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Ultimate Audio Playback / Your thoughts about the Sound Quality / Re: We all fell in the W7 pitfall
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on: October 07, 2010, 01:11:07 pm
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Thanks guys. At this moment (some 10 hours of subsequent listening and trying back and forth) we are as far as that the RAMDisk with Vista brings the least "distortion". I had to do a second test last night to be sure of that and, it's true. Peter is right once more. Vista and ramdisk is the way to go. The differences on a resolving system like Peter's are huge, from fatigue to enjoyment. It remains to be checked vista32 vs 64bit (hope it doesnt) because I think we need the latter with 8+gig of ram to be able to load enough tracks. I'm already thinking 16gbs but I didnt check yet if my current mainboard supports that.
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171
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Ultimate Audio Playback / Playback Tweaks and Source related subjects / Re: RAMDisk
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on: October 07, 2010, 12:58:32 pm
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This is the new dimension of sound. I could only imagine what would happen if I turned network services off, etc... but I don't want another OS just for XXHE playback, at least not now.
SFS still matters, unfortunatelly, and I haven't found optimum for me yet.
Greets, Marcin
When i was using the network card to take some stuff from my other pc, i experienced severe SQ loss, so I'm sure that killing all network services will improve the sound a lot, and since I have a dedicated pc for audio, it's the very first thing that I will try in the next optimizations (read back to Vista).
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172
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Ultimate Audio Playback / Your thoughts about the Sound Quality / Re: We all fell in the W7 pitfall
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on: October 02, 2010, 03:06:33 pm
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But ... In my case I *need* to upgrade or something. So, I can't perform a clean install because I will be looking for days and days for all my install keys for all the development stuff (plus that stuff itself -> undoable). I suppose that can't be done ? Ok, if not I guess it will be another boot, just for playback. Ah, but indeed, I guess I won't be able to "develop" much with such a slimmed system anyway. Ok.
Thanks, Peter
Yes i think you should use a separate, clean installed OS for playing only. The dev stuff with all MS ddls can impair the sound somehow I never upgrade. It takes 2 days of reinstalling all stuff but it will be clean and put.
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174
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Ultimate Audio Playback / Your thoughts about the Sound Quality / Re: We all fell in the W7 pitfall
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on: October 01, 2010, 03:52:28 pm
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My PC runs one SSD with my normal hard drive "parking" after a 1 min of not being used (it doesn’t spin back up at all during music play back). I got similar musical results to what you are describing, no placebo. I seem to remember reading that you have a fanless setup but hears one to try if I’m wrong. Temporally disconnect your CPU fan's power (and other case fans) and listen to a track before and afterwards (Sorry I know you know this, but others reading may not - be VERY careful with CPU temperature, I can listen to about a track and a half before my CPU get to about 60 deg C and I put the CPU fan back on). This gives simlar improvements in sound to adding an SSD in my system.
Does anyone know of any reasonably priced, good fanless heat sinks for CPUs, do they exist?
Nick.
Big tower ones that are built for low-speed fans -not many exist. I use a scythe ninja mini (anything bigger wont fit my case, all fanless), the very best would be oh i forgot the name, it's one of the thermalright build for fanless or lowspeed fans, ultima-90 i think but i may be wrong. Check on silentpcreview in the review session and on the forums. Beware that anything too fast wont be stable fanless. My E5300 is stable when playing music and video at no more than 55°C. But if i run some stress test such as occt it will go to high 80s and then crash - which is a thing to not repeat many times since it can corrupt the OS.
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176
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Ultimate Audio Playback / Your thoughts about the Sound Quality / Re: We all fell in the W7 pitfall
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on: October 01, 2010, 03:44:52 pm
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Man, you have no idea nor clue how important it is to have a GOOD reference again. Sorry for my nagging, but this really is the most crucial. So, I'm just imagining rebooting the PC for that 64 bit version and have a listen; if in one system not all (*ALL* !) is right, and in the other also not all is right, the decision on what is the best becomes arbitrairy (and personal, subjective). But if one is good (nothing lacks to your ears), it is so very easy to reject the other. I think that now you can assume vista32 as your reference OS, which is SP1, right? not SP2? I think you should put two OSes (lets say vista32 and vista64) on the same SSD disk, hoping you have space and then do the dual boot. I dont have a reference-quality sistem to do this myself. :/
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178
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Ultimate Audio Playback / Chatter and forum related stuff / Re: A WARNING about SSD's ...
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on: October 01, 2010, 01:59:29 pm
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In my experience HDDs are no less prone to die as SSDs, it's just a matter of luck. SSDs are just memory and memory can fail, while HDDs can break,although recovery in spinning discs done by specialized firms and very expensive, IS doable while for SSDs i think not. Better to backup that library and to make a raid1 of SSDs for my next rig
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179
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Ultimate Audio Playback / Your questions about the PC -> DAC route / Re: Software DSP
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on: September 22, 2010, 06:23:41 pm
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I want to add one thing. I already do some software processing (which i'm not sure comes before or after xxhe plays the file), by means of a vst host and the soundcard drivers routing.
And I compared foobar to XXHE with clear differences in sound. This means that the xxhe processing (or not processing the sound) still has influence when using a software XO.
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180
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Ultimate Audio Playback / Phasure NOS1 DAC / Re: World's first NOS 24/192 filterless DAC ?
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on: September 12, 2010, 09:11:41 pm
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Telstar,
The bits are "lost" in the end result. The calculations in between are unrelated (for both the volume and AP) ...
Peter
Are you sure? Because if i recall correctly this trick is used in some dac chips like the sabre, 44 bits for the volume attenuation, it firsts adss all zeroes and then reduce the "volume". But you are the software wiz If you tried and it cant work, pity, we'll have to spend more to have it passive.
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