XXHighEnd

Hi,

I am new to this party, I have been using FB2K for years and I am a total GEEK and Developer as well as a massive audio collector.   Currently I run my main system (surround, Clements Ribbon Speakers (Phil is a friend of mine) all being run from an I7 Acer Ultra Portable via HDMI out normally using WASAPI to feed from FB2K.

I have 2 turntables with Moving Coil cartridges with a hand build pre-peramp, but I have not played any Vinyl in years as I don't believe that it sounds better than high bit rate audio and certainly no where as good as well produced surround.
I also use the IZotope Ozone 4 to tweak the sound to the room.

So based on my proclivities  will I hear cleaner sound from this player?
If so, please explain why.

Will the Acer be OK for the PC to use?

Will I still be able to use Ozone on the 2 ch content?

Will I be able to move over my playing history from FB2K?

And last - is the Peter from here the same guy as Peter from FB2K?   :-)

Thanks,
Barry

Hi there Barry,

Well, all the good guys are named Peter. Didn't you know ? haha

Now let's see …


Well, out of all you're at the good address here. I guess you knew that in advance. So go ahead and get mad of all the SQ influencing settings.
That was an easy one …


Okay, try to postpone your judgment of me being ignorant, but here all goes wrong for starters. HDMI is no audio interface hence it will never bring you the best sound.
A laptop is never up to the job. Never, but certainly not for XXHighEnd. Sound killing so to speak.
WASAPI is a bit up to you (because you easily could have chosen KS assuming the sound device in there allows for that), but you can easily see that in here nobody uses it. I think literally nobody. And this is not because someone told them not to. It's just to sterile or something. But you can easily try for yourself of course. One thing : by now WASAPI is not much further developed so to speak, just because all happens within KS. More possibilities to tweak.


Since it is you who mentions it, it will be me to sort of "state" you shouldn't. Of course this is up to you again, but such a thing would undo all what XXHE tries to create for you. Just try it without, and, for example, see your standing waves being disappeared to begin with. You'll see …


Eh, tough to say. Maybe not when you let all go as you do it now. Well, see above. But it still should workout to some extend. But mind you, a first thing noticeable will be the slugginess at preparing the tracks for playback. This is not a SQ thing but a convenience matter. Also important. Remember, XXHE is a pure memory player.


Haha, now you go too far. So, maybe drop a bit of Hydrogen mentality and listen first. Oh please, I don't say you per se will have that mentality, but chances are fair you have, being a Foobar user. And why not. But still things don't work like that, where science is only science by means of "what counts most" is true and science (about abx stuff and the like). Anyway, be my guest and try *not* to hear the difference. No DSP is applied (but stay out of Phase Alignment because that is) and count out the digital volume which is lossless (and therefore no DSP). Of course you should be using Arc Prediction  Filtering which sure can be called DSP, BUT which is only a replacement for what happens in your DAC otherwise. So, a necessity in general, but when you leave it off you will be listening merely to the filtering of your DAC which is so-so. Here too, everybody uses it while it was made for the NOS1 D/A converter and even when I told NOT to use it. It just works.


Not by standard. But if it is important to you I can squeeze it in I guess (no guarantees) because here too playing history is maintained (in XML).

I hope I didn't steer you away right from the start !
Regards,
Peter

Thanks for your detailed reply Peter!

So do you advocate just a pure 2 channel approach or do you also play multi-channel tracks as well?

Also, it seems to me HDMI provides the only directly way of moving the digital signal from the PC to the receiver -I am using a Pioneer SC-27 which replaced a whole bunch of separate amps and preamps with a really clean nice sound for my listening room.  I was at CES this year and a rep showed my a 2 channel amp chip that produces 75 watts per channel and has been a-b against huge tube amps and won or tied most of the time in listening tests.

So I guess if this is all about zillion dollar cables and huge tube amps then I will have to pass.

And yes I used KS and found it worked well except for switching between 2 and multi-channel tracks.

If you can't use anything else than HDMI, then so be it, right ? But *if* you have another opportunity somewhere, please try that.

I don't use multi channel playback and XXHighEnd is not made for that. Well, not at this time, and later for XOver appliances it will (and it will do normal multichannel just the same then). What works though is DTS and as far as I know this is then multi channel.
(Russ ?)


Haha. Well, I am known to be explicitly about the 1$ cables (as supplied with the NOS1, really !) and 4$ GainClone chips. So it can't be about that …
(a bit in the realm of the standing waves disappearing without any gear or bass traps etc.)

Just try it out - that's easy.

Peter

Barry -

It sounds a whole bunch better than Foobar to me right "out of the box," so to speak.  That was true on my laptop, and is now true on my desktop.

What's also true is that if you listen to Peter's advice, and well short of zillion-dollar anything, you can very much improve the "out of the box" sound.  (I don't know what's in the Acer, so I'm not sure how many of the improvements will actually be available to you.  Easy enough to try them and see.)

G'day Barry,

XXHE will successfully pass DTS encoded WAV's (or FLAC's) at up to 24/96 via a digital connection, provided no resampling is set. As per my signature, I use a SPDIF coax connection to my theatre pre-processor, and playing back DTS encoded surround is very enjoyable for the times I want to experience multichannel sound.

Currently XXHE only supports multichannel sound via these DTS encodes, and I produce them using DTS's Pro Packer/Encrypter/Encoder suite, from the individual discrete channels of the source. The source can be any multichannel file type, provided you can extract the individual channels in wav format.

The encoding process is a little tedious, so lately I have only been processing albums of significant quality and uniqueness.

If you have the pre-requisites, ie. SPDIF connection to a DTS decoder, you can download a number of sample files from here ...

http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2446&artikel=740607

Cheers,

Russ