. We’ve been using the high-res file as the reference. We ended up doing strange things to make the CD as close to the high-res as we could. That, of course, benefits a lot of old recordings.
RF Because we’re audiophiles there’s a tendency to say to ourselves, “Think of the heaven we’d be in with this high-resolution file.” But you have to continually put yourself back in the shoes of every-day music enthusiasts, where the recordings they love were made in any number of different ways, and many are compromised. What the public wants is great reproduction of their music. That’s everything from the Stones and the Beatles to everything recorded in the 60s and 70s. It’s all the stuff. We’ve tried to make a real contribution to keeping music alive by addressing issues that are relevant to music lovers and not just to audiophiles. If we can bring about a more ideal conversion of this massive body of work, everybody wins. To me the heroic effort was sort of archeological—that is, to take a medium that’s been beat around and abused and doesn’t have a great reputation, certainly amongst us purists, and raise it up and discover the really noble performances.
KJ I have a monaural Joan Baez LP that’s a gorgeous, beautiful recording of a great voice in its prime. If you listened to the CD years ago, it was like knitting needles in the ears. But if you listen to the same CD where the time-domain distortions have been reduced, you hear the LP in the CD. For 25 years we’ve learned not to expect from the CD what we hear in LP and analog tape. But when decoded correctly, it doesn’t sound digital. It sounds old and vintage, but it’s beautiful. That quality is on many recordings you wouldn’t expect because you thought the CD had been so badly encoded. That’s reversible to a degree.

[The highlights are mine.]

Mani.

Actually, I think Miska refers to them as 'polynomial' filters. But you're right, he doesn't recommend them. And I agree with him - they sound fatiguing. My preference is his 'poly-sinc minimum phase' filter.

However... I'm only talking about comparing the filters in HQP to themselves. Much as I like HQP (for the reasons cited), I have a strong preference for XX and AP. And I agree, the single 16x AP setting is not found wanting with any type of music. It's seems to be universally the best filter to use.

BUT...

On CA, I mentioned the following article: http://spectralaudio.com/bulletins/0806.pdf

By 'recreating the sound' there may be filters that help to eliminate/reduce the distortions created at the ADC stage. A true interpolating filter such as AP wouldn't do this. Now, listening to AP and how great it sounds, it does seem that whatever these 'ADC distortions' might be, they aren't really important... but who knows until you've heard the sound without them?

Mani.

I must have switched between 'Minimize OS' and 'normal OS' over 100 times yesterday with none of the described issues whatsoever. But I have 'Windows 7 Ultimate' on both of my music PCs (both relatively new clean builds). Might it be a good idea to invest in a copy of Ultimate just to alleviate these kinds of issues (if indeed this fixes things)?

Mani.

EDIT: Ah Eric, I see you're already on W7Ult. OK, so that's not the soluton...

Guys 'n' Gals,

I just thought I'd start a thread about feeding the NOS1 from HQPlayer rather than XX.

After a wasted (really wasted) couple of hours yesterday, everything is now working perfectly. I'm using XX to minimise the OS but keeping WASAPI services on (required for HQP).

So why would anyone be interested in using HQP instead of XX? I think there are a number of potential reasons:

1) HQP can convert native DSD64 and DSD128 files to PCM  on the fly and feed this to the NOS1 (from 16/44.1 up to 24/384 rates). I've been converting DSD64 to 24/352.8 and then feeding to the NOS1. So if you're getting into DSD downloads or recording, no need to get a dedicated DSD DAC if you already have a NOS1. I have a Mytek DSD DAC but find it very inconvenient to keep switching between this and the NOS1, as I don't want to destroy the sound with a preamp.

2) For a newbie, HQP is easier to get your head around than XX. The GUI is far from perfect though (especially file management, and there's no coverart, etc) but it really is very intuitive and easy to use.

3) HQP has some terrific filter and noise-shaping settings. I think it's worth it just for this. Playing around with various schemes, you'll really get a sense of how various filters and noise-shaping schemes sound. It makes a totally mockery of the 'perfect sound for ever' marketing hype for redbook - there is no  'perfect sound' - all the filters sound different and there's no single one that sounds obviously the best with all different types of music.

