First of all, no forum rules here. You wouldn't read them anyway ! 
But like everywhere, please behave. If not, you know ... 

There's a bit of house stuff though, mainly related to spamming boards like these;

Sadly, it is unavoidable to explicitly let you in after appliance. This means that you'd have to wait before you can put your first post. You'd have to wait until I (or whoever turns up as an admin) wake up, come home, arrive back, etc.

No matter what your usual nickname is, please make it rather normal. It helps. If you don't do so, you will be treated as a spammer and you will be rejected. Not because you *are* a spammer, but because I can't see the difference.

You don't need to sign up in order to download XXHighEnd (http://www.phasure.com/index.php?board=1.0) but if you have a question ... yes.

Please note there is *no* email address available for support or offline communication otherwise. Might you find one (which is easy because they are no secret at all), I will just not answer them.
Might you want to shout at me , then there's the PM on this board. But only for that please.
Anyway, I just like to have all communication in one source. So that's why.

Last thing for now ... I apologise to the people in Holland for speaking english about this dutch originated audio player, but I hope the reason is obvious.
At the same time I better apologise for my very hard to understand english writing, but which is not much different from my dutch writing.

Peter

This topic is about the general environmental prerequisites;
For the technical prerequisites see the Install Notes.

Edit October 17, 2008 :
Since the latest two or three versions a sub folder \Temporary Data\ is created within the XX folder;
When this XX folder is in \Program Files\ for Vista you don't have rights to that folder, and the program errors at startup or a first quit, and then can't be used.

Until this is solved in the next version, don't put XX in the \Program Files\ folder !

Then, one other thing for Vista users : Do not forget to slide up the digital volume slider, but be careful when you don't have a preamp connected. Try it carefully step by step in that case, until you're comfortable *your* files play without statics.
Also, be sure to have selected your sound device as the Primary Device. Currently Engine#3 won't play otherwise.


Next, if you are on XP, first of all please read the general Helptext.

Operating System

XXHighEnd runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP (32 and 64 bit), Windows 2003 server (32 and 64 bit), Windows Vista (32 and 64 bit) and Windows 2008 (32 and 64 bit).

Windows Vista or Windows 2008 are the preferred operating systems, because XXHighEnd makes use of the WASAPI audio technology only available in Windows Vista and Windows 2008, and does this by means of Audio Engine 3 (1 and 2 can be used on the other operating systems as well).
Audio Engine 3 plays bit at all times.

Although the theoretical choice for the OS is there as decribed above, practically Windows Vista or Windows 2008 are the only operaring systems advised. This is because the audio quality (which is very explicit) can be achieved with Audio Engine 3 only. Although many say that XXHighEnd sounds better "than all" even with Audio Engine 1 and 2, there is really no comparison. It is Engine 3 you will want.

DirectX

For technical reasons, you should have installed DirectX 9.0c at least (you will have it if you have XP SP2). For Vista / Windows 2008 this will be okay always, for XP it might not. In the install notes a Zip is added for it.
If you run DXDiag from the Startbutton - Run, you can check your current version. The version will show on the first page, the last line under System Information.

Playback device and connections

Currently, which means without extensive testing the very many configurations and possibilities, there are no requirements to the playback device / -drivers. Thus, it could be anything that connects to S/PDIF or USB. A few remarks though :

If you have an USB connected DAC, examples exist of such a DAC internally converting to SPDIF. This *will* cause a different sound, and I don't make judgements on better or worse. For that matter, do note that a conversion of this type not necessarily make things wrong, but that it *will* change (the amount of) jitter. What is the effect of jitter ? it makes the playback quality better or worse ...

The above is hard to explain, but try to think of jitter being present always, and *if* it's present (which is always , a little bit more of it may give just better results.
My current DAC, a TwinDAC+, is such a converting device, with the positive addition that it also can connect directly to SPDIF. For me it is very difficult to judge what is "better", which it is not difficult at all to heard the difference ! For this DAC I vote for SPDIF, but note that in any case the cable length -with very different cable topologies !- will imply differences as well.
Besides that I use a (SPDIF) reclocking external soundcard at the end of the SPDIF (coax) cable, which is impossible with the USB connection.

