Hi Peter,

I shut off every mobo port in the BIOS except the PS/2 for the keyboard and mouse and the LAN by which I transfer new music files across to my SSD as they are ripped (I then unplug the LAN cable).

Anthony

Hi Peter, I agree that nothing conclusive can come from a handful of tracks and two handfuls of amps in a day...but you can get in the ballpark and have a good idea of the ones to audition for a while.

For instance, I know that there were four amps in that room that I could live with long term, all for different reasons and different qualities...but you see I had a significant advantage to many of the others at the GTG in that I was already intimately familiar with four of those amps having recently had them loaned to me since I have had the Phasure on its current settings (I've not change them for months) plus I have listened the Gryphon with my NOS1 and those same speakers (and same XXHE settings) previously.  Guys from the GTG have also loaned me two of the contenders that I liked but had not heard in my system before...I'm playing one of them right now, so all up I will have had 6 high quality amplifiers from that GTG through my system on extended timeframe without having altered the settings in XXHE.  There were even a couple of other amplifiers on extended loan before I added the RAMdisks to XXHE, but I have not changed any other XXHE settings for quite some time, and have no desire to because they are giving me good sound over a decent range of amplification. 

I don't see how I can chase down noise if I am always altering the software settings...surely as you demonstrated in the other thread (that you linked to earlier tonight) you have found a way to use XXHE to provide the same effect as having your USB3 drive plugged in.  If you can do that I think that a good approach to noise is to minimise it everywhere that we think reasonable and then change the XXHE settings to cover up any of the noise that annoys us.  That's one of the real strengths of the software in my eyes.


I was overwhelmed with possibility by the end of the GTG, not so much confused.  I have never been in a room of people that all had the same opinion of something simple let alone something more difficult like making a judgement of audio reproduction.

Cheers,

Anthony

Ha...that was me last night after listening to all those amps in one day...not really sure what was going on but I had all these seemingly random impressions.

Anthony

Guys, here are some photos I have just taken of the V1 and V2 cards.  I will post them first and then possibly we can talk about them later.

Anthony

Thanks for the excellent report guys.

I notice that Coen has reported a similar thing regarding the bass in the "Bert Must Have" thread...


I don't know what is going on with this bass issue, or why it could possibly be happening, but it is certainly not what I am hearing in my system.  Interestingly, yesterday I took my XXHE PC and NOS1 down to an amplifier get-together at Lenehan Audio on the Gold Coast.  Basically, my source direct drove about a dozen amplifiers yesterday through these magnificent speakers that Mike Lenehan builds (the ML2 Limiteds).  The amps represented Classes A, AB and D and ranged in price from $600 diy Honey Badger to $35,000 Gryphon Antilion Signature.  The only valve amp present was a beautiful heavily modified Leak 12w valve amp.  The Phasure drove all of these amps beautifully and with a similar bass response...apart from the Leak.  Now a 12w valve amp is never going to have the bass of 150w pure Class A or 500w Class D into 86dB speaker playing Daft Punk, and the general consensus of those present was that the fundamental was largely missing with the Leak but we were hearing the harmonics...so I have a good idea of a missing fundamentals in the bass region sounds like (or doesn't sound like).  All this was with the PPAstudio USB card V1. 

My version of the USB cannot be purchased anymore, it is too difficult to build apparently and the V2 card is considered a lesser version.  I happen to have a V2 card with me at the moment (brand-new...not run in) but I will have a look at them together and see what differences I can spot as a layman.

I am really keen to hear for myself the NOS1 USB card upgrade, so I might just see if I can do something on this side of the world.

Cheers,

Anthony

Interesting report Coen, and very informative in a number of ways.  One of the things that I have always wanted to do since I got into this computer audio thing is to build my own pc case.  There are a number of reasons for this but one of them is so that I can run the USB card in relative isolation to the mobo and power supply to minimise the amount of unwanted electrical action between them.  I have toyed with building a little metal shield to slot over the USB card in an attempt to isolate it, but have always come up with other projects.

I have the original V1 version of the PPA USB Card, which is a more elaborate and more difficult to build version of the V2 card that you have there, so there are some physical differences, but my listening impressions are quite different to yours Coen.

Based on your reports, and Nicks experiments with the NOS1 USB clocks, it does seem at this stage that the best gains are to be made with the NOS1 USB clock.  I really want to hear about the Nick/Paul get-together this weekend and associated investigations and impressions.

