Mani hi,

Great, I really hope it is worth all the effort for you, fingers crossed 

The extra SMPS sounds like a good way to test the hdd setup. It might be worth playing the earths between the two supplies a bit when the time comes. With my linear setup this made the different between just smoother sound and smoother sound with good bass.

Looking forwards to hearing how it sounds,

Best,

Nick.

Sorry I should read more carefully !

Will be trying under clocking later me thinks 

Nick

Stefano hi,


I also noticed this, on my old pc I used to get the front side bus going as quickly as possible and work on timings. Generally faster was better. My new pc build was carefully specified to give quite fast memory performance. Good to know that others are getting similar effects from memory speed.

Best,

Nick.

Paul, Coen hi,

I am ashamed to say that the selection process for these cables amounted to seeing them in the corner of a hifi shop in Norwich at an exdemo knock down price. That was in about 1994 so it's taken a while to part me with any more money for replacement cables ( i just spent a truly cheapfi worthy £25 last nick on enamelled wire      )

In fairness the vdh cables give a detailed and well balanced presentation, i can see why they got good reviews back in the day.

I did try some audioquest cables years ago that really allowed the music to detach from the speakes (quad esl 63s at the time). I have a feeling that it would not be too hard to get this again, hopefully these enamelled wire cables will do just that.

Coen, I tried vdh first carbon interconnects again a long time ago. They had a really smooth (in the best sense) presentation as I remember.

Best,

Nick

Paul,

Thanks for doing the checks on the wire sizes for me, I will go ahead and order the wire in the confident certainty that all of the theory is well and truly nailed  and my sore hands will not be in vain 

As Peter says the drill is charging and ready to go.

Current cable is this http://www.vandenhul.com/p_c05.aspx

Best,

Nick.

Peter,


You have homed in on a key point, I did stress that the package seems to work well. Individually each tweek moves a slight shroud of distortion / noise from different aspects of the sound in different places. Taken together something slightly more seems to happen than the sum of the small changes. I am not sure why at the moment.


What I have done is to apply stuff that I have tried and trusted for a number of years to this new PC build. Its not an entirely     random selection. It may be that there are some "dead wood" changes in the list but I am reasonably confident that most contribute.

The interesting thing is that going back a few years I could hear the differences that each of these tweaks made but there was just too much other noise and distortion coming from other factors in the reproduction chain to make them “important”. With the NOS1 USB, a decent mother board (doh that old mobo was such a problem !) USB3 etc etc things are generally now are so good that what was a "small and interesting" effect before now seems to be quite important.

On a couple of points

Having no fans we all know about the motor noise issues.

Taking power off DVD, SSD and HDDs I am confident that whilst the 12v supply to rotate drives do have an effect the 5v supply that powers control circuits + the additional instance of software drivers + the additional active hardware controllers also have a sonic effect. For this reason for the very best reproduction I have found for a long time its best to remove power to additional drives. As you say not very convenient if you need more flexibility to do other things with the PC.

I have been looking in to linear power for the rest of the Mobo eg main +12 +5 +3.3 and -12v rails. There are folks on the net claiming this is really good for replay but this is more for academic interest as it will not be a practical solution for many running 4 high current bench supplies.

It’s a real pain sometimes that the community is so spread across the world, wouln't it would be great to just be able to say come take a listen what do you think ? For all I know the sound I'm listen to would have folks running from the room   

Best Nick

Oh an extra thought on packaging the PC. The power switch on my (free from any house hold dump) PC case packed up a couple of days ago. Fortunately the Asus mobo has a power button on it so right now I am having to reach inside to turn on. One side effect is that I have no space or cooling issues as the side of the PC case cannot be fitted, I am not sure that the audiance for you new system would appreciate such features 

Juan hi,

I have updated the PC spec post I made earlier with the card details.