So why is the above in "prerequisities" ? well, to kind of explicitly indicate that SPDIF nor USB are prerequisites. Just not at all.
Many think an USB connection is the holy grail for audio playback, but to me there is no indication of that. But do note again, that I use the external soundcard (very deliberately and to keep that electronics out of the PC), and as said, it reclocks (= lowering jitter) the data.
For the holy grail thinkers : with a USB connection, there just is no soundcard involved. So they just can be right ...

One remark on USB : the type of USB connection used with audio playback (in general, so not dedicated to XX), is so called "isochronous". This means that the fed amount of data is kept steady with the harddisk as a source, and if something happens that can't keep up with feeding (so in the area of the harddisk's data towards the USB-out from the PC), you'd just receive skips. So the consistency of the data is not garanteed !
To put this in perspective : when you copy data from an USB connected harddisk, the consistency of the data just is guaranteed, and the speed doesn't matter ...
With normal useage you won't have problems, but please think of the combination of above mentioned two types of USB operation, when your CD data comes from an USB disk ... Both will interfere with eachother and counteract !

Memory

2 GB of internal memory is ok for 16/44.1 files.
This is different with the hirez files (XXHighEnd plays al types of them, up to 352800 DXD) where 3GB will be needed to play around a bit when the tracks are longer.
Since XXHighEnd is a pure memory player (for the good cause of SQ) the memory requirements are harsh. Note though, that any single process can not use more than 2GB in a Windows operating system, which is thus the limit for useage, and which implies that 3GB of physical memory really is enough.

Harddisk space

Do not underestimate this !
In the beginning all looks nice with a 320 GB harddisk to store a bunch of CDs. But it's just "nothing" if you want to keep on playing different music for many weeks. Okay, such a disk can contain well over 450 CDs, but most of the time you won't like most of it, and then it's really too few. Also, DO NOT FORGET you need backups. Never mind you have all the CDs in your cabinet, it takes weeks to rip them properly, and you wound't want to do that again.

Type of files

Currently XXHighEnd will accept uncompressed WAV, AIF, AIFF, FLAC and MP3 files.
Very special attention was put to the playback and sound quality of MP3, which may look odd for a high end player, but since people kind of require MP3 support (hey, I have some myself) why not let it sound the best of all.

The Soundcard

This looks strange as a separate paragraph, but maybe it is not;
First of all, many people will have the question which soundcard is good for decent audio playback, those people not having dedicated audio DACs, but having a Lynx or RME which is kind of top of the bill. Well, it is. It is for soundcards.
A dedicated audio DAC however, is a very different beast. I myself have an RME Fireface800, and believe me, it is total cr*p compared to my TwinDAC+ audio DAC, and the Fireface is only a little cheaper than the TwinDAC. It's made for a different task.
Just do not expect miracles from XX if you use the soundcard's DACs.
It *is* allowed however, to expect something not so bad at all from any non oversampling $100 DAC. XX was made having nos-DACs in mind, and if the quality of such a DAC is not the worse of all, it will be not so very hard to compete wih a multi $1000 oversampling DAC.

With the above I certainly don't say that a muli $1000 NON-oversampling DAC will make no difference to the $100 one. It just will. Generally of course.

Currently much will depend on the experiences of others ("you") on esitmating the value of me (and a few more) using the Fireface as an SPDIF passtrough device, reclocking the data in the mean time. We (those currently using such a configuration) know that this just gives VERY good results. We do *not* know, however, whether those good results can't be achieved by other means. Time will tell ...

Time will tell ? maybe that is not so easy, because how to make clear to eachother that "mine is as good - or better as yours" ? 
For that matter I have one suggestion (not spending many words on it here) : when you find yourself without ANY standing waves at using XX, "yours is as good as mine". 


