I should say that I have not reported the"first track only plays" issue because I have only been a couple of days in w7 and I have not been able to identify what the precise conditions are that causes it to happen.

Anthony

Short answer...don't think so...but I have never tried turning off hyperthreading.  I do get one or two of Georges errors in w7, but I have never attributed them to hyperthreading.

Firstly, in w7 I do occasionally get the "will only play one track" problem that George reports, but it only seems to happen from the first song of the album.  If I play from the second song all of the songs play through.  And I don't think that it happens on every album I play. When the problem does occur and only one track plays when XXHE comes back up I notice that the little blue square on the right hand side of XXHE is empty, which I think indicates that the playback engine is not initialised  (or something like that).

Secondly, in w7 I do get the occasional "Caller J" and "Playback drive full" messages but it seems to correlate to songs with commas or apostrophes or some other unusual symbol in the filename, so I thought it was a filename issue.  I have always had this problem with FLAC files but I got around it by converting all my music files to WAV.  These days I only seem to have this error if I am trying to play FLAC with unusual filenames that I have not yet converted to WAV.

This morning I will turn of my HT and report if it fixes any of these issues.

Regards,

Anthony

One of the things that I have been challenged to do is to run XXHE from w7.  I have never done that with any version of XXHE (I’m a relative late-comer) so this morning I finally got a good install on w7 after an initial false start.  Thankfully Peter explained to me that I needed to update to SP1 and then turn off the windows updates after that.  On my first w7 installation I updated all the way to current and to be honest the sound was sh*t but of course that may have been due to other factors, I don’t really know.  Anyway, I am dual booting with both os’s in separate partitions on the same SSD.

So today I did some listening to both w7 and w8.  After my initial favourable impressions with w7 I changed the w8 settings to match those I was using in w7 (which are Peters settings including the 0.1 SFS).  Switched between them and…OMG…WTF…????...I can hear a difference between _operating systems_ using the same hardware, software, settings, optimisations, BIOS, cables, dac, amps, speakers, everything. 

On something like Roberta Flack “Killing Me Softly” the differences are not subtle as far as differences go.  W7 has this air and ambience that surrounds the singers and it seems a little richer as a result.  In comparison w8 sounds more forward, less refined and a little coarser in the treble region.  Take note that this is after a single day’s listening, so I have plenty more time to spend getting to the bottom of this, but my first impressions are that w7 is better than w8.

Also note that this is with the Silverstone isolated both ends but without my PCIe cable loom.  Unfortunately, in the efforts of progress, my cable loom has been deconstructed one too many times and is pretty much beyond repair.  I am now itching to hear w7 with my loom so will have to fast-track its replacement.

Anthony

Can I ask why Peter?  I press the power button on my computer and windows boots, automatically creates and populates the RAMdisks and then starts XXHighEnd from RAMdisk.  It works well!

Anthony

Peter, which The Wall track has the seagulls?  I'll track it down tomorrow and see if I need to duck while listening to it....hehe.

Anthony

Hi Peter,

A fair bit of effort on your part to do this and I am sure that many will appreciate it. 

Is there a reason that you are running an old version of the BIOS?  I notice you are using P2.10 but the current version is P3.0.

A couple of extra things that I had turned off in the Southbridge section:

• Onboard audio
• Onboard Debug Port LED

Also in the ACPI Config page I had disabled "Suspend to Ram" because I have disabled hibernation and sleep in windows8.

Are you intending to provide further instruction about underclocking the cpu to piggyback these BIOS settings Peter?

Thanks once again.

Regards,

Anthony

Hi Peter,

Thanks for this report.  I've never listened to w7 and XXHE but I intend to do that in the next week or so, but I have to be honest, based on your description I am not sure that I will enjoy it.  We will see.

The one thing that is making the Silverstone card enjoyable for me (with w8) at the moment is the LPS and cable loom setup from the other thread, otherwise I would not be using it because of a tendency toward harshness (a better description is noise I think) but it is so good with the separation of notes et cetera.  Were it not for the cable loom I would have my PPA card with Coens mods in my XXHE pc.

Anyway, I urge you to experiment with cleaner power into the Silverstone because I am most interested with what you would report.

Regards,

Anthony

That's great Coen.  It will be good to get another opinion on this.  Peter nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

I will leave the loom in place for a while now and investigate windows 7.

Regards,

Anthony

I have now listened to the latest incarnation of the loom for about two days now.  To verify my findings I recenty removed the loom and ran the isolated Silverstone and NOS1 as so that I could hear the "reference" again.  All that I can say is that sound is well ahead when the loom is in place.  If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the sound since I re-connected the grounds on the x1 lane is better than when they were disconnected.  Happy days.

It seems as though feeding cleaner power directly to the Silverstone card helps the sound.  Changes to the grounding arrangement of the card do not seem important from a sq perspective (apart from perhaps the faceplate isolation from pc chassis ground) so perhaps the improvement is as simple as providing cleaner power to the crystal on the Silverstone.  The only other item on that card that may be affected is the USB Host Controller IC.

Anthony

XXHE and the NOS1 are a team 2glory...a symbiotic relationship!!

So last night I re-soldered the wires in the loom for the ground pins on the x1 lane (A12, A15, A18, B13, B16, B18).  This has _completely_ solved my "fluoro light" issue.  So now my loom is delivering linear power directly to the Silverstone card but the x1 data lanes and grounds are all in tact.

I will listen to this setup for a while and then play with isolating the NOS1 USB with its black wire again.

See below for the current PCIe pinout for the loom.

Cheers,

Anthony

Hi Paul,

I would be interested by what you actually tried about a year ago.  Did you try something like my loom that disengages the ground between the PCIe socket and USB card and allows cleaner power for the card itself?  Or did you do something else?

Regards,

Anthony

I've never used the Asrock ramdisk and I must admit that I did not know it even existed until about a week ago.

I will give w7 a go and am sure there is a spare licence kicking around here somewhere.  I came to XXHE once you had sorted out w8 so have never listened to w7 and XXHE.

Anthony

Hi Arjan,

Great that you got it working!!  Did you use a LPS for both 3.3V and 5V?  Did you have any problems with pops like I did?

Once again, I really appreciate that you gave this a go. 

Regards,

Anthony