The Resorator comes as standard with two water cooling "blocks" one for the CPU and one for a graphics card. You don't have to use the Graphics cooling block but I did for fun. The standard heat sink on the card can easily be removed and replaced with the secong cooling block. The return water from the CPU cooling block is then routed into and out of the Graphics cooling block on its way back to the radiator.

Regards,

Nick.

I just went out for some groceries and was composing a reply to Juan's kind words in my mind on the way but now I see that Peter has already made a comment which is also very kind. Thanks both.

What I wanted to say is that IMHO there is one pioneer who posts regularly on this site. This person is well known by us all for not just relying on subjective experiment to discover improvements but who always seeks to address fundamentally the theories in his own developments our others proposals. Were it not for Peter's approach I believe that computer music reproduction would not have moved on like it has in the last 5 years, at times it has been is dizzying listening to what has been achieved.

So Juan thanks for the kind words but I am just a slightly obsessive and compulsive type enjoying trying things out and sharing the results. Pioneer is a little strong in such towering company 

Kind regards,
Nick.

Juan hi,

No problems re questions.

The Resorator 2 water cooling system comes as a kit with everything needed (except the mounting clip for a socket 2011 CPU this is ordered separately). The water pump is in the bottom of the radiator and has a 240v mains lead going directly to it. I plug the pump into the same socket block that the rest of the hifi is plugged into. This way as soon as the wall mains is switched on the pump is running before the pc can be booted.

http://www.quietpc.com/products/watercooling/reserator1-v2

http://www.quietpc.com/products/watercooling/zm-oc2011

The HDD does not have any fan at all. The disk itself is powered by an external linear power supply, this feeds +12v and +5 volts to the disk drive. Again the external linear supply is plugged into the same socket block at the rest of the system. When the wall power is switched on the linear supply starts and the disk spins up. Then I boot the pc when I am ready, the boot process does not mind that the disk is already spinning.

Hyper threading is usually something that can be enabled /disabled in the pc bios. This is where the Asus x79 motherboard turns it off.

Hope this helps,

Nick.

Hi all,



Here is the spec for my PC build. Thanks to Juan and Mani for their recommendations which helped to spec the build.

Juan, sorry no pics yet, see comments about the case below - its not pretty 

Processor

Intel Core i7-3930X Processor - 3.2GHz, Sandy Bridge, Socket 2011.

Processor provides physical 6 cores and up to 12 threads if hyper threading is used, I have it switched off. It will overclock to about 4.5Ghz with a good motherboard and supports quad channel memory access.

Motherboard

Asus P9X79WS Workstation Series Motherboard.

I think this board is a great spot by Mani, I was going to go for the Asus Sabertooth X79 board but the P9X79WS is a very nice if expensive board. The board’s Bios makes it easy to shut off none essential hardware for music and overclocking is very simple (The board and CPU achieve a 4.2Ghz CPU clock speed by clicking a single “auto tune” button).

Memory

G.Skill 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3 2133MHz DIMM CL11 Ripjaw Z.

I went for reasonably fast 2133Mhz clock speed as in the past faster memory has helped with sound quality. Also some benchmarks show lower density DIMMs achieving slightly higher memory read speeds. This amount of memory in the PC allows for SFS up to 470mb in XXHE (I have not tried any higher). If Peter swops to a 64bit version of XXHE that needs more memory the ASUS X79 WS mother board has another 4 DIMM slots so it would be easy to bring total memory up to 32mb.

The motherboard clocks this memory to its full speed.

Cooling

No case fans, CPU fans or video fans are used.

Zalman Resorator 2 Water Cooling (CPU and video card).

I really like this unit for providing fanless XXHE sound quality and silent operation. The water pump has its own separate mains connection and so doesn't  use the PC’s Power.

EDIT

the Resorator 2 needs a Zalman mounting clip kit to be ordered to fit the water block onto a socket 2011 motherboard. The kit is cheap but is not in the box with the standard water cooling system.

Storage

A single Seagate Barracuda 500mb SATAII drive.

This is the only drive used whilst playing music. The drive is powered by an linear power supply external to the PC. OS, XXHE and music are all on the same partition.

