Hi Peter,

after rebooting the max. speed is now 1.8GHz.
Is this value ok?

When playing unattended is goes down as described above.

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

on my audio PC Stealth Mach II (with XEON E5 processor) turbo boost looks like being on, because I see up to 3.3 GHz.
When playing in unattended mode the speed goes down as it should:
e.g. 0.86 MHz with Balanced Load set to 36.
Is this ok like this?
Or shall I try to disable turbo boost in the BIOS settings?
(I never changed anything yet in the BIOS of this PC)

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Zheng,

there another new album from March 2018, which is very good for comparing Redbook with MQA. Here in Europe both versions are available on Tidal:

Artist: Nakhane
Album: We Will Not Die

Again, in my ears the MQA version outperforms Redbook in an pretty impressive way: better soundstage, clearer highs, more natural sound.

My dropbox is pretty full, so I will find another way.

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Zheng,

hopefully this link will help:
https://listen.tidal.com/album/84487108

If not, let me know and we will find another solution.

Kind regards
Richard

Yeah, I like the cover too!
The recording quality differs though from track to track. So don't losten to the bad ones too much, like the second track, what was recorded in Vienna with pretty strong hum on it 

Hi there,

that's a very interesting topic for me. I enjoy it more and more listening to good MQA albums with XXHE and my NOS1a-3G. For me the majority of the MQA albums sound significantly better (bigger sound stage, clearer highs and more precise bass) than the redbook and highres versions. I believe to receive well the better timing and/or debluring of MQA in my ears, but that's subjective for sure.

Ok, it depends a lot on the mastering the tracks come from.
In this way I think, very new albums are good for A-B testing, like e.g. Melody Gardot's "Live In Europe" what was released 2018.
We did a-b-c testing of the track "03-Rain" with three versions:
a) redbook from Tidal
b) highres 48/24 downloaded from Qobus
c) MQA 48/24 from Tidal

These versions are most likely from the same mastering, as the track lengths are exactly the same.

The result: c) clearly outperforms a) and b).
There is not so much difference between a) and b) but a pretty big gap to the MQA version c). Especially the basses are much more precise and the highs too with MQA. Some blind testing confirmed these results. My girl friend Alexandra prefers MQA:  "The bass is much nicer...".

Peter, it's great that you implemented the MQA decoding!
Thanks a lot for that!

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

I can see well all the goodies of the new UI for the playlist using the new right-click options.
Maybe it would be an idea to solve it this way:
- add one more right-clock option like: "Use selected tracks as playlist"
- and the Play button could work like before.

It happened to me a few times already that I unintentionally selected two tracks instead of one and lost the rest of the playlist when pressing play. I surely will survive that, but I don't like it, as I have to save and reload playlists now all the time.

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

I am using XXHE 2.10 since about two weeks now. All works well and is amazingly stable. And I like SQ a lot and MQA and so on...
There is only one point which I miss or maybe just don't know how to do it in the appropriate way:

With 2.10, when I press "Play" after selecting tracks in the playlist, the playlist gets reduced to these selected tracks.
Is there a way to get back the original full playlist?

With the previous XXHE versions I was doing it a lot like this:
- create or load a (long) playlist
- select some tracks and play them
- select some other tracks out of the same playlist and play them

With XXHE I didn't find a way yet to do that without reloading and maybe reorganizing (if not stored) the original playlist.

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

with 2.10 MQA is working well now in my setup, what's great.
Decoding is done well up to 96kHz.
Thank's a lot for your support and the software improvements!

Kind regards
Richard

Hello Nick,

all this is very interesting for me, because I had similar experiences with XXHE 2.10 since I installed it more than a week ago.
I agree with all the post above, 2.10 brings amazing improvements of SQ, but I too missed something in the low frequencies.

I have one question:  Do you use the same SQ paramenters for both versions: 2.09 and 2.10?