Good luck !
Peter

That is ... not that I ever noticed it helps.
Note though that all is relative to the playback quality of XXHighEnd, and it just could be so that "you" do notice differences.
But beware ! if you notice pops and clicks, this just will *not* be due to services or other tasks doing something during playback. This will merely be due to poor (hence outdated) motherboard drivers. Having soundcard buffers set at too small values (if adjustbale) is a possibility as well.

Personally, I do just *everyting* during playback, without noticing pops and clicks, or degraded soundquality (like bulk copying, stessing the CPU, having all kind of interfaces connected to the PC, etc.).

Remember that the above applies to XXHighEnd, hence it is not a general advise for PC audio playback !

This board is all about downloading and installing XXHighEnd. To keep it clean, it's read only. You can say as much as you want though, in each of the other boards.

---

Just because it is important, first there's How to upgrade :

Always have a main "XXHighEnd" folder with under that a subfolder per XX version. In there you put the download (RAR) and in there you unzip that.
Edit June 2016 : From of version 2.06, with each upgrade we alo provide an UpgradePatch .rar file. This can not be installed on its own; it has to be pasted (unpacked) over the last official version (which is allowed to be a version which had an (or serveral) UpgradePatch version(s) applied). Obviously, when you apply Upgrade Patches you can not compare the old version subject to the Upgrade Patch, with the new version (also see more below). And, if you want to "revert" to the old version, you'd need to (download and) reinstall that.
Upgrade Patches are useful to those who are afraid to lose their Actvation; this is virtually impossible to happen with the Upgrade Patches.

---

What you see in the board you're navigating in currently, is that - generally - each of the non-sticky topics contains a version of XXHighEnd. The oldest version is at the bottom, the latest at the top. Unless an older version can really harm somehow, it will keep on being availailable for later reference when needed.
No real install is performed, and each version is selfcontained in its own folder (to be put whereever you like it). This implies you can indeed fall back to an older version if you want. Btw, since XXHighEnd is about playback quality as its main objective, the quality will change over time (with the intention of better obviously), but because it will always be my own judgement at first, I just could be wrong at it, and it will be all of you together who really make the judgement. Besides that, the quality can change unintentionally (happened quite a few times already), and at the cause of the new version, it may have slipped slipped my attention.

Obviously we all have different equipment, so many situations exist which respond differently to XX from the one to the other (never mind this for now, but you will learn throughout the process and this forum what this is - or can be about); From my responses and the origine of the player, I can only tell that my own situation is just the best I could find for audible quality (through my ears). Because of that we all might bump into situations like with two persons, the one saying "with me it sounds worse" and the other "with me it sounds better". So far, throughout the process of development and in 100% of cases, this has always been explainable, if it were only for *me* just wanting to explain whatever it is. I intend to keep on doing that, with the objective of improvement over and over, or, in the mean time implicitly indicating where elements of the equipment can go wrong in the situation it turns out that it's not XX causing the anomaly.

I will never tell you what sounds better in your situation, but I *will* tell that (and when) a specific XX version *is* better. In the case that you don't hear the difference, during that time please trust my opinion on it. It will just urge you to find the differences. In the end it is a process we all already know about : learning to listen.
If I tell "a" difference is audible within a second, I mean that, or otherwise I wouldn't say it. You could blindfold me and test it. But ... this is not about me, but about the player, and there are too many people already who agree with this.

So that's why in this board (about) all versions keep on being available, and that's why I intend to keep track of decent releasenotes in order to point out later where things (which might be very delicate) went wrong (right now, June 27, 2007 you won't see much of it, because since this forum exists I've not been working on quality aspects at all).

I will keep track of both the current issues as well as the solution to them, and in addition of course the enhancements;
When I think it is needed, I will put an absolute list of it all in one of the Releasenote Topics. For you this implies that you can look down from the top for such an absolute list, and then crawl up if you want to know all the changes since then.

Peter

So here it is : the first public release of the XXHighEnd Audio Player.

