XXHighEnd

Hi,

I'm not all that smitten with WIN10 after a week of listening. Sure its much, much better than WIN8 but that 's not really an achievement imho.

After reverting to my normal setup I am again amazed and puzzled how much better it still sounds with WIN7. Knowing that power consumption may have a part in SQ, I have conducted some measurements and it turns out that WIN10 in Unattended plays 12-15 Watts more that WIN7 attended. And that was after tweaking settings to allow for a power reduction from 97 to 83 Watts for WIN10.

I had never thought that WIN10 was so power savvy and this may indicate some potential for SQ improvement. I wondered if the rather high power consumption has anything to do with windows vs custom drivers. Are you using WIN10 plain or with special win8 or win10 drivers?

regards, Coen

Hey hey ... a typo I suppose ? :)

Coen, I can not believe this.
You seem to tell "aus Blaue Hineins" that W7 always has been using less Watts than W8.

So is that what you are saying (for a base) ?

Peter


PS: Can you carry krates of beer on your wat to us over here, or on the way back to your place ?
haha

Even my '80s walkman sounds better than win8. I have left it behind a long time ago :bye: (win8 that i) and never put the powermeter on it. Can't remember the password even. If win10 is like a win8plus than powerconsumption could have been higher than win7. Anyway directly after boot without any application started win7 consumes 10watts less than win10. Your call, did you measure?

This power might not interesting per se, but sure it will indicate the processor and mobo running because of something that I overlooked. Drivers maybe?

After the steep climb to a min-ossed win10 config I really want this to work!


You mean full ones your way and empty ones back?  :wacko:

Regards, Coen

Coen,

My W8 uses 48W during 32/705600 playback.
Of course it depends on the further configuration (that is with one 2.5" hdd and 3930K processor). And although I did not try it, you are not going to tell me that W7 will be 38W or even less. It it true though that I did not measure.
Nor did I mueasure W10, but I have my ideas (less again). I can do it though.

So ... wit that data we have to do it ... :) (is that Dutch ?)

Peter

PS: I can't know what settings you tweak to reduce 97W to 83W but there is nothing much to tweak if you copy my settings. You do realize that you are talking 40-50W more to begin with, right ? ...

Hi Peter,

My LPS is not as efficient as your SMPS so I am bound to see more effect from a little extra or less PC power consumption.

I started out in WIN10 MIN OS with XX configured according to your settings (yet no RAMdisk or remote control). That gave me 95 Watts when playing music Unattended. I set Q4 and Q5 to 0, timeresolution to 10mS and increased both first XT tweaks to 98 and 54 (the others seemed to have no effect). I noticed that the disabling of Timestability to 'not optimal' increased consumption by a watt or two.

If I wait for a minute, the idle power consumption of WIN10 decreases to a similar level of WIN7 now: 73-74 Watts.
WIN10 has a tendency to make the HDDs rattle for quite a long time during which the consumption is in the order of 85 watts.

The big difference is between 9z9e on WIN7 vs 2.02 on WIN10, when playing music the first REDUCES the power consumption by 3 to 4 watts yet the latter INCREASES the power use by 10 Watts. This is regardless of further settings, min or normal OS or enabling/disabeling of devices...

At the danger of hijacking my own thread I have another observation. The boot of Win10 in normal OS takes 25 seconds of which 16 seconds to the 'welcome' screen. In MIN OS the boot takes 44 seconds of which 11 are to the "welcome' screen.
IOW is this normal behavior or an indication that something is wrong?

regards, Coen

Yo Coen,


Yes. And I think you can influence this by means of the NOS1 Driver Control Panel buffer setting. This you can see even without playing. Otherwise the Clock Resolution is crucial.

You can not compare 2.02 with 9z* (unless the very last 0.9z version IIRC) because both are too different regarding this.
And for example - and to give you an iidea how sneeky things are : look at the CPU usage with Q3,4,5 = 1/1/1/. In W10 you can do that (in W8 and W7 you can not because all stalls). 100% and the usage gets LOWER because of that.
Blame me. :)
But this stuff is not in the older 0.9z versions and earlier.

Sort of maybe too quick conclusion : you can not compare with different XXHighEnd versions, so *if* you want per se, use 2.02 on W7 as well. :yes:
If I am wrong in thinking that you indeed apply this apple-orange, let me know (otherwise the FULL krate goes this direction hehehe).
Btw, for W7 it is even more important to copy my settings, if you want to compare. And they are NOT the same at all as for W8 (I did not compare W10 for the consumption). But this implies the necessity 1.186 at least (last 0.9z version also OK IIRC).