After reading your post today I did some intense testing again with both versions: 2.09 and 2.10.
I am using SQ parameters with large buffer sizes (see my new signature), very similar to Peter's settings. As many others here I changed to that because 2.09 was too punchy in my ears compared to 2.07. And I was very happy then with the SQ, especially for the bass range.
With 2.10 it went the opposite way somehow. With Peter's actual settings (SFS: 5.19, Balanced Load: 52) the basses didn't sound so well with my audio equipment: louder, but not precise enough, too smooth and mellow.

Today I changed some settings, which brought back the amazing low frequencies of 2.09, still using the high buffer sizes:
- SFS: back to 10.19 (as I had it most of the time with 2.09)
- Balanced Load: back to 43 (52 makes the basses louder but much more unprecise in my ears)
- Nervous Rate: between 10 and 20. I am using 16 right now (with 2.09 this was set to 100)
- I am now using AP (what I never did before)

With these settings I feel no need any more to switch back to 2.09. The punchy and precise lower bass range is back again. With 2.10 the mids and highs made a big step foreward anyway.
And it's amazing how SQ can still be influenced by small changes of Nervous Rate.

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

thx a lot for your detailed explanations!

On both PCs I have got the latest XXHE version installed. That's for sure.

Everything works perfectly for MQA 44 and MQA 48 since I have installed the latest releases. I am happy with the SQ of these MQA albums.
When I look into the ID-tags of these flac files, I can see that the tag ORIGINALSAMPLERATE (44100 or 48000) corresponds with the audio property "sample rate", which is always the same for these wELL working MQA tracks.

When I download a MQA96 album, like the Robert Plant album in the emailed log file, with my audio PC, it is like this:
the tag ORIGINALSAMPLERATE has the value 96000, what seems to be correct. But the sample rate of these flac files is 48KHz only. It should be 96KHz too, as I believe.
I cannot play these files with my audio PC.

kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

just now I found something interesting what may help to locate this cover art issue:

Using the Windows Explorer, I watched the temporary files beiing created in the 2.xx folder during attended playback:
When tracks from the USB disk of my music PC (Microsoft Surface) are played, the file Wallpaper.bmp is created a few seconds after the UnicodeTracknnnn.wav has been created. It's not displayed in attended mode but nevertheless it is created.
When I play the same tracks from my Synology NAS, no file Wallpaper.bmp will be created! So, most likely the same happens during unattended playback.

Peter, maybe you have an idea why it fails to create Wallpaper.bmp even in attended mode, when playing tracks from the NAS.
Will this help to solve this issue?

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

I did some more testing about this issue this evening.
As reported, when playing FLAC files from my Synology NAS (connection via LAN cable over the router) in unattended mode cover art is not displayed. It's like that since about 2 years. 

Next I connected a USB harddrive, which I use as a backup device for my music, to my music PC and played music with my audio PC from there. All fine in this case. Cover art is displayed in unattended mode too. The interesting point is: My music PC is connected only via Wifi (no LAN cable installed). So that's a pretty slow access for the audio PC, significantly slower than to the NAS through the LAN cable, but cover art still works fine in unattended mode.

So, it's all a bit strange. I have no idea what could cause XXHE not to display cover art after the tracks had been loaded from my Synology NAS. I am doing some more testing....

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

the log file I sent you yesterday is from my music server PC. It's a Microsoft Surface 3 Pro. That's the one which has access to internet and Tidal. My audio PC (Stelath Mach II) has no access.
The cover art of this album is correct. It contains the "MQA 96", as it is shown in the posts above. But the the flac files are created for 48KHz only.
As I read above, other users had similar experiences until they pluged in an appropriate highres DAC into the USB port of their music server PC. I tried that too a few month ago wihout any success.

Kind regards
Richard

Hi Peter,

I will try it using a windows PC with its HDD as a server. I will tell you about the result.

As I remember, there are more posts mentioning this cover art problem for FLAC files in this forum. So I am not the only one for sure.

There is also an impact on SQ: kind of short time cracking when cover art display fails for FLAC files a few seconds after unattended playback starts. There are posts about that too.

Kind regards
Richard