4) From a purely personal point of view, I hold HQP's developer in very high regard. Although he has a very different approach, his ethos is in many ways similar to Peter's - he's created a player and hardware solution for himself and is just sharing it with the world.

I'll be using this thread as a sort of blog to share my experiences and thoughts about the HQP/NOS1 combo.

HQP will never replace XX for me. But I think it supplements it well.

Mani.

OK, this has been a comedy of errors... on my part!

I can't believe this, but apparently the particular track that I chose from a totally random album on my 2TB HDD has actually been ripped incorrectly. It plays, but as total silence. For some reason, WMP ordered the album tracks differently and I chose a different track when trying it.

Soooooo, to cut a long story short, everything seems to be working as expected. I'll start playing around with a few different configurations later this evening.

Sorry for wasting anyone's time...

Mani.

A final thought on this for today: do the 'persist' buttons actually do anything?

Mani.

Haha...

Just to eliminate any bluetooth/RDC affects, I've reverted temporarily to using a direct monitor & keyboard/mouse connection.

WMP works fine with the NOS1 (not WASAPI). But I just can't get a whisper out of HQPlayer or XX. It seems to me that WASAPI still isn't restarting properly after a 'Minimize OS'. (Even when following Peter's earlier advice about stopping only desktop services and then going back to normal OS.)

(Yep, I check Windows volume control very carefully before I hit play in any of the players - the NOS1 is going directly into the power amp.)

Mani.

OK, it's nothing to do with the NOS1 either. I'm getting the exact same behaviour with the mobo soundcard.

Will continue experimenting...

Mani.

Thanks for the ideas guys.

Well, it's not an HQPlayer issue. I'm not getting any sound out of the NOS1 with XX either! Neither Engine#3 nor Engine#4! Again, everything seems to be working OK, the clock is counting and the slider is moving (in Attended, of course). But no sound out of the NOS1. Yes, there are two Engine#3 NOS1 devices and two Engine#4 NOS1 devices. Non give any sound out of the NOS1.

Peter have I got the latest USB driver? It says:
- driver version: 1.0.1
- build type: release
- interface version: 2.0

(But you sent it to me ages ago as v1.0.2.)

I could load the Mytek driver and see if I can get some sound out of the Mytek DAC, but I'd rather get the NOS1 working properly first.

Mani.

I'm having problems getting any sound out of the NOS1 with HQPlayer. Weirdly, a test tone in W7's 'Manage Audio Devices' plays perfectly out of the NOS1.

I have the device in the NOS1's USB panel set to 'Stereo' (not 4.0) and the relevant switch on the NOS1 in the correct 'up' position.

It could well be a configuration issue with HQPlayer. Everything seems to be working fine - the track details show and the timer runs exactly as it should, but there's no sound out of the NOS1. It's strange because the HQPlayer/NOS1 combo used to work fine 6-9 months ago. But I guess a lot has changed since then with HQPlayer (and maybe the NOS1 driver too?). I'll contact Jussi at some point and see if he has any thoughts.

Mani.

Cracked and solved!

In your RDC connection, you have to select 'Play on Remote Computer'. This solves the problem.

All credit to Alain.

Mani.

CRACKED... but not solved!

Alain, thanks for your help... it didn't solve the problem but certainly led me in the right direction.

WASAPI works absolutely perfectly if the PC is booted in 'normal OS' and is accessed locally, i.e. monitor and keyboard/mouse connected directly to PC.

WASAPI does not work if the PC is accessed via bluetooth RDC. (It may well work via LAN RDC, but I haven't tested this yet.)

The two screenshots below were taken via the two diffferent access means. Absolutely no other parameters in W7 were changed.

Thanks again Alain.

Mani.

Nah... I've never installed the Mytek driver on this newly built PC.

So just to be clear, I'm simply trying to use the NOS1 as a WASAPI device either in HQPlayer or XX. But although it shows in W7's Device Manager, it doesn't in either of the players, or indeed in the W7's Audio Device Manager.

I'll try to post some more screen shots to help us get to the bottom of things.

It makes me wonder how other people are using non-NOS1 DACs in 'Minimize OS' mode...

Mani.