The installation of 09-z82 on W7 went fine (once I managed to down load it   ). First impressions are of a land mark release ! W8 levels of detail but with warmth and ambiance. Transients are in a totally different place, fast with the correct levels of weight / delicacy. Timing is superb (not a strong point in W8 for me) familiar tracks are bowling along beautifully.

Many thanks to you Peter.

Cheers Nick.

Peter,

Mouthwatering stuff, really looking forward to hearing this.

 

Nick.

Paul hi,

It's interesting there may be some consistency.

Both installs here are simple as well without OS tweaks. I'v been playing about with "prioritise background tasks" in computer advanced settings. I'm on the IPad so I can't easily look up a better description on the setting location but I guess you know it. The effect is quite significant in windows 7 with the otherwise simple setup. When set to "prioritise background" the smearing of the highs gets very much better, its very smooth and more like in windows 8. In am not entirely sure if for me the setting is a "keeper" because there is a smidgen of warmth that disappears with the setting but it's interesting how much of the windows 8 sound appears when I set this in windows 7.

In windows 8 setting to prioritise background tasks seems to upset things.

Cheers,

Nick.

Peter

I will put sound quality comments to the other tread

Mani,

The "format up install" is nothing special just taking the disk back to repartition it and format it before installing the OS, XXHE etc.

I have installed the OS's in 100gb partitions of different HDDs and copies of XXHE and music on a second partitions on each OS disks (one disc for w7 and a separate one for w8). For sound tests I only have one disk connected at a time, either the W7 or W8 HDD and no dvd connected.

I was amazed at the difference the new W7 install made last week, I think my old install was probably getting a bit over tweaked  . One thing that might be relevant to the really great sound is that I did not install the ASUS P9X79WS x79 intel chip set drivers on the Windows 7 install. This can be done because W7 media doesn't have drivers for the X79 chipset, the result is that Device Manager shows about 30 mobo devices uninstalled. The funny thing is I could swear I have never had W7 sound so good.

Anyway,

W7 vs W8 impressions in the other post soon.

Cheers,

Nick.

Hi Guys,

I did a disc format upwards reinstall of windows 7 this week, including re copying all music files. W7 was just ahead of W8 before the rebuild but after the rebuild it has addressed the bass and high end issues i mentioned in the W8 thread, and windows 7 is further ahead.

So today windows 8 also has also had the format up rebuild treatment and tomorrow, will do some listening again. I will try out the cool when idle setting Mani.

One thing that really helped with windows 7 for me was phase intensity set to 3!. I was very surprised by this but in my setup this really works.

Anyway will try W8 again...

Cheers,

Nick

Paul hi,

I was going to pm you to set up a visit to yours. I'm really interested to catch up. We will certainly have a lot to try out Personally I would not get worried about what you are hearing, I was astounded by how easy it was to hear that the Adnaco was not as good as direct usb connection. I would be very happy to come and lend an ear.

I am keen to try our DaCs back to back as well, you will know why 

will pm you,

Cheers

 Nick.

Alain hi,

This subwoofer settings are not the cause of the "noise" problems. I just found it funny that something a simple as setting knob slipping on its shaft had caused such a fustrating problem.

The noise problems are still here, but for some reason at the moment the symptoms in my DAC are almost gone, this means that I can use my NOS1 at 8 and even 16x up sampling rates. There is still noise in the system particularly the amp but sound is much better.

I will post a small update on the noise soon.

Cheers,

Nick.

I'v been watching the debate take shape and decided to spend some time playing on Windows 7 today after 3 weeks or so of using Windows 8. I have to say straight away I have been extremely impressed with Windows 8 but it's interesting to step back to Windows 7 to compare.
So thoughts on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (based on 9-z08-1a and low latency settings for both OS's eg SFS 2 Q=1 etc)

Windows 7

Mid range is where the magic is (and I mean magic),there is a totally believable presence not over etched just very real, voices and acoustic instruments are set in beautiful relief, there is a beautiful balance of speed, tone, details. The sound is absolutely in the moment of the performance.
Highs have a greater degree of sweetness than Windows 8, I was suppressed how much so, BUT Highs also have distortions, a slight sibilance and harshness that act to break the spell by just reminding you this music is being reproduced each time the music hits a frequency that excites these faults.  Having said this I just get the sense of the music flowing from each instant in time to the next which is a very good thing, there is a sense that anything could happen next because the musicians could DO anything next (even through it a recording), this is exciting to listen to.

11/02/13 EDIT I need to tone down this comment on sibilance and top end distortion it is there but to a much lesser extent than I had thought. I found that something I was doing internally within my NOS1 was causing most of this. It's fixed and whilst there is a small amount of top end distortion left its nowhere near as pronounced whilst using Windows 8 now.


Bass snap and tonal resolution get a 7/10 which is ok but not top draw. Weight in Windows 7 is about the same as Windows 8 but it’s less distinct tonally and so not a tuneful as Windows 8.

Overall Windows 7 is great for less dense acoustic music, but can lose an amount of control on dense complex music like rock and dance, partially when highs that excite the sibilance are in the mix. When this happens the music sounds slightly confused at the top and a layer of detail is lost.

Overall impression of Windows 7: very real midrange presence, a sense of realness and live performance that draw you in and make me want more. I just feel myself wishing for better Bass, the loss of the sibilance and that last step of control on complex passages with HF energy.