This first release is a demo version only. It can *not* be upgraded to a fully working version yet, but that will take a few days only.

What's Demo about the demo version ?

The demo version plays continuesly for 5 minutes at least, and after that it quits somewhere around 30 minutes of playing.


Currently known issues : many.

Well, not *that* many, but enough to call it a beta version so far.

If you :
Just play a bunch of tracks right after the startup of the player, there's not much wrong.
The only thing you might notice is that gapless playback is or not so gapless as intended, or even overlaps. This depends on the speed of reading the tracks from your harddisk or network, and the only thing I can say is that currently all anticipates on the speed of SATAII internal hdd reading, which still may vary from "yours". Eventually this will be okay.

Further known issues (also see see Helptext !) :

• Possibly many install issues (XP or Vista), because very few have been tested currently.
• Possibly soundcard or USB issues, because very few have been tested so far.
• Under Vista, obtaining one track from the Library button, will show the track twice in the Playlist area. First attempt per session only, and only when 1 track is selected.
• ToolTips cannot be shutoff, although a checkbox implies it can
• A-B playing (repeating a selection) ditto.
• Pictures can be named Folder.jpg only (which by itself is good btw), although a textfield suggests otherwise (and is put there will not be remembered).
• Dragging the playback cursor under Engine #1 may cause anomalies. Under Engine #2 you can't drag it at all.
• Under Engine #2 it is allowed to choose another playback driver (device), but it won't do anything (only the Primary Playback Device will work).
• Though rare, it can happen that a track plays double under Engine #1 (echoing).
• Playlists cannot be copied to other PCs in the network, hence the drive references -as currently used instead of Computernames- will be wrong then.
• Similarly, Playlists can be use locally only (from the install directory of XX).
• Although not officially available yet, a payed for version might give licensy issues, while you'd have a license for the whole house (which you always have).
• Though the Properties area suggests otherwise, currently only 2 channel stereo playback is supported. Different sample rates than 44100 should work, and only a bitdepth of 16 has been tested.
• Playing *not* gapless hasn't been tested for a long time. Expect that not to work properly in this version (by default Gapless playback is On).
• Using Doubling under XP will use many resources, and may hogg the PC for a while for other stuff than XX playback.
• The currently playing track, eventually will move out of (under) the Playlist area (depending on the length of the Playlist).
• You will find anomalies on faxt clicking the Next and Prev buttons. I tried my best to get it as decent as possible though. Just don't click them that fast, and click a track + Play instead.

Small tips : Engine #2 wasn't meant for Vista, and instead should be used under XP *with* Doubling (needs 88K2 samplerate of the DAC). When possible, use Vista with Engine #1 and set the soundcard (and/hence DAC) to 96K sample rate. Set ThreadPrio to highest in either case.
Open Explorer and drag files onto the Playlist area is more convenient than using the Library button.

Download XXHighEnd : 

Also see the Install notes.

Edit : This version has now (unintentionally) expired ! Please go to 0.7f.

Being busy with the best audio playback always, there came a time when I thought playback with the PC as "transport" means should just be able to beat all.

After some years of thinking about it, February 2005 I bought a (Momitsu) networked player, showing me that indeed better playback quality could be achieved by avoiding the "improper" reading of the CDs as, how I expected that as a reason for improper playback. However, such a networked player, in fact playing from the harddisk somewhere in the network, is very awkward to manipulate when it comes to track selection and all.
Anyway, the sound coming from it, connected to my dedicated audio DAC was better, stronger, more "steady", than what came from my TEAC P1 drive connected to the same (Audio Note) DAC.

July 2005 I bought an external soundcard (Fireface 800) allowing me the passthrough of S/PDIF -with decent reclocking by the soundcard- to the audio DAC. From there on began my struggle for audio playback which could match the quality I was used to, even from the old TEAC situation.

I started with XMPlay, then found Foobar, explicitly searched for all of the others, and none could bring me consistent playback to start with. The quality somehow varied per (ripped) CD and per day, and worse of all, all the players sounded differently.

