Sorry, it is clipPED, and not clipPING of course.

Never mind (I think) ... this is what I heard after I got the Delay running and could sit down comfortably :
It sounds too full, and actually like the JVC uplevelled stuff like was described here : http://forum.bd-design.nl/board_entry.php?id=11436&page=0&order=last_answer&category=0

This first one is at 20 seconds.
As you can see, it's clipping all over the place in the right channel, and this is what you hear.
Btw, it doesn't come to me as a distortion, but as harmonics of which it seems to me they should not be there.
Far worse is the full (saturated) sound.

Anyway, so far it is like I pormised. This thing (#3) is rather accurate, and most probably what you can hear with this one, you just can't hear with the others.
Lousy player ... so you could call this a downside, but of course it really is not.

If you have other examples, please don't hesitate to post them. If XX is wrong, I am most eager to improve it !
Peter

As a matter of fact, today I had rather many occasions that a next track just wouldn't play (without pressing anything). But, then it wouldn't play at all anymore. So not : one not, one yes, one not etc., but just not anymore. After pressing Play, yes.

I'll try to find this ... 

Hmm ... suppose I don't hear anything strange (which I don't ) what to do without a description of it, and what to do with "Maybe after 15-20 seconds". 

And what about the Track Delay not working in #3 as it appears now ... 
Edit : Correction : it only works after restarting the player. Not so handy ...

Couldn't you be (a lot) more specific ?
Note that I hear a lot in there, and for now it's my guess that it is something which just doesn't work out with you there ?
So please ... time the exact seconds and tell what it is what you hear (wrongly).

Torh and Werner,

Would you care to upload a 2 minute sample of what you perceive as wrong with #3 (here), and indicate what you hear at what time offsets ?

Then I can judge whether it's XX or not.
Thank you !

Werner,

Sadly I can't find anything wrong in the program.
Unless you receive messages which you didn't tell.

When you don't here sound, is XXEngine3.exe running (I guess you have something like TaskManager in there) ?

Then ...

When all your drivers are current, there's a fair change you can solve things by means of the PCI Latency tool. The link in there guides you to the product itself.

Additionally you might want to read this : http://www.theatertek.com/forums/showthread.php?p=58821

What I say in the first referred to post, may be the most convenient for you.

Okay (not yet ) ... try to read this carefully, and keep it in mind forever :

One of the objectives I had at creating XXHighEnd, is thet we (you) should not have to deal with stupid OS settings, shutting down services, changing priorities outside of XX, and all the stuff you actually want to know about. And-they-do-not-disturb.

I told more often, that my XP Audio machine has many interfaces connected to it (like controlling the heating and that kind of stuff), and it's even a webserver, continuesly connected to the internet, people probably browsing pages on it. Right.
Besides that, the PC is just used during playing audio for this typing, or browsing the internet myself. I don't care. Because the player doesn't care.

With Vista and #3 it's even more explicit, because there is no way I can tear the audio down by, say, 10 tasks at the same time of bulk copying files, ripping CDs or DVDs, name it. It just can't be influenced. Well, not that I could prove. Not for glitches, and not for quality.

But coincidentally, here's Bert's experience ...
He indeed had this (seemingly) same problem, and *he* had to be careful even not to drag tracks onto XX, because there would be a glitch. So this is what you have to keep in mind : In the case of Bert, priority settings would help, and not touching the PC would help, hence shutting down services and other stupid stuff theoretically would help. BUT IT IS NOT THE SOLUTION !
And the most dangerous part of it is, that I could show you the skipping (glitching) of 1 out od 10 samples, and you wouldn't even hear that. Not at first sight ...

So what most probably happens in your system, is apart from the major glitches (which would be about several hundreds of samples being skipped (do the math ... there should 44,100 per second)), there very well can be the skipping of a small amount of samples you don't hear, but which surely *does* influence the overall sound.

In the end what I say is : just do NOT try to fix this by shutting down interrupting things. You won't hear the small interrupts which maybe are still there, and it just degrades the playback !!
So finding the real cause is the only solution.

And like Hal3101 you have a DDDac ...