Windows 8

Gives a very balanced spectral performance from low to high frequency, consistent solid, detailed, with a rock solid stage. Bass is better controlled with greater tonal differentiation of notes, mid range is very smooth and sounds natural but a notch or two less presence and “realness” compared to W7. Highs are smooth without the slight sibilance of W7 BUT  they do not have the sweetness or the weight of the Windows 7 highs, this is a small but important step backwards. For a brand new OS without XX tweaking it’s a brilliant start (really brilliant) but it sounds like it needs the magic that Min OS and XTweaks bought in W7 in order to just give it that kick of realness in the midrange and sweeten the highs. Now that would really be something.

Right now I could see me booting into different OS versions to suit the music that is to be played, IMHO though W8 is many times better than W7 when it was first released and Windows 8 appears to be extremely promising if Peter can work his magic in a way to would tune it as effectively as with Windows 7.  If the midrange life and top end sweetness of Windows 7 could be bought forward in to the Windows 8 sound that would be a sound I could really live with, long term. Fingers crossed.

Nick.

Ps no comments on sound staging in the above comments, my listening environment disqualifies my from passing comment here (Paul will know why, haha ).

One problem that's proved to be nothing to do with noise, it's a  bit embarrassing but quite funny   

I have blamed everything in sight for the past 3 years for weird and frankly cr*p Bass. 'Noise', DAC, amp, OS, mains, they have all come under suspicion as possible causes of the problem. Paul and my friend Pete were most polite when they listened to the bass at my place, I'm still waiting to receive their claims for damaged hearing  .

Armed with the new oscilloscope and a 40hz tone track I decided to trace through the system from DAC to active subs to see if there was anything amiss.

The real culprit ? Each of the active subwoofers on my Avantguard Duo's has a gain knob and a cross over frequency knob to adjust these settings on the sub's internal amplifier. Now the right hand sub has always been the one that would just not work, always too loud or too quiet or just cr*p balance ever since the sub amp modules were upgraded about 4 years ago. With the amp module out of the left sub and poking about in the amp module, I noticed that the knob for the cross over setting was slipping on the potentiometer shaft, but is was just tight enough to not be obvious !! This means that the calibration mark on the knob could in effect be anywhere up to 360 degrees out from the actual setting on the potentiometer in the sub that sets the cross over point. Loads of swearing, followed by big smiles when I sat down to listen with subs properly matched and setup. I cannot say what a difference correct settings have made.

What a hobby, never take anything for granted I guess.

Nick.

Ps after looking at the amp module i'v got a nice list of upgrades worked out so maybe even better bass is to come 

Matt hi,

To give you a Target to try I I'll just say what I used.

The install was on W8 pro 64 bit (I happened to use update com earlier Windows media). No updates applied but my music pc is not internet connected after the OS has been installed, so   I am relaxed about security updates.

When I first ran XXHighend it needed Microsoft .Net installed so I let the pc download this. Also to use Peters Windows 7 shell instead of  the w8 metro shell (Peter says the metro shell has a bad mpact on sound quality) you will need to have a Windows 7 dvd to hand to for the shell install to copy the Windows 7 shell files from.  The Windows 7 dvd needs to be the match the bit level as the Windows 8 OS you installed (eg 64 bit or 32bit same as your w8).

Hope this helps and WELCOME

Nick.

 

W8 is up and running here. The OS upgrade, XX install and windows shell installs all went in very easily.

The sound is another very BIG step forward IMHO. I certainly recognise Peters observations (long post above). It's good to be getting the sweetest sound from high SFS and buffer and Q settings. I guess in theory it should work this way and it does. I was slow to move OS before (vista to W7) but I'm seriously pleased with this move.

More considered notes on sound to follow after some more listening 

Cheers,

Nick.

Whilst I was reading your Windows 8 perceptions Peter my Windows 8 Pro upgrade order dropped through the post box. 

Sounds like the next few days are going to be interesting.

I'm guarded about making SQ observations until my system problems are fixed but I'll will post Windows 8 thoughts as soon as I have any.

Cheers,

Nick.

Peter hi,

Thanks for suggesting the test, I see what you are saying about the peaks possible carrying the decoded signal, it would be facinating to understand what could decode the signal with the DAC off, i'll try to capture some traces.

Best Nick.

Hi,

I said I would post a better trace of the VHF noise.

This trace is recorded with more scope memory depth and shows a lot of transmission detail not apparent in the trace I placed in the first post.



The trace is taken from the speaker cables of the system with the pc dac and amp turned off. The 100mhz fm transmission is actually highly modulated, with approx 30db pulses at 60khz and lower level pulses at ~480khz. This looks much more difficult to deal with as a result. The noise extends from 10s of kHz to 100mhz.

Word clock frequency in the my NOS is 706khz and bit clock at 22.6mhz you can see why this interference in the wrong locations in the system can hurt sound quality.

Nick

Edit - updates to the frequencies quoted to properly reflect the trace details.

Cristoffe hi,

The article is bang on point for my problem ! I think all four of the fr interference types could apply here. The article also points out that VHF level signals only propagate short distance down power lines is useful. This is the final encoragement meded for me needed to invest in some decent quality shielded mains leads (RF is so good for justifying upgrades  ).

I am trying to read as much as possible before I start to making changes to the system, so this is a really useful article, thanks.

Nick.