A Samsung SH-222BB SATTA DVD R/W. and OZ Vertex II SSD are fitted but power is always  disconnected whilst playing music. The DVD drive was selected only based on availability, I will have to see how it fairs when used to rip CDs.

Operating system

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit sp1 installed directly from Microsoft DVD. No update's applied.     

Power supply

Corsair AX750, thanks for the recommendation Juan, a nice unit, silent operation in this PC (the fan never comes on) and good sound.

USB

PCIe USB 3 card with NEC chipset, USB 3.0 cable and adaptor to connect to NOS1 USB.

EDIT
Graphics

Radion HD5450

Its a passively cooled card as standard. I have watercooled it but really it doesn’t need this. It was selected as a low cost card which hopefully would not do too much damage (through hardware and driver behaviours) to music, it seems to work well in this respect.

Case

This is where it gets a bit embarrassing - A no-name pressed steel case (probably about £20 pounds or free from most house hold dumps :-) ). My excuse is that it doesn't help it sound quality so no money spent here.... yet.

Best,
Nick.

Paul hi,

I'm really looking forward to trying this. I cannot believe the costs  .

When you say

"I ended up with 4 x .8sq mm each speaker (ie 8 strands for stereo) for the bass units and 8 x .5 mm each speaker (or 16 strand for stereo) for tweeters. Connected in bi-wire configuration."

Do you mean ?

4 live and 4 return wires per speaker at 1mm diameter (approx 0.8mm sq) for the base

And

8 live and 8 return wires per speaker at 0.8mm diameter (approx 0.5 mm sq) for the tweeters

It just that in the picture the gauge difference looks a bit bigger than the diference between 1mm and 0.8mm diameter wires.

(Keen to get the right wires with so much making up to do. The batteries for my drill are on charge  )

Best Nick.

Paul Gerard, hi,

I'm going to build some of your speaker cables to give them a try. I have been reading back through the post and have a good sense of how to make them but I wonder if you could give the number of strands and wire gauge you are using. Also have you used any sheathing to protect the overall bundle ?

Paul if you have any suppliers for the wire etc in the UK that would be great.

Many thanks,

Nick.

Mani hi,

I realise this would be quite a change for your build so I was giving some thought to how you could try this in an easily reversible way without screw driver work.

Perhaps you could try the following for the physical changes first;

1)   Pull all the fan headers for all the case fans off the mother board

2)   Pull the CPU fan header off the mother board and run it from a separate external 12v supply for now. Doing this will give a “CPU fan” Bios error, this can be fixed by setting the Bios (it needs to be done otherwise the CPU may be throttled down due to the lack of cooling status). I can point you in the direction of this Bios change if needed.

3)   Pull the power leads out of all of the RAID SDD DVDs etc and leave them where they are (SATA cables still connected should be ok).

4)   Use your supper fast HDD for OS, XXHE. Put some music on to this drive to try the config with before the RAID drives are powered down.

5)   The linear power to the single HDD is easy to setup if you have some old SATA power cables about and a suitable bench power supply. We can discuss this particularly the earth layout (it’s simple to set up). Is seems to be fine to power up the drive before the PC so I just switch the HDD PSU on at the wall socket that the whole system is connected to then boot the PC as usual with the drive already spinning.

6)   The Bios and OS tweaks are all reversible so these are easy to apply / dissapply.


Apart from the Linear supply on the HDD all of the above would then be easily reversible if the config does not give the SQ results but I think it should.

PM me when you get to step 5) and I will explain what I did (if you don’t have a supply to hand there is a Maplin one that works fine and is not too expensive to try).

Best regards,

Nick.

Coen hi,

Good to hear.

I tried ahci quite a while ago but it had a negative effect on sound quality. Then I found there was no way of swoping back to IDE drivers without re installing the OS. 

The linear supply for the HDD is worth trying.

Best,
Nick.

