I was wondering, are xtweaks active always when enabled or only when playing?
So for example they would influence the sound in other programs outside XXHE?

I have been in sort of DAC limbo for the last year and hadn't used XXHE  much, but just after trying out 2.11 with some ok gear and gotta say Im really impressed with it. I hadn't used it in so long I forgot how much of an improvement you can get from a player can make (well XXHE at least, not sure about others), It's nearly like changing a piece hardware.

Using KS, High SFS, long buffer and 8x arc predition and it sounds very good.

I am going to pair it with Andrea Mori's (from diyaudio) upcoming NOS R2R DAC, FIFO and clock when it's available.
At least Andrea's goal is to provide a FIFO that completely eliminates influence from the PC, so most of XXHEs ability will probably (but hopefully) will be wasted,
But I do still need a digital volume control and digital filtering, XXHE is still the best choice in this regard, so not completely wasted

I have kind of moved away from PC for music playback in favour of a simple SD card player but thought this is worth suggesting as a feature for a future version of XXHE.

Ryzen CPUs use groups of 4 cores each with their own cache (CCX) that are linked together to reach full core count (8,12,16), Intel generally has less cores which are built into a single ''package'' with one cache.

With AMD there is an issue of latency between the CCX groups which was shown to impact gaming performance.

However the internal core latency of the CCX is supposedly lower than Intel cores


Isolating the OS processes to one CCX and playback processes to another with AMD seems ideal but Im not sure if any software can utilize the CPU in this way?


I have noticed with Ryzen 1700 CPU usage is always spread over the 2 CCX, even at idle, it makes me wonder if music playback would be spread between the CCX too which kind of turns one potential advantage of the Ryzen CPU into a disadvantage.


Maybe with core appointment you can prevent that but
I dont think the current core appointment schemes in XXHE are oriented specifically towards this Ryzen core scheme to isolate between the CCX

I think there is some amount of interest in Ryzen 3000 for music servers and if XXhighend had options to effectively utilize 2 or even 3 CCX in a 12 core that could generate a lot of interest, XXHE is already a really good player on its own but that would push it even further above the others.

wow, what a coincidence

I notice ''special'' KS mode works for me now using an ESI Juli@ XTE PCIe card for I2S output to my DAC. Special mode never worked with USB interfaces, and the problem was always the same even when every single thing in the system had changed, the music would play normally but have loud crackling on top, similar to the original issue mentioned in this thread.

It works now with this PCIe card and it sure does sound good

something to note, with any upsampling on special mode I start to get pops, I wasnt able to fix it by changing settings, other than going back to adaptive mode, so not much use if you need upsampling.

Thanks for the report.

I also wanted to give this a try sooner but most MoBos only have 1 PS2 port now, or do they?
The MoBos all seem to have a 2 tone, green and purple socket. This implies dual support, the IO guard has both symbols side by side too with no ''/''...

PS/2 splitters do exist, the PS/2 connection has 2 N/C pins which could easily carry the extra CLK and DATA signals, but any discussion or info on the single ports supporting split signals is scarce.
Im not using USB now for the DAC so the only thing keeping me from disabling all USB ports is KB+M... I will have to get some PS/2 devices and see if this works

I had some notion that the recent DAC chips could do this ''bit perfect'' control like XXHE internally, but not a single article mentions the word ''lossless'' when describing the DAC volume control, if thats not a good enough hint.

With underclock weirdly I got the 'WASAPI silence' on KS, usually min 0.02 is possible but with UC I had to increase to 0.11 to get sound.
No help for  the popping with 16 bit

After posting that I thought about hows it been nearly a year since comparing XXHE attenuator to the DAC attenuator. An innumerable amount has changed and improved since so I had to recheck that... it took a few tracks to notice that XXHE does seem like it does better job attenuating with DAC set to -0.
 XXHE seems warmer and softer in how it influences the sound but remains more transparent, the DAC attenuator imparts a nasty sharpness and hollowness onto the sound.

On a similar note I have digital 32 bit attenuator in my DAC (its common now), to me this seems quite transparent. I have tried setting it to 0 and using XXHE for attenuator but I dont think is really bypassing the DAC attenuator and XXHE seems more transparent at 0dB than the DAC, so kind of stuck with that.

That isnt much to design a whole feature around but felt it was worth mentioning

You should look outside HifiMe for a new one I think. Their DACs are fine as budget choices but based on my own experience with them , it was not really surprising to see that review on ASR of their 'flagship'. Building a dac and getting sound is easy, even ok sound, but for anyone interested in entry level hi-fi SQ you want to choose something where you know the engineers have at least some idea what their doing, measurements will be one sign of that.
Check ASR, basically any DAC they recommend will measure excellently so look for the cheapest one. Maybe look for subjective impressions of a few of the cheapest options.

I wasnt aware and thanks for bringing that up, reevaluating CPU underclocking with this Ryzen CPU is something that needs to done.
The possibility of it being PC hardware related makes total sense, when I said software I only really knew it wasnt related to anything after the PC (DAC, USB interface). It could not be influenced by software settings, only SFS which itself is influenced by CPU speed.

With SFS above about 2.00 there are no clicks/pops . it always worked like this and I wonder why I made this thread when the solution was already discovered, though S2019 was a real problem with an unexpected fix.

Thanks, Peter.
The S2016 file had no effect, funnily XXHE does recognise as ''Server 2019'' when no tracks are loaded into playlist and with S2016 tss file it still does. Using W10 file instead worked , recognised as 'W10' with features restored and working

Clicks and pops correspond to the lower SFS just like KS, but im being pedantic as large SFS sounds just as good and work perfectly.

Well thanks, that explains it.

Usually when limits in SFS were encountered, which was only with WASAPI, the results was below a certain point the sound would just stop, but that's WASAPI.
But, based on what you're saying, with 0.02 being possible at 24bit, at least 0.04 should be possible at 16bit?

To elaborate on the sound of this issue, there is no affect on timing of the music, only  cracks/pops/clicks like you'd find on vinyl but louder.


About trying WASAPI, right now I have server 2019 Core on a 16GB optane drive, this was only OS which will fit on this drive.
With the newly add ''FOD'' feature in core and AudiophileOptimiser it was possible to get WASAPI, KS and desktop-like environment. XXHE works in S2019, buts very problematic, seems to recognise the OS as ''XP or older'', so a lot of features are restricted,which includes WASAPI.

Having the SATA card and SATA drive dedicated to storage and Optane as OS has given the best hardware performance so far... Perhaps in the short-term made more sense to go for 32GB option, but next gen Optane drives are on the way.

Anyway XXHE filtering was a good and convenient option but there still remains the more traditional option of using an analogue reconstruction filter for this 16bit DAC.