Marcin,

No, I was careful to select a mother board with a very basic Intel on board GPU built in, I use the basic out of the box Vista drivers and over clock it in the Bios then limit video traffic as much as possible in config. I have used PCI and PCIe video cards and tried to buy the slowest most basic possible. The problem is they all have mega 600Mhz +++ processors and complex drivers these days. They have high IRQ priority and can command a lot of CPU interupts. As a principle try to limit the PCI traffic to the card by doing whatever you can with the config to do this.

Sorry forgot you question on power schemes. I start with the max performance one then go with

Never sleep
Display off in 1 min (I read an interesting comment from Peter saying this may platue CPU speed so I will look at this)
Hard disks off in 1 min
And turn off everything that means the OS has to monitoring something.

For a bit of fun (sad) I used to follow how quickly the PC shuts down, it gets quicker and quicker as things are stripped and tuned. From the moment you click the power down button to the PSU relay clicking off with a dead screen it takes 3 seconds ! Now RAM disk is installed and writing the disk from memory it takes ages 

Nick.

Marcin,

Great work, a myth busted ! Its easy to wonder off down the slow CPU route but system responsiveness in the right places suits HighEnd IMHO as well. It will be interesting to hear Peters thoughts following his earlier post.

You make a very important point about a poorly tuned PC masking issues in the overall replay system. I also think this but have never expressed it so clearly. The better the tune the more you hear so the basics have to be right but if they are  .  As Peter's software as taken great leaps so access to the last 15 or 20% of audible performance from the system has become much more important IMHO.

Regarding your PCI card. I have modified a USB PCI card to run from linear supplies. The only connections to the PC are the PCI bus earths and the signal channels of the bus to the card. There is still going to be some RF transfer through the earths / signal and general environment but the card was far better. I don't use it any more (gone over to internal USB which works better with the asynchronous mode HiFace) but this might be a great modification for your PCI card. Its a fiddly one to do though as the tracks that you need to cut and solder are very small. I am looking forward to seeing the PCI interface that Peter has put into the Phasure NOS. It sounds like it doesn’t need much tweaking ! but....

Nick

Martin hi,

I tend to go for responsivness as the guiding principle. RAM and CPU  give moderate improvements. I also over volt a little. On my system the last 5 % or so of clock speed is -ve for sound so I back off from ffull potential. 2 cores seems best I have a quad core but run 2 by setting boot options.

There was a build paper for another player with great configs but to low volt underclock did not work for me.

Cut the background load  and run fast !

Nick

Ps will post autoruns later then thighs get interesting :-)

Roy,

What dpclat are you getting from your tuned OS? This is not a hard wired indicator to music performance but it gives me a feeling for how far you have gone with tuning. Are you on vista? What have you stopped / done so far?

When settled what are max, min and estimated average dpclat scores ?

Nick.

Worth a try.

Telstar,

I had forgotten that you are running W7. W7 does not implement the clock keys there in Vista only. This reflects is one of the fundamental changes that took place for audio playback when MS launched W7. In Vista the key allows you to set the granularity of CPU time dedicated to multimedia processes. The clock key values suggested dedicate loads of CPU time to music  There were problems however for Microsoft with this CPU prioritisation as effectively other processes like network could be crippled when media was being used (not that we care  ). MS fix was to remove the CPU time Guarantee in W7. We may discover other reasons as well but I suspect this is at the root of the Vista / W7 performance difference. This is why I never moved to W7.

This makes me  when I think of all that CPU time going to audio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8_0e0pDzAY

On Vista the reg edit takes music to another level, it would be very interesting to see what you think the remaining key edits does for W7. Hopefully there will still be some benefit.

Nick.

Telstar,

Let me know what you think to the Global DEP disable.

Have you tried the MMCS service prioritisation regedit ? It's in a longish post from me a few pages back in the thread. The effect fundermantal to relay , this is the one you REALLY want to apply for best music.

Nick.

Another reasonably effective OS system edit – Globally Turn off DEP.

Data Execution Protection is implemented partly BIOS / HW and in the OS by Windows. In the windows admin tools you cannot fully turn DEP it off. I guess that there is some busy bit of kernel code checking I/Os and DEP flags trapping any errors as programs run.

