For me, 'Adaptive' still rules (with device buffer set to 1024 and Q1=1). Special does sound more resolving, but sounds too thin here on my system.

Right now, I don't want to change a thing...

Mani.

So... I finally got around to installing Vista (thanks Peter) optimized for audio (thanks Nick + others), with XX installed on RAMDisk (thanks Marcin).  Oh, it's nice to have a digital sound that can match my vinyl for 'sweetness'.

I've been thinking that my Weiss AFI1 interface is just too bright and edgy, and hence it's been gathering dust for the last 12 months or so. Only now do I realise that it's been W7, and not the Weiss, that's been at fault. I've also been mildly critical of QAP for a short while and again, I now blame W7 for this criticism.

I really don't know where we could take the SQ from here... Of course, that's been said many times before on this forum, I know...

A very happy Mani.

Guys, I'm still interesting in knowing whether anyone has tried this...

Mani.

What I meant was that it was there automatically after the first and all subsequent reboots. I don't understand why people are saying that it takes 2-3 reboots to make it all stable - not the case for me... on 3 different PCs.

Mani.

Marcin (or anyone), have you tried W2008 R2 with RAMDisk?

Mani.

FWIW, I didn't have to reboot at all. As soon as I pressed 'Start RAMDisk', the RAM drive appeared. I then unzipped the XX files to it.

It has worked flawlessly on 3 different PCs with plenty of shutdowns/startups.

Mani.

Peter, please merge whatever makes sense.

Why do all the really interesting developments come when I'm away from home and can't get involved? FYI, I'll be away from home a lot in the next few weeks - SQ should improve in strides

Mani.

Obviously Peter is the guy to clear this up. But my understanding is that this is exactly where the SFS comes into play - XX will load into RAM as much as is dictated by the SFS. If this covers a whole track, then that's what will be loaded. If it doesn't, then XX will transfer data to RAM when it needs to, during playback. This will be the case whether 'Copy to XX-drive' is selected or not.

But there's still a very curious thing going on here. Take a small, say, 15MB track and don't apply any additional processing to it in XX (e.g. upsampling). Now, you would think that there'd be no difference in SQ if the SFS was set to, say, 50 or 100. I haven't tried this (I'm away from home right now) but I bet the sound still changes... Also, IIRC it still takes longer to load a single 15MB when the SFS is set to 100 vs 50. Why this should be, I have no idea...

Mani.

No, once you select 'load disk image at startup' and also 'save disk image on shutdown' then everything becomes automatic. You will notice that your PC takes longer to shutdown, as RAMDisk saves the RAM disk image. On startup, the RAM disk is created automatically with XX and all the previous settings totally intact.

That's how it works on the 3 machines I've tried it on here.

Mani.

EDIT

I forgot to mention, once you've pressed 'start RAMDisk' and everything looks OK, then just close the window - DO NOT press 'stop RAMDisk', unless you actually want to delete the RAM disk and XX (if you've installed it there).

Without meaning to steal anyone's thunder (I hope you don't mind Marcin), I thought this topic was worthy of its own thread.

So, how exactly can running XX from a RAM partition improve its sound? I have a hypothesis which is related to this thread over at CA: http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Monster-raises-its-headagain.

Could it be that its all down to the SATA cable? Presumably, running XX from RAM would eliminate any ill effects that the SATA cable and HDD/SDD might be introducing.

It's a hypothesis (a far-fetched one, I know), that's all.

Mani.

I'll be travelling for work later today, but I did get a chance to take a quick listen early this morning. What surprised me was that the SFS still makes a difference! But having optimised it (I needed to do this as I've switched from the RME AES-32 to the Weiss AFI1), I'm pretty certain that my digital and vinyl setups now sound very close.

In any event, I'm sticking with W7 and RAMdisk for now...

Mani.

PS. Even my Atom-based work PC sounds great!

Raj, I've loaded RAMdisk onto the slow Atom-based music PC in my office and flacs play fine here. I suspect you're trying to load too many tracks at once. (I have the ramdisk set to 1GB.)

Mani.

I had a bit of a mammoth listening/testing session yesterday (but not quite 10 hours...) with a single aim in mind - to recreate perfectly the sound that I get from vinyl. (My vinyl is not perfect, but it has a 'sweetness' that is very hard to get right in digital.) I wanted to start with a clean sheet and question/test all of my current SW/HW settings. Everything was up for grabs. I think without a reference point towards which to aim, I would have gone mad!

I tried and tried, and although I could get close, it wasn't quite right. I just couldn't get the right 'colour' using XX. To my surprise, I could get the right colour using Foobar, but the resolution was very poor compared to XX. Close to midnight I was ready to give up. But I thought I'd try the RAMdisk (this was just before I saw Peter's last post).

Well what can I say? My experience was similar to all those who have already written about it. Superb clarity and yet beautifully smooth also. It was late at this point last night (actually early morning!), so I didn't get a chance to listen to much. I'd like to do some more listening today and very importantly for me, compare XX on RAMdisk to vinyl. But one thing is for sure - XX on RAMdisk is better than XX on a separate SSD. And the great thing is that the former is a cheaper (actually free!).

Let me add my thanks to Marcin for sharing his RAMdisk experience. Excellent!

Cheers,
Mani.

I'm interested in trying this, having heard the improvement in SQ when I use a fast SSD for XX separate from the SSD the OS resides on. But I'd like to understand it a bit more first.

Now, I have 4GB of RAM on my main machine (8GB on my second machine). So, how much should I allocate to the new RAM partition? I guess this depends on whether I'm using 'Copy to XX-drive'... but also on whether I'm using 'Normalisation of Volume' and whether I'm playing non-wav files that require conversion during pre-processing. I suspect large hires files might prove an issue if the RAM partition is too small.

I'm currently using W7 x64 on both machines. On my second machine, I'm assuming I can create a much larger RAM partition and still have plenty of RAM left for potentially large SFSs in XX.

Hmm... any thoughts?

Mani.

Marcin,

I'm pretty certain you can't use the Elgar's firewire input to connect it to a PC. The firewire input is designed to connect the Elgar to other dCS units (like their CD/SACD transports and upsampling units). They used firewire to allow for the high data rates required by SACD.

Of course, the newer dCS units can be connected directly to a PC, but via async USB, and not firewire.

If your friend is interested in using the Elgar's dual-wire AES inputs, then he has three options (there may be more):
1. the RME AES-32 (PCI or PCIe)
2. the Lynx AES16 (PCI or PCIe)
3. one of the Weiss units: AFI1 (with w/c IO) or INT202 (without w/c IO)

HTH,
Mani.