Cheers,

Anthony

Peter, are you saying that it is sometimes better to have a higher level of 'good noise' rather than remove it and expose 'bad noise' even at lower levels?  If so, I guess you are saying that in your situation the USB2 disk makes 'good noise' for you and masks some of the 'bad noise' that you experience when it is not here.

This could well be true, and I like your thinking.  But, as you know from the linear psu thread, I am on a 'low noise' crusade at the moment and am really interested in where that gets us in regards to sound quality.  Personally I REALLY like the sound I am getting from my XXHE PC with the PPAstudio USB card and am confident that I can improve that further with the LPS and perhaps the NOS1 USB Clock upgrade that Nick is pioneering (and I hope you can verify before I am too tempted to take a soldering iron to my NOS1).

Anyway, eventually there comes a point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in, but we never find that point until we have gone too far at least once.

Anthony

My vote is for you to try Peter.

Hi boleary,

The ramdisks really made a difference for me...I would not go back.  I have a single SSD with the o/s on one partition and my music on the other (1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD).

Cheers,

Anthony

Nice.  Look forward to it Peter.  That may help to solve my "activation" problem as well although that seems to have changed a little.

Anthony

Hi Peter,

I have not seen anything like that but when I was measuring the draw of the entire pc my accuracy was only about 10w.  When measuring the individual components the accuracy was much better and equal to the accuracy of the multimeter. 

Some of the individual components did seem to have non-rhythmic power usage, but my thought is that perhaps the culprit may be something like the fan controllers.  Maybe try to run the fans from another power source and disconnected from motherboard monitoring and control, just to see what happens.  That is the most immediate thing that I can think of that might have sporadic use of resources and low power draw.

Anthony

There was another thread going where the music would pause automatically and start again when you moved the mouse.  If I remember correctly Peter your suggestion was to turn the volume up one position and that stopped the pause from recurring...or something like that.

I have decided to leave the XXHE PC running in un-minimised mode for a while and see if windows loses it activation.

Anthony

Hi Peter,

The windows de-activating itself is happening more frequently now...three times today.  The first time this morning it just went into its automatic pausing ritual and then twice today windows logged me off while playing music creating a thump and scaring the pants off me.  I was left there with the windows login screen and nothing to do but restart the computer because I could not login.    What I have here at the moment is a problem that is sooner or later may cause damage to the equipment.

I will research more about windows activation.  I am not game to play music right now for fear of being logged off without notice and causing a thump.  I am convinced that the automatic logout behaviour is windows software protection related and I need to find a way around it.

Regards,

Anthony

Hi all,

I am having a recurring issue whereby my windows 8 installation is _losing_ its activation.  What I mean by this is that for the last week or so, whenever I turn on the XXHE PC in the morning and play music eventually there is a little problem that causes me to de-minimise the o/s and re-minimise it.  After the first couple of days of doing this I noticed a message on my desktop saying "Windows is not activated" so I went into Control Panel to verify this message, and what do you know...it was saying that window 8 was no longer activated.  I pressed the "Activate Now" button and it activated successfully even without an internet connection. mmmm.  Strange.  So this has been my routine for the past few days...turn on the XXHE PC in the morning....play some music...have a little problem (such as the uninitiated pause issue reported in another thread here or XXHE just stopping for no reason or windows automatically logging me out of my user account and waiting for me to log in again - but usually the pause issue)...check Control Panel to verify that w8 has de-activated itself...de-minimising the o/s...re-activating w8...re-minimising the os...playing music flawlessly for the rest of the day...shutting down the XXHE PC at night.  Repeat the next day.

My XXHE PC is not connected to any network or internet, is set not to receive windows updates, has firewall and defender disabled.  When re-activating w8 each morning it makes no difference for the next day whether I activate when connected to a network with an available internet connection or whether I don't plug in the network cable. 

Any ideas?  I had meant to check whether w8 was still activated when I turned on the XXHE PC this morning but completely forgot...that's a job for tomorrow.

Anthony

Please note also Peter that Paul Pang recommends 5V 1A minimum external power for the card which is 900mA to meet the power output of the USB3 specification (that is never used in our situation as far as I can tell) plus 100mA to run the card itself.  When I measured the power draw of this card in the Linear PSU thread it never drew more than 20mA when it was connected to the NOS1.  You could use a super low noise/low power psu for this card.

Also, Paul also upgrades motherboard clocks with what seems to be the same clocks as used on his USB card (see picture below) and he also has a modded CF card reader that can be used as the O/S disk instead of a SSD or HDD.

All food for thought if we are thinking about the clocks in general.

Anthony