This I can not judge. Things are strange there. So yes I know and I let it go. Similar is the time required before RDC starts to work.
But careful please, because 10074 *is* a beta (I'd like to call it alpha). So I really don't care about such things, as long as it starts to work ...

One more thing : I do not recall endless disk activity (as you say) after a boot. But possibly this depends on other stuff or general other OS settings (no hibersys file for example - but which just is an example indeed). But I can't check that any more because as you know, my whole OS boots from RAM. No disk connected anywhere. No disk lights either.
:grazy:

Regards,
Peter

Thanks for the reply,

It could be a million things in retrospect that foremost I think have to do with differences in PSU, chipset and processor. And it is not unlikely that those can lead to quite a different behavior of the system manipulation by the software. On the other end I may not have gone far enough to reap sonic benefits (like RAMDISK and the two tier fileserver-XXHEMusicPC setup).

Then there is always the possibility that we have different paradigms on good sound, however there is nobody I trust more in this regard than you. I have a post in preparation for this. I plan to visit Koningshof/Veldhoven/Xfi for a live exposure of the real ting this year, hopefully you have a good room!

One last question: should I disable the fiberfill for WIN10?

regards, Coen

Hey Coen,

Small question : was that you who detected phase problems in my own room, walking closer to the speakers ?
I think this was you (and back then it already was W8). So careful what you say ... :heat:
hehe

The room should be fine in Veldhoven because we have the 110 from the first time again.


Maybe you are literal and if so then I don't know it (didn't Google either). But Hiberfil, yes. But I think you know it from previous (W8) issues :

Open a command prompt As Administrator. In there type :
powercfg -h off

Now the system won't be working on that copy of the memory on your hdd.
But of course you now can't use it either, and this a.o. means that a boot is more slow.

Side note (quite crucial) : I have that Off in W10. But if I don't have an open RDC connection to it, it falls asleep in a few minutes *AND* can wake up again (1-2 seconds). This, while this Off setting should disallow "sleeping" as such (hibertation). So what to say ...

Regards,
Peter

Hi Peter,

I'm a picky guy wrt audio and want to get the best out of mij relatively modest setup.

I disabled the fiberfill (=hiberfill, damn spelling corrector) and that reduced the boot to 35 seconds. Quite a long time in the welcome screen and then almost immediately into the windows screen.

On the driver front I found a win10 version for my video card and that actually installed without any problems. This definitely brought SQ forward. I'va also been looking for a win10 driver for my USB 3 card but those have not been made for WIN8 and later versions.

On the settings front I'm moving forward too. I think your reference settings are way to demanding for my setup and the quite nice sound I'm listening has a totally different set of values.
For now the most decisive move was increasing Q1,Q1x along with SFS. I'm far from finished exploring, but it has become clear to me that I've to go through all the settings and co-influencing ones to find the best balance for my system.

regards, Coen

Hi Coen,

since W10 I'm using a SSD, boot time is 8 sec, laptop runs cooler, sound is great. XXH on a RAM disc.

What are your present Q settings?

Thanx

Joachim

Ah Coen, that is looking better already. Thank you for sharing.
Keep on going ...

Peter

PS: Is your USB3 card so special ?
I only now realize that I did not install the Drivers for my Silverstone ... (and NOS1a is hooked to that).

Hi Joachim,

My settings are quite random and need more exploring. On the positive side in the third day with these settings unaltered (just relaxing) I still think it sounds fine. I will PM you with the details of today.

Peter, no special USB3 card. Some OEM part in a brown unmarked box. It needs a RENESAS driver. Yet on the RENESAS website it is indicated that the last drivers have been made for windows7. I could not find any 'hidden' ones for win8 or 10 on the net either.

reagrds, Coen

***newsflash****

Peter,

You reminded me of placing back the isolated Silverstone USB3 card. That was not possible before because of the lack of a proper plug on the simple LPSU/SMPS wiring. I however rewired it lately and realized that it now could be done.

So I did replace it and the first thing that I noticed when playing music that it consumes way LESS power, actually identical to my WIN7 setup with the no-name card: 68 Watts.
CPU graphs are much cleaner in the cores not assigned to playing music. So the 11 extra watts have been dissipating because of software reasons NOT associated with XXHE processing.

Now in the device management panel I saw the same RENESAS driver (no new hardware found) that is apparently used for the Silverstone.

