So the fact that my PC and NOS1a are in a room totally isolated from the listening room is probably a very good thing, no? I mean, no speaker coupling whatsoever. But this has only really become possible, with no hit on SQ, since the Blaxius cables came on the scene. 10m lengths? No problem.

I now use Windows RDC to control the PC with a laptop via wifi. The PC itself has no wifi, just a LAN connection. (Actually, it doesn't even have a graphics card.) I would strongly recommend anyone to try this... BUT you have to have a NOS1a to ensure no SQ degradation using the LAN.

Mani.

Yep, I still have my SOtM USB card (PCI version, not PCIe) and SATA filter from back then. At the time, I felt both made the sound 'duller'. It's sort of what you would expect - all filters seem to do this, irrespective of where they are placed in the chain (from AC mains, to footers, to IC/speaker cables).

BUT... I haven't tried these SOtM pieces for a while now. I'm happy to do so once I have my PC resurrected, with its replacement mobo and memory DIMMs.

Mani.

Yeah, especially at your age 

Mani.

Hey Peter, you're right of course. So what are we left with? Two options:

i. you solve this USB interface/cable issue once and for all
ii. everyone continues with the trial & error, in the hope of stumbling upon 'the best USB cable' for their system

'VJ's tours' are an excellent way of enabling the latter.

Mani.

Should be possible Paul. The only issue I'm going to have is positioning my PC (it really is a 'monster') close enough to the NOS1a's USB port to be able to use the 'short ordinaire' cable. I've got a 25cm USB cable coming through soon and will certainly try.

Mani.

Hi VJ, Happy New Year to you too.

I haven't received the YFS yet (very much looking forward to it), but I'd love to have a listen to the Audiocadabra too. My parents were originally from India, so I almost feel I have to ;-)

Let me know how the logistics will pan out, and if there's anything you'd like me to do at this point.

Cheers,
Mani.

Thanks for the support guys. Alain, your experience sounds particularly painful.


I was trying to 'clear the memory'. Switching the PC off didn't seem to work - as soon as I booted it up again, I would get the 'low memory' warnings coming up again. I tried unplugging the PC and leaving it for a few minutes before booting up again. Exactly the same thing. Then I thought if I physically remove and replace the DIMMs, the RAM would have to have been cleared.

Strangely, when I ran 'Performance Checker' (before I broke things totally), it was showing me very low memory usage. And yet I couldn't start any application (including XX)... due to apparently low memory.

I totally take the blame for screwing my mobo up. But there was something really strange going on before I did this.

Mani.

Yeah, I may still have two working DIMMs, though I can't remember which were which now. But I'm pretty certain the mobo is gone.

I any event, I've gone ahead and ordered a new X79 mobo (couldn't find a mini-ATX, so had to go for an ATX) and 4x 4GB DIMMs. Around UKP290, so not a total disaster in the scheme of things. But I'll NEVER make this mistake again.

Meanwhile, this has prompted me to try my office PC in my main system. I've always been more than satisfied with the sound in my office, and it'll be interesting to hear how my office PC compares to Le Monster (before it died).

Mani.

Thanks Peter, that may well have solved my initial problem.

But things have gone way beyond that now. Stupidly, it seems that I replaced two of the four RAM modules in the mobo the incorrect way around. Of course, they weren't inserted all the way into their slots, but enough to screw things totally up. I'm pretty certain the mobo is now broken (and maybe the memory modules too). I suspect the issue with boot-up is now due to the broken mobo malfunctioning and asking for too much power.

So, an expensive day for me. I'm going to order a new mobo (and memory modules too, to be on the safe side). I just hope my CPU is OK. If not, maybe it'll be an opportunity to look into a Xeon?

Thanks for the help.

Mani.

Well me neither. But from my above post, it's obvious that there's something more serious going on.

Any more thoughts much appreciated.

Mani.

Thanks for the ideas Joachim. But this seems to be a deeper problem...

I thought I'd really 'clear the RAM' by taking out the RAM modules in the mobo and re-inserting them. I did this, and the PC just refused to boot up. I mean, totally dead. Of course, I've checked that they are inserted properly - they are, but they are probably inserted in a different order to before (shouldn't be a problem, right?)

After thinking about things, it occurred to me that the problem looked very similar to one that I've seen before, namely the ATX power supply too weak. I tried a few other things, and in the end decided to replace the ATX power supply - I had an identical spare ATX PSU to hand. And voila, things worked... sort of. Now, I'm getting half-way through boot up and then everything freezes. Again, this smells of an ATX PSU problem to me.

Could it be that by taking the RAM modules out and putting them back in the PC now needs to draw considerably more power on boot-up? My ATX PSUs are 460W - should be more than enough, right?

Anyway, what I now need to do is replace the graphics card to get into the bios and see what's happening during start-up (I currently run headless via RDC).

Will be back... either tears of joy or tears of... not worth even contemplating.

And the crazy thing is that my system was sounding soooo good these last few days (after I moved my PC right next to the NOS1a and started using a shorter USB cable and running the PC and NOS1a off the same power block).

Mani.

Hi Tore, I've had the exact same problem with HDCDs for ages now. I've commented on the problem quite a few times here, but I guess Peter has other priorities. This is a shame because virtually all HDCDs sound superb (among the best sounding CDs I have).

The workaround for now is to convert your 16/44.1 HDCD rips to 24/44.1 files. You can re-rip with dBpoweramp and engage HDCD dsp, or just use dBpoweramp's Music Converter to convert your current rips to 24/44.1 files.

HTH.

Mani.

I thought I'd tried using a RAM disk again after a couple of years without it. I followed Peter's instructions (http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=2915.0). I set the a: and b: drives to 5GB each in the BAT file. I thought that with 16GB of total RAM I'd be OK... but obviously not.

As soon as I ran the BAT file, I started getting all sorts of memory error messages, without starting ANY program. The first is "Your computer is low on memory". If I try to start a program (e.g. XX) I get the message "Exception of type 'SystemOutofMemoryException' ".

I've tried uninstalling IMDisk Virtual Disk Driver from Control Panel and then rebooting, but this doesn't help.

So, it seems that I've locked out most of my memory and my PC is now totally unresponsive irrespective of what I do.

PLEASE HELP!!!

Mani.

Hey, Merry Christmas everyone! Hope to catch up with some of you in the New Year.

Cheers, Mani.

Hey Nick, a quick question: How many of your 'original tweaks' do you still have in place? I'm referring to these (I've stated what I've done in red):


I'm interested because I'm going to be playing around with my 'Le Monster' PC over the holidays and just wanted to get a steer on what others are doing.

I'm tempted to go for a single, 'small' SSD with nothing but virgin Win8  and XX installed, and use remote desktop for control (I use this already and really love it). All music would be stored on a NAS. I'm currently very close to this config but use a single 2TB HDD, with Win8 and XX on a separate partition and all the music on the rest. But all of my music doesn't fit onto the 2TB HDD. The NAS has 10TB of storage, with about 4TB or so currently used. Should be fine for quite a while.

Why SSD? Just because it would be so much faster. But I'll only do this is there is absolutely no deterioration in SQ. Anyone checked with a NOS1a lately?

Mani.