My support activities over at TheaterTek.com allowed me to meet my now good friend Carlos Rodriguez, who just asked me to perform some tests on the Fireface. This was March 2006.
Carlos is able to instantly hear / judge jitter, and via hundreds of emails I started to learn what he actually hears. A dangerous job by itself, because Carlos justy can't stand jitter, hence gets crazy of some types of it.

It was August 2006 that I (or we) decided that all the existing players just "did" something to the music unknown, and there was one solution to that only : create a player myself. And since I'm into programming, say, all of my life, I did ...

I put myself to the task of creating audio playback software, that would pass on the audio data to the DAC as much 1:1 as possible, *never* touching DSP (digital sound processing) stuff.
Knowing that this would be the way already before, some earlier I bought a non-oversampling DAC, with the theory of that too passing the data far more 1:1 as the more "normal" oversampling DAC (like the Audio Note I had). For the insiders : the oversampling DAC makes a sinus of a square wave (the more oversapling, the more real sinus it gets), while the nos-DAC doesn't change anything to that. My thinking was : never mind the lacking filters, I just jump in because it must be better from the 1:1 theory.

By some coincidence, the nos-DAC I searched the internet for for quite some days, was found to be collected only 20 Km from where I live. It must have been the summer of 2006 where I met my now another good friend Bert Doppenberg, who not only sells that nos-DAC (the TwinDAC+), but who also appeared to be a builder of very fine horn loudspeakers. The greatest coincidence, however, was that he promoted PC playback instead of the boxed CD players, and so far he was the only one I found explicitly promoting that, from an audiophile point of view. Apart from myself, that is.
Of course, many people use the PC for audio playback, but note that here we are talking about "spoiling" all of your finest equipment to a PC playback means ...

For those of you readers who are not experienced to the XXHighend Audio Player ... together with the jitter knowledge or Carlos and the -if I may say- ultra high quality of the horn loudspeakers of Bert ... this is where it all came together;

The speakers of Bert could very well unveil the quality of XXHighEnd as how it was from off Augus 2006. From that point on, if somethings sounds wrongish, we say "it sounds like Foobar" (which is not meant explicitly negative, but for us indicates the type of sound which comes from there, and in fact comes from all the software players although no one is equal).
It all, by means of Berts ears for a great deal, allowed me to improve the quality. From that came, that Bert could better hear how his speakers could be improved, and from that came that we both could hear better that XXHighEnd should be improved. And up till today, this goes on and on ...

A few months back we all started to be in lack of "amplifier quality", with the sidenote of now being able to explicitly judge that it was amps doing it to us. So both Bert and me started to look for the holy grail in the amp world.
Well, to make a very long story short, that ended up by Bert creating himseld his BDCrazyA amp, and I state that the mixture of XXHighend, TwinDAC+ and Orphean/BD15 speakers produce the best music playback of the planet. And I mean, by far.

From off the August 2006 XXHighEnd version it was already the best, and so many times it - and other things were improved hugely. You just cannot imagine what happened. And what it will do to the audio playback world ...
Note that an even *far more* better version exists, not open to the public. I only want to say, we're not done yet.


Lastly in this topic, let me try to express a very - very important phenomenon I discovered along the way;
We all now about room anomalies, or better : how the room can negatively influence good audio playback. This is about reflections and standing waves.
Believe it or not (but better do ) but if the playback is good to my standards, they do not bother you anymore. Not in the slightest means.
I could say "standing waves are not there anymore", but this is not true because they can still be measured.
While you could think "that is nice", there's something far more important coming from it : this has become a measuring device ! I mean, once you encounter standing waves, something MUST be wrong somewhere. Go and find it, and keep on looking until they are gone.
Now, assuming that your equipment is rather okay (which includes proper impedenance matching as one of the most improtant factors to let things go wrong in this area), try XXHighEnd and compare it to whatever other player and watch this phenomenon ... 

Hope you enjoy it !
Peter


(edit : removed a dead link)