Mani hi,

You asked if I could mention tweeks for the Asus X79 WS mother board. I think I have a package of settings that is REALLY worth taking the time to setup. I am so impressed with the potential of this board, I wish I had upgraded ages ago. Almost all of this is stuff that we all know about but as a package of changes the sound produced it is quite beautiful to listen to. The thing I would stress is that the tweeks seem to work as a PACKAGE, individually you can hear them but put them together and wow 

The set of tweeks defiantly work on the Asus board that Mani and I have but others may find that they work on other boards with fast multi core PCs, I just cannot say that the sound quality is going to be what the Asus X79 WS provides.

Summary of tweeks.

1)   Eliminate ALL fans (CPU fan case fans etc)
2)   Take power off ALL drives but one (OS XX and Music on the single HDD)
3)   Power the one HDD from a linear power supply
4)   Remove power connections from DVD and Floppy Drives etc
5)   Turn off hyper threading
6)   Over Clock the CPU
7)   Disable CPU “Clock Spreading” 
   Turn off Intel Virtualisation
9)   Use PCIe USB 3 (NEC chipset)
10)   XX processor scheme 3, SFS around 350mb,
11)   Hygiene factor tweeks (Old hat stuff but for good measure)
a.   Disable Data Execution support (in Bios)
b.   Disable all Devices not needed for music (extra SATA controllers, USB ports etc etc in Device Manager)
c.   Disable all devices not used for Music in  Bios (Mobo
USB, Sound card, COM ports etc)
(Points 1 to 10 all have an effect individually, but together they really move music to the next level.


Notes


1)   Fans. At first I had to set my new PC up with a CPU fan because the mounting clip to fit my Zalman Reserator water cooler was not available. When the clip arrived I was able to remove the CPU fan and fit water cooling to the CPU and Video card. The water pump is powered by a separate 240v supply. It really makes a difference.

2)   Only ONE Drive with power.
For years every time I have added ANY additional drive (SDD, DVD, FD even just having them powered up in the PC and not using them) it always affects SQ. With the tweeks I have one Sata II HDD powered up (SDD and DVD are fitted but powered down). This is really worth doing and its easy to test, just put the OS, XXHE and some music on the same HDD and pull the power off all the others then listen....

I just reconnect the power on DVDs and other drives if I need them.


3)   Linear Power supply for the single HDD. This is really important.
Most HDDs seem to get by on about 1.5amps on the +12v rail and 0.5amps on the 5v rail. The key is to make sure that the linear supply power rails are directly referenced to the PC’s SMPS earths directly and individually for both the 12v and 5v rails (I found that if you reference the linear supply earths only via the Sata Power connection to the drive the Bass and SQ do improve but not NEARLY as much as with the earth set up mentioned).  I am using a cheap Maplin bench supply and I can explain a little more about how I have the supplies setup if needed.

4)   Take Power off all drives except the one used for Music.
Already mentioned in 2) above

5)   Turn off HyperThreading. This was a funny one. In the past over I found over clocking has helped sound quality a little. With the 3930 CPU I was thinking the choice here is either 12 threads at half the clock speed or 6 threads at full clock speed and full cache for each core. 6 threads at max clock won easily.

6)   Over Clock the CPU. See 5). Use the “Asus Optimal Mode” button on the “EZ Bios” Page to get a stable 4.2Gb clock speed with good memory speeds. No other effort required.

7)   Disable CPU Clock Spreading. CPU clock jitter as far as music is concerned in the ASAS Bios this as called. Bios > Advanced > Ai Tweeker > Spread Spectrum > Disabled

   Turn off “Intel Virtualisation Technology”. Bios > Advanced > CPU Configuration > Intel Virtualisation Technology > Disabled.

9)   USB 3.0.  Well documented on the forum. I am finding a USB 3.0 cable with an adaptor best with these tweeks.

10)   XX processor scheme 3, SFS around 350mb. Not much to say but these give the detail of Scheme 1 together with a rich full presentation with presence and great timber.

Best Nick.