I have also tried the USB Polling regedit and have found it very effective. the sweet spot for me is a value of 4 but its a close call between 3 and 4. I am also using a HiFace so it's interesting that Ivo and my results are converging.

Nick.

Peter,

I think you have really pulled a rabbit out of the hat with z3, I cannot stop smiling whilst listening, many thanks.

Marcin,

I agree ini setting of 21 gives terrific dynamics.

IMHO I agree with earlier posts that ini 11 sounds clear and tonally staifying but is a little down on dynamics and slam in the low and mid range (still fantastic great overall though). Ini 21 is very dynamic I think system tuning effort will concentrate here for now.

I haven't posted on z3 so far as I have been recommissioning my main system after 8 months of being mothballed after my house move. It's a bit disorientating right now trying to pinpoint what components are contributing what but z3 is absolutely shins through a NOS DAC, Gainclone amps and horns speakers.

Nick.

Peter,

My hat’s off to you, that is one great piece of diagnostic work to get to the bottom of SFS and it sounds like solving the problem has lead to fundamental changes - I'm really looking forward to hearing the results. Also great explanation, it may just be me but having a bystanders view of the elegance you craft into HighEnd under the bonnet really adds to the appreciation and enjoyment of using it.

Nick.

Marcin,

Weird but good news.

Out of interest you use PCI Lock (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > System configuration > Boot > Advanced Options)

http://www.osronline.com/ddkx/ddtools/bootini_419v.htm

Nick.

Marcin hi,


I have updated my signature after reading Mani's reminder 

EDIT

SFS is at 83 at the moment for me which gives a balance of detail without sound becoming too thin. Sounds like Peter has some suprises for us though regarding SFS 

EDIT


Nick.

Guys,

I agree with your comments Ivo and Peter that some code somewhere needs to make calls invoke the key values via MMCS.

I said I would do some tests to pinpoint  the MMCS registry keys that effect sound. The clockrate, affinity and systemresponsivness key values are defiantly producing subtle but important changes in sound with engine #4 on my machine (as it happens the values that I placed in my post are resonably optimal). With engine 4 playing the MMCS thread is periodically popping up and consuming processor time. Engine 4 will run without the MMCS service running but sound changed and not as satisfying. I have not localised yet which registry control profile is being called (I’m still applying changes to Replay, Audio and Pro Audio) but I will do this.

Peter has established that XX is not (so far  ) making any calls to MMCS to invoke any of these registry settings, however it appears some code in my replay chain defiantly is. As I said before I suspect that this is either the sound device driver or possibly Vista when a sound card is registered by a program which is preparing to play music.

I don’t know if this presents potential for Peter in code but as a tweek something is defiantly happening.

Cheers,
Nick,
Ps When I first tested this registry edit some time ago I was using a Transit card and drivers. At this time I also remember being able to detect changes in music presentation with different key values.

Sounds like we could be in for some surprises Peter,
Good luck
 

Peter hi,
I agree that there are program calls to access Multimedia registry profile settings. My understanding is that MCSS sets up prioritisation based on these profiles when asked to by any code that makes the calls. On my config there is defiantly an marked A/B change in sound quality with the registry exits so I still think something is requesting MCSS to use the registry profile data. Could the HiFace Driver be invoking the settings ? or windows still has an awareness of the HiFace as a music hardware device, could MCSS apply the settings anyway when a process (say XXhignEnd) registers with the sound device ?

I took a scatter gun approach when coming up with the suggested key values by applying them to many of the profile types (pro audio, audio etc). I will spend a little time trying to pinpoint the profiles and key values that have an effect.
Whatever is happening  for with current versions, I do hope this is exploitable for 0.9-z3.

Regards,

Nick.

I read Marcins reaction and had to have a go as well. I tried Music + XX on RAMDisk last night. To rebalance sound presentation I had to increase SFS from 75 to 85 MB. What a result ! even smoother, larger stage, macro and micro dynamic improvements, bass and treble extension.

IMHO this is defiantly worth doing, I hope you can incorporate a way of exploiting this is 09z-03 Peter.

Great find Ivo.

Nick.

So IntFiltr install glitches are not likely to be service pack related I guess.

Peter,
Thankfully I’m running nothing on SSD at the moment so I hope power cuts will just remain a simple annoyance not a data nightmare (I feel your pain).

Regarding sound changes, I wonder if your DAC electronics being so optimised means  that the OS changes do not make the same level of difference. If your electronics are well clocked and locked on the stream it might be your system has better tolerance to OS induced jitter and timing errors. Just thinking out loud.

Mani,

After reading Peters earlier XX internal settings, I thought I would try special mode again (At last I have understood how to set buffers size and latency for special mode correctly). What I found was I could get 95%+ of the organic quality of Adaptive mode with much better resolution and rightness of tone. Even more like vinyl.