Of course I like to say it's not the player, but I'm carefull.
For *sure* I don't say that the DDDac is wrong, but here I'm carefull again. So a few remarks :

What you now have at hand is a player that just lets hear everything. So I'm saying : much more than #1 and #2, which already comes from those not being bit perfect in your case. So my any means #3 is more accurate.
Now, it is very very common to "detect" anomalies from the rest of the system by this. And of course you also could say : lousy player because I hear wrong things.

With the above as the context, many things could be going on, including the Dac being not ok. Btw remember, it is not 16 bit IIRC, and or it is just less, or effectively it's less. It was on DD's website some time ago, and when I last wanted to find this again I couldn' find it. Of course you can build a 24 bit Dac from it, but you'd need a cooling tower with the size of ... well, you know best.

The other angle I have is in the direction of buffering in (near) the Dac. For this matter, it's good to know that the Dac talks to #3, and from that communication follows the buffer size. It just could communicate wrongly about this ...
In the same leage is what I do with that information within #3. As I said elsewehere : this version is *not* calibrated for soundquality, and in fact it should be more or less calibrated for my own situation, or the Fireface if you want. Not that there will be settings for each Dac etc., but stuff around this can be automated, so, say, auto-calibrate. This is not in there at the moment, just because I have to find the general parameters on that for Dacs I don't know ... (like yours).

To make a long story short ... it would be good if you could analyse the problem (let's call it distortion), me knowing that these things just can be done by some (hmm) experience. E.g. if you say it sounds nice, this can't be possible including that distortion, unless everything actually is wrong, but you still judge it as ok. In that case it would be the Dac. Difficult to explain, but if that would be my communication with the Dac, there would be no way that you judge it as "sounds nice". Alsdo, there's no way that only piano notes (etc.) distort, but there are a zillion ways to let sound piano notes wrong just NOT caused by the Dac (and the player makes it profound).



The whole point (well mine) is, that the both of you have such a Dac, and now I can't think this is a coincidence.
For that matter, I'd be very happy to hear from Klaus what his opinion is.


Is in fact a known problem, but from #2. By that experience this should be about your Dac running much too fast ("much" is 10 seconds on one track, which btw is not so much if your track is 1000 seconds (1 % on nearly 20 minutes).
Also it is related to the fastness of the "network" where the track comes from, which then must be veeeery slow to let this go wrong.
To conclude this one for now : The last thing I had to do was making some adjustments on just this, related to new error messages I had to build in, related to the not matching sample rates from source and Dac. I did not test this thouroughly, and with that I am not saying that this is the fault of the Dac or network, but just me not finishing this part completely.

Peter

Chris, of what I understand of it ...

Go to the Dell website, find your laptop, and next find the download of the latest drivers for it ...
If you can't find where to go, call Dell Service ...

Besides that, maybe you have some Raid configuration installed ? that's (very) prone to give these problems. If so, try to test around your Raid configures hdd drives.

Yes, this is computers. But in the very end it's for a good cause. Lateron you will be explaining to others ...

That would be something for me to address ...
So far (say, days of playing) I did not notice that, but it just could be my bad; When you have that more often, please try to recognize the pattern.

Thanks once more,
Peter

I must agree with this;
Once the buffer settings in the Fireface are too low (many clicks audible), and during playing you uplift them, you'll get the blue screen of death (BSOD).

Hmm ... Chris ... From theory that is possible, because of my earlier expression (somewhere) that after this timeout it shouldn't present an error. So ... as long as it does while I don't understand why ... it could cause anything. I myself never experienced a reboot, but I think it just can.
Don't try to find the cause of this for now, and just blame me. 

About the glitches ... you know my opinion about that ... just take your time to get a grasp of that somehow.
Cheers,
Peter

Ok, thank you all for your trial and error miseries !

I 'll try to look into your further notes.

For TorH : Please try to analyse what could be causing this. I will try USB myself once more. But maybe more importantly :
Klaus ... do you have the same experience with your DDDAC ? and what about SPDIF ? (IIRC you have that)

Ok, a bit of a superfluous question : your DAC (and/or soundcard) can do 88K2 ? (at 16 bits)