Turning DEP off could open systems up to memory overwrite attacks and might cause instability if you run badly implemented programs but since my build runs music software only and never goes near a network I am happy to turn it off.

The effect is quite marked when applied on top of the MMCS parameters regedit. More hash and grain removed from the sound with improved imaging depth and resolution but I am not sure if it takes away some of the musical engadement from the sound ???

From a command prompt with admin privileges;
To turn DEP off “bcdedit.exe /set nx {current} AlwaysOff” then reboot
To turn DEP on again “bcdedit.exe /set nx {current} AlwaysOn” then reboot (I had to guess the on command but it seems to work fine)
Nick.

Peter,

I had something that sounds similar when I was using my Transit card with a PCI USB card in a Gigabyte mobo Pentium 4 PC. All would play well (well before the KS engine) then I would have sense that something subtle was wrong with the sound (loss of resolution, timing closed in image and loss of base lines), occasionally I would get a few ticks as well then suddenly lots of distortion, quite loud masking the music. I had to stop playback power cycle the Transit and restart to get music back but a reboot was the best solution, as the music would break down more oftern after the first time. Some times I could play for hours without a problem and it did improve with some general OS speed tuning but never went away. It was frustrating, I put it down to a sync problem as well but despite trying never got to the bottom of it. As it only cropped up occasionally for me I lived with it and then bought a new mobo with quad core and new memory. The problem disappeared and the same PCI usb card worked fine in the new setup so the problem was probably mobo related.

This is a shame I hope you find a fix, I took a look at the mobo you chose and it looks very promising.

Nick.

I hadn't though about that, I did the tests on pre kernel streaming HighEnd versions so it may be that some additional services could go. Will have a play.

Peter,
I know you had spotted this issue with W7, I remember the post, you really made think hard at the time. This post, papers on W7 and Vista architecture and cool audio quality reception of W7 at Phasure and elsewhere made me adopt a “wait and see” approach till something definite happened.....then this thread started .

I can really identify with your “the heat of the battle” comment, I get that a lot in what I do as well. You had to work with W7 when it was released though, every MS dependant application owner has to. What impresses me is that in you pursuit of the best sound you have the guts to say the “king has no clothes”.... I mean “We all fell in the W7 pitfall” dosent pull any punches does it 

Best,
Nick

Marcin hi,

I think all of these services are needed. This is the minimum set to still have a working audio system. From memory I removed each individually to check and the system failed. I remember being disapointed at the time because XP would run on only 6 services ! Each removal was tested for sound quality as well (at least on my system).

Nick.

Marcin,

GREAT !!!!

I think the MMCS regedit is another fundamental component of the playback platform

I was thinking I had a case of the placebos, so it would be good hear your detailed on the change. For me it changes almost everything in the sound and takes music very big step closer to vinyl.

Ps don't take the Mulimedia Class Scheduler MMCS service out, its this service that implements the registry values that you are listening to 

Nick.

Peter hi,

Indead things are moving fast.

I don't know if you have had time to digest the underlying concept behind the registry tweak I posted above. This could explain at least part of the Vista W7 difference. It seems in Vista Multimedia Scheduling Service DOES guarantee CPU time slots to audio. This feature has been dropped in W7 - so NO guarantee of CPU time slice length in W7 ! The reason MS gives for dropping dedicated CPU time slices for W7 is power management but I read a lot of complaints after Vista was released about network transfer speeds more than halving whilst playing audio in Vista.

The registry keys mentioned allow you to specify the CPU time slice length and associated priorities for Audio replay (quite important  )

I think this might be another fundamental parameter for playback, like use of RAMDisk. It would be good to get your thoughts on this. If your reference system improves like mine when using these setting with RAMDisk as well, I predict a rash of smiles breaking out at your house quite soon.

I am not sure people are working with these registry settings yet but it would be really good to get some feedback on them. I am worried that I have a dose of placeboitus 

Nick.

Josef,

Now I think about it, I think you are right. Both HDD play and RAMDisk play are playing from RAM already !!

I think I remember reading that preconverted files are loaded to memory before play (except WAVs that are not processed which need Copy to OS setting). This means as you say both HDD and RAMDISK are playing from RAM.

What is making the difference ??

Nick.