Thanks Russ. Will give him a listen.

Brian

Saw Tommy Emmanuel live last night. Unbelievable performer. He is a must see, if he's ever in your neighborhood.

So I've been on the road most of this week. Driving home yesterday it occurred to me that the substantial difference in sound that I heard between a track ripped directly to the OS drive and one ripped to an internal storage drive might have had other influences: the track on the internal storage drive was ripped a year or so ago with the optical drive in my cheap Dell, and the same track on the OS drive was ripped with my new Plextor PX-L890SA (thanks Juan). When I got home I reripped the track with the Plextor onto the storage drive. Damn, even with the storage drive plugged in, I'm having a very hard time discerning any difference between the track played from the OS drive and a track played from the internal storage drive.

One thing is for sure, the optical drive used to rip your tunes makes a big difference. As for Nick's tweeks, still sorting through 'em. 

Thanks Arvind, I think it's a problem with my DVD Drive.

Can you guys with 64 bit systems adjust the rip speed in the settings area of dbpoweramp? On my 32 bit system the rip speed is adjustible and I've used the slowest setting. On my 64 bit system the only rip speed option is Maximum. I sent dbpoweramp an email but haven't gotten a reply. Just wondering.....

I totally get what you are saying and I don't mean to be contrary at all. 

Peter, thanks for the sanity you bring to the table. Though I must say that because there are so many unknowns simple tweeks can and should be tried by folks here, cause consensus can provide a guide or direction for investigation.

Okay, I'm gonna go have another glass of that cool-aide.

Have a great day!

Brian

I'll take a pair too.

Brian

Thanks Nick, Iv'e had the PCIe card from the beginning. Have you specifically compared a filed ripped directly to your OS to one pasted there from another drive? Just wondering. Here there is a definite decrease in "glare" with the file directly ripped to the OS, similar to the difference when one unplugs unused drives.

It's really going to take some time to sort through all the possibilities. Very much appreciate your shared findings!

Brian

Nick's (intitial) tweeks on his new system are pretty significant so I thought it might be a good idea to put them in a topic of their own. (If this isn't agreeable please delete this thread) They are reprinted below:


This post is specifically about 2 and 4 above which I would think should be the same for everybody. I was really surprised that #2, putting music directly on the OS/XX drive would make such a significant difference for the better, but it does. I have always used a secondary internal drive to store music, I've never kept any music on the OS drive. Today I ripped a cd directly to the C Drive music folder and was surprised at how much better it sounded. The SQ improved more when I unplugged the DVD drive and the secondary music drive--#4 above. For me this is both good and bad news: all improvements in SQ are good. Bad, though, because it looks like I might need to move the OS to a two or three terabyte drive so I can reripp my music to it.......a bit of a daunting task at this point. Why rerip? Well I tried to copy/paste music files from the secondary drive to the OS drive any they didn't sound as good as the music ripped directly to the OS drive!

Anyone know of a good therapist, I might be in need of one!

Thanks for all the input. Problem was solved with a 512 mb Nvidia card. Really it makes no sense to me that the ASUS, 1 gig, card caused this SFS limitation. I rebooted numerious times using different SFS values with the ASUS card and it just wouldn't work over 414. I finally gave up when I got the following message:
Ha!

Thanks Cohen and Peter. Still no solution.


With nothing allocated by Engine 3 the memory use is 1.22 gig.


My graphics card is a cheap ($39) ASUS branded ATI 5450, fanless, with one gig of memory. reducing clock speed to lowest, lowest resolution, etc, makes no difference.

Though the sound is phenominal I'd like to have all working properly. Do you think using a card with less memory would make a difference?

Don't know if this is significant, but i have less kernel memory? Might that be the problem?

A quick first impression of hyperthreading:

On: softer, more refined, maybe even a bit more transparent

Off: In your face full sound, Gimme some Black Sabath Paranoid right now!

Will need to do lots more listening an fiddling with packages and stuff for what is preferred.

Are we having fun yet! 

Weird, the largest SFS I can get is exactly 414-one tick higher is a no go. Using 16 gigs of memory should allow for a higher SFS? To you various and sundry XX Guru's, any thoughts on what might be causng the limitation?