http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=692.msg6125#msg6125 

Ok ok, I'll get it.

That red track thing isn't so obvious at all. Try Google, and see how many people ask about it. Anyway IIRC - a year or so ago - I ended up in exactly one link with someone who knew.

Dave, FYI : As you may recall I deliberately set Q2/Q3 back to 0 to get the real merits from the stopped services. I kept that up for quite a while. However, the other day at testing with these analysis, Q2/Q3 by accident got stuck on 30/30, and it was only the next day that I started to recognize just what you said in the quote. Yesterday I payed attention to it explicitly, and it just seems to be so.
Even "meat on piano notes" would be a good one to state. Like I earlier said that a piano would get less dry from it, I now hear the same for bass. It's more spatious, and to me this comes as a good thing.

Telstar,

Interested in a TEAC P10 ?
hehehe

Hi Mani,

Besides that I don't have that album, I don't understand what you want us to try.
I know about these kind of tracks, and once they are ripped (I forgot how to do that, but aren't those the ones shown in red by EAC ?) they are just normal tracks. For the computer there's nothing like counting down or anything. It's no other track than otrhers. But :

This is different for Cue Files, because in there all is officially denoted, and IIRC indeed in there you'd see something like minus times for the first track. XXHighEnd supports this, and what you see from that on the screen is again nothing. Could be a track 00 in the Cue File case, for those situation no track numbers are present in the track names; I then take them from the Cue data.

Peter

Telstar, no ... but you may be missing the -4 vs. 4 ?

Mani,

Right after Q1 was introduced a few of us were seriously testing it and we were shouting to eachother to notch down after starting at the default of 14 (IIRC this was merely off line). At 4 things started to happen, and at 1 we were shouting things got wild and crazy. This was all in a time span of a week or so (slowly getting the grasp), and while at first being under 0 we were all impressed, we later all came back on that. Now, some 2 years further down the line, try violins. They don't work at these low levels. Things seem more detailed, but violins sound digital. Now :

I have always known (and told about it when it was necessary) that the values below 0 are special because they imply some randomness. And although I was talking into the blue to some extend, I knew about that randomness, that by itself creating a resonance. As you can see in the pictures where Q1=-4 is involved, you can clearly see it does something with a pattern of 3/100 of a second. How that sounds ? I guess more detail is perceived but in the end it sounds like more digital. Watch the violins.

Peter

Your both wish is my command ...
Below you see (don't look at the window title !) :

(1) 1st trace 4-0-0-0-0 Unattended compared to Foobar WASAPI;
(2) 2nd trace -4-0-0-0-0 Unattanded compared to Foobar WASAPI;
(3) 3rd trace 4-0-0-0-0 Unattended compared to -4-0-0-0-0 Unattended.

Sidenote : The white graphs are the transients, as taken from the first (left one) mentioned. Generally they are the same for each trace because it isn't about that. However, it may look logical that anomalies in the DAC are cause by high transients. I could not prove this though.

Some notices (beyond the pictures you see, so trust me) :

a. (2) and (3) seem to be of opposite phase, which most likely is because of different offsets used. Strange explanation, but right now I have no other. Otherwise (2) and (3) are very similar.
Try to imagine the phase-change-thing, and that the base of (2) and (3) is -4 vs. +4 (the left one mentioned is the base).

b. If you look very carefully at the first trace of the first picture below (Compare09) you see that where the mousepointer is a "1 cm" repeating pattern occurs throughout. This is fragile, and note you're looking at a time span of 20 seconds here !

c. Compare10 has zoomed in (time span is now near 2 seconds) and with some imagination you can still see the pattern in the first trace.

d. While both (2) and (3) incorporate Q1=-4, you can see it masks all, and makes comparisons worthless. Keep in mind this is my DAC !

e. Compare11 is generally showing that some consistent thing is going on in my DAC; Where the mousepointer shows, right below you see the same but expanded (this is Q1=-4 doing that !), while the third trace shows exactly the same though in opposite phase, but dead sure again Q1=-4 doing it. If you look closely at the (1), (2), (3) above, you see there is no common denominator (none of the three elements, -4, +4, Foobar is in each of them), so my DAC must be doing this by itself. However, it is emphasized or it is not (like in trace 1 it is not).

f. Knowing that Q1=4 seems more reliable, Compare12 the most clear shows that in between Q1=4 and Foobar a pattern is present. It is mild though.


In a year's time I may have more firm conclusions. Just learning here.

G'day Jeffc,

Bailing out, right ? just joking  of course ...

But is my conclusion right that you are using Engine#1 (and other players) to compare ? I think that is dangerous ... Or maybe just not for your purpose. E.g. :
Flac is known to (possibly) sound different because of the real time processing it takes to decompress it. Not exactly your example of course, but Engine#3 is known to take distance of that, because it pre-decompresses, and after that it's just wav-wav comparison.
The real merits are up to you here.

Just wanted to let you know before climbing from your laundry and join the lunatics on bailing out for another Woodstock.

Peter

1. Yes.

2. Yes.

3. Yes. Note that "off values" is the difference between two recordings. Only thourough analysis between different sets of comparisons may unveil which recording is really off, and from that may come which one is the most correct. Only if reasons can be found for seen off values, like the one from the last example and the time cursor, one comparison may be sufficient to declare one recording as being off in absolute sense. And also :


With the knowledge of the last picture, and without examining it again, I dare say that this too comes from the time cursor in Foobar.
So, once specifics are known and can be recognized, it becomes more and more easy to qualify what is happening in other situations. This will be a matter of experience.

Peter

Ok, I think I'll be spending the rest of my life analyzing this stuff. Look what I found now :

Below you see a comparison between Q1=4 Attended and Q1=-4 Unattended.
What you see could be explained as breaking up sound. The point here is that this is a comparison between Attended and Unattended, and what you see happens exactly each one second. What is the main difference between the two ? one of them moves a time cursor forward, once per second ...
It always takes 12/100 of a second before everything is in rest again. Edit : I don't know how I got the 12/100, but if I'm looking again this is around 7/10. Sorry. Edit2 : No, sorry again, but 12/100 is correct afterall.

Anything else ?

Yes Dave, and you can actually see that in both above pictures;

The red line is how things should be. Everything above it deviates to plus voltage, everything below it to minus. And since there are patterns, who knows how this is perceived. Oh, note you see one channel only.

I think I saw my DAC switches absolute phase, btw most do. So whatever you want to see in the above, think about that.

But it is a good remark/question about that phase thing Dave. I already forgot about it, did not look at these pictures with that in mind, but indeed below a certain setting of Q1 we have always felt "phase change". "We" = many.

Hi Jeffc,

You won't get many complaints in here for hearing these tings, although by now people may think you live in a tree.
But ok, once there was a time I came up with "software makes a difference", and at last that can be proven now.

Right now I don't see how your FLAC procedure can make a difference. At least not with XXHighEnd. But if it does, I think copying a WAV from one place to the other already will.
Btw, this has nothing to do with FLAC being losless or not, because it just is and it can easily be checked.
But give it a week or so, and you can test it yourself.

Peter

Well, I must say I'm a little proud on this. Long from finished, but here's something for :

05 is a part of 0.7 seconds from the difference between Q1 = 4 and Q1 = -4;

06 is a part of 0.3 seconds from the difference between Q1 = 4 and Q1 = 24.

Unattended, other Q sliders at 0.
Both snapshots are not throughout like that, but they are characteristics for the difference.

Let's assume we can hear this. Hahaha

I know. This is wrong for quite some months now. There was a time it worked.
I never got into it, since nobody complained about it.

Which ended today.