On the HiFace I set the XX buffer size to 2048 but found that the lowest Q1 latency was definatly not where the sweet spot is;

Set Q1 to get 2 sample latency and played with SFS arround 70 - 90 = Much too thin souding and  hyperdetailed

at 4 samples latency and SFS between 70 and 90 = better but nowhere near right

8 samples approaching adaptive mode sound only losing a tiny amount of resolution (or it might be that the forwardness of the lower latency settings is dropping out of the sound)

16 samples hit the sweet spot ! – organic, detailed, smooth and engaging. The surprising thing was just how sensitive getting the sound right was to SFS setting. I had to spend a lot of time on SFS at each latency to get the best sound. In the end I was making changes of 1 and 2 Mb and getting subtle but very important changes in the sound. The end result is all the Adaptive quality but with the resolving power and wonderful presence of Special Mode.

I know you are a fan of Adaptive Mode but it may be that the OS changes enable Special Mode to do this.
Nick.

Guys,

Just thinking out loud here, I read the ms doc again and it mentions that from vista sp1 onwards there is explicit support for setting interrupt affinity. I am on vista sp0 without this support and using intfilter has not results in errors or problems.

Mani your install was also straight forward what 2008 sp level are you running ? It would be good to understand what is causing the inconsistent installation behavior.

I have had a couple of days off but am planning to take a look as well at processes too. I looks like we are all getting some unexplained logic on where process end up.

Peter out of interest did you get the sound improvements that Mani and I experienced ?
Nick.

Hi Marcin,

Interesting results, glad the 2 core build is running so well though.

What Intel based machine do you have in mind ?

Nick.

Josef

Thats intesting, if USB connected drivers without IRQs are defaulting to CPU 0 maybe it would be better to shunt all of the systems background IRQs off to CPU3 then and assign 0,1 and 2 for the music. Hummmm....

Nick.

Mani,
Thanks for the feedback, I am really pleased that you have managed to get such significant changes in the sound of your system, credit is also defiantly due to Marcin as well. I am particularly encouraged by your A/B test with vinyl, that for me is a most significant finding. My system is also has a wonderfully analogue sound but the comparison for me is from memory as my LP12 went a year or two ago (god rest its soul ).

I have been doing some testing on the affinity setting of the three important types of service:
1) Sound card and connection,
2) Storage RAM Disk,
3)and XXHighEnd.

Finding are that generally the sound fills out and tone becomes more “right” when each of these processes has more that one CPU to run on. The improvement very nice to have BUT for maximum resolution one process per CPU seems the best (this is in line with the theory that each software processes should get uncontended immediate access to CPU the moment is called for).

So conflicting dynamics:
Better general sound with more CPUs set but lower resolution
vs
Best resolution with one CPU per process but not the best possible overall presentation.

Conclusion I want more CPUs than I have to test giving each key process 2 or more CPUs ! If you have time (or can pull yourself away from listening to the new setup ;-) ) it would be useful if you could run the hyperthreaded test we talked about on you i5 processer. Something tells me there could be a real sweet spot here wait to be found.

Regards,

Nick.

Josef,
I selected mother board based USB deliberately in order find a port with its own IRQ but I have used PCI based USB cards which had shared IRQs in the past. Try to find a port with its own IRQ if you can but sometimes using a PCI USB board can sound better even with shared IRQs.
You have some valid points regarding the instructions, I looked that the documentation too and decided the key words were “generally” and we “recommend” not don’t do it at all.  So I figured i would try it pushing the configuration and see what happened. My experience has been fine for setting affinity drivers that have IRQs and those that don’t. I did however reason that problems might come if you have two drivers, that share the same IRQ, set to different affinity. I made sure that where there is IRQ sharing all attached drivers get the same mask settings.

One reason that I took the risk of assigning affinity to drivers that do have IRQ is that it seems IntFiltr was developed for tuning servers. Therefore stability is of the upmost concern, for this reason the advice could be a little conservative which is why personally I decided to push the configuration to see what happened. If there is anyone from Microsoft or with deep experience of IntFiltr reading their views would be very welcome.
Ultimately is your call on how you apply IntFiltr but it sounds like you have a good understanding of what it is doing, you just need to be comfortable you can recover from potential problems (eg you have backups and the time to rebuild if something bad does happen).
One last thing, a USB connected drive and mouse are not the best for sound quality if you have a USB sound card. You don’t have a signature set for your posts so I cannot see you setup but if you are not using a laptop, why don’t you use PCI SATA to attach your storage and use a cheap PS/2 mouse ?

Regards,

Nick