Anyway imo the native RENESAS WIN10 driver is now the prime suspect of the power supply consumption 'enigma'. The WIN7 version works as advertised for the no-name card, but not on win10. Likely some incompatibility with this typical OEM version. I did not try but I suspect the silverstone card will perform identical in WIN7 and WIN10.

Another thing that occurred to me immediately is that the sound is louder and more dynamic. So i'll have restart the win 10 parameter discovery all over again (sorry Joachim).

regards, Coen

Aha ...

It is true that many (W10) people report hot laptops, loud cooling fans and melting-hot phones (drowning the battery in an hour instead of 24).

Yes, drivers are crucial.

Windows 10 is and remains for now an unfinished product. It is still beyond me what MS is doing.
And I am afraid that *because* of that, it sounds so good (way too lean yet because of so many things lacking still).

Regards and please continue ... :)
Peter

Grrr,

By now I'm sure the newly introduced loudness is pure distortion covering precious nuance in tone and melody. Intelligibility is down as is the musical structure. I also am annoyed by hardness in the midrange and highs.

Worse, this sound is very reminiscent of my WIN8 :censored: experience.

I'm afraid that I am the proving case that a presumably technically "better" environment iow less noise overall does not always lead to better sound.

Maybe it is all about starting to hear more clearly the effects of (mis) matching USB clocks on both sides of the interface. Can "fix" that only in WIN7 (to some extend).....

regards, Coen

Hi Coen,

I love reading your posts about the various Windows versions and your experience with them.  It makes me wonder why your experience is so different to many others?  Obviously you have a keen ear for what you like and knowing "musical structure" and understanding "nuance" are very important things that I don't think everyone gets.

Personally, I liked W7 for a while but eventually W8 won out because of the extra nuance and better tonal shading, which is completely the opposite of your experience!  Based on the impressions you have made in the various threads I have this idea that what you are liking or not liking emanates from the upper-bass/lower midrange, say 100Hz - 1000Hz, which is where warmth and tone and fullness are really set by your speakers.  Would you say this is accurate?  I ended up not liking W7 in this range because is made things a little unfocused or muddy in my system but you are the opposite. 

Could the differences be speaker/amplifier related?  I notice you use a 16" high efficiency Altec woofer for this frequency range and I wonder if there is some interaction problem with the 0.8W SET amplifier you are using, be that by back EMF, clipping, OPT core saturation or some other mechanism?  Just putting it out there, I am really not sure and no-one is more familiar with your system than you, but it is something that I thought about when I read your signature.

Cheers,

Anthony

Hi,

to replay all the amount of "informations" coming from a NOS1a we need a very fast system.
When you listen here:

http://www.monoandstereo.com/2015/09/zellaton-and-fm-acoustics-at-audioarts.html

the resolution of the bass is amazing. I don't hear the percussive sound of the body of the bass in my system with that details.
The piece of music "Carry On Wayward Son" is a track on the "Wood II" CD by Brian Bromberg.

Joachim

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for your contribution! Likely you have a far more accurate system than me to assess the tonal differences between windows versions. In retrospect I concur with you about the upper bass/ lower mid being stronger in WIN8/10.  This undoubtably plays a role in my experience.

The thing is that I do not experience any of the mentioned negatives with neither my Phono rig nor with the mid-fi Rega player of the 90s. They are both as clear and flowing as can be through my system. At best my NOS1a rig extracts way more nuance out of the recording in tone, space and dynamics whilst sounding soft and delicate, just as in real life. This adds up to a total music experience that is my ultimate goal: awakening the sense of beauty and connection to the music. This is a whole different level of listening.

Now my WIN8/10 experience is unfavorable by any standard. How much worse can sound get when you can't understand what the singer is singing and when missing out on melodies played by others. More fundamentally I have a difficulty to connect to the music. The music leaves me cold and this is not only a tonal phenomenon.

When asked the question if the source is the negative influence of the underpowered computer is ameliorated by OS generated noise or that my amp and speaker cannot cope with a strong upper bass presence, I'm inclined to say the first. No such upper bass problems ever noticed with my other sources; yet I cannot rule it out since it all is related to each other.

We'll see in time what's the case, maybe even both.

regards, Coen




 

Then it is perplexing if your other sources work fine.  The unintelligibility thing is quite an extreme symptom and it seems as though something is definitely amiss.  Is there someone nearby that can loan you a XXHE pc for a while just to see if the problem is computer hardware related?  I would send you mine (no playback at the moment  :() but I doubt we are even in the same hemisphere let alone the same country.