Tonight I compared with 9z9b on win 8 (same tracks) and it seems that the balance is allways shifted to the right. It is only better noticable with some settings than others (ie low timeres).

It will shure take a lot of time experimenting with all possible dials to establish the most influencial ones...

I've had no weird skewing (yet?) of the balance on windows 7 with 1.186.

Regards, Coen

yes Peter,

But it is not solely triggered by the high sfs or high Q/Qx, timres or buffer size, but rather certain combinations. Thats what I meant with reproducing it consistently.

regards, Coen

Hi,

I've been trying to dial in 1.186 on windows 8 and encountered a sound issue. I cannot completely reproduce this consistently, but it was clearly noticable with high sfs (120), Q (14x10) and a timeres of 0.5 s.

On my system the sound got focussed between the speakers instead of being loose from them; more specifically it skewed to the right speakers side too. The sound also gained an unpeasant artificial (stressed?) quality with a lack of dynamics and small and condensed instrument "images". Changing the settings makes this effect dissappear and reappear.

A soundcheck on my win7 8e reference confirmes my finding of the skewing and narrowing of the sound balance.

Does anyone got a familiar experience?

Furthermore I have found that 1.186 dispite its virtues is no cure for the windows8 sound imperfections on my system that I have been raising since a year ago. I will put a little more energy in installing and optimising it for my win7 setup.

Regards, Coen

Ok thanks!

I missed that. After a reading those notes for a while the letters started dancing ...

Regards, Coen

Maybe I just missed something, but loading the tracks of feels a little different.

I was used to double-click on an album icon to ADD the tracks to my playlist. Now doubleclicking replaces all but the playing track in the playlist area with the new albums tracks.

When I press the "load" button instead of double-clicking the icon the tracks are added to the playlist. never used that button before so I don't really know if this is the normal behavior. This is convenient now!

Has this been changed or is there an "add"  setting/trick that I am unaware off?

regards, Coen

Hi juan,

my kind of thinking! The problem is that an OS has to do so many complex tasks for allmost any hardware that it is impossible to develop your own. However, what can be done is splitting tasks over different OSses/PCs and for a limited hardware setup, reducing the need for one that can do all.

This all boils down imho to a two (functional) pc setup. One for filemanagement internet connectivity maybe numbercrunching etc and one just for XX memory playback. The latter doesn't even need a user interface let alone a Graphical one. With selected hardware interfacing with dedicated hardware (like the NOS1) this can be a relatively "simple" OS. The other route would be stripping down a commercial os in order to be able to support a greater variety of hardware.

If this is all simple than you could make the point of integrating the (parameterised) memory playback part in the NOS1 (NOS2?). For the more generic tasks not directly assiciated with playback you can use any os.

Anyway it would be nice or maybe even necessary in the end to have more control over our playback environment. For now Peter has "solved" all windows versions for us so no real need emerged. Maybe 8.1 will be the trigger (or Peter's next challenge!).

This really deserves a topic of its own. More OT i really agree that sq should not be optimal because of a bug in a certain motherboards BIOS  .

Regards, Coen

Hi,

I installed this version on windows 8 and was like all previous posters immediately positively impressed with the sq (mimicking Peters recommended settings). The most important feat for me was far less shattering of the music making it sound much more like a whole musical performance. This has always been a hurdle for me to stay for a longer time on win8.

A little more listening revealed that (like Alain) I found it to be less dynamic or present than I was used to and also on occasions a bit sharp. Now trying to dial this out it became clear that the corescheme, sfs, timeres and dac buffer settings have an enormous impact on the sound. It is easilytunable to hyperdynamic end of the spectrum. I am afraid it will take some time to find the optimal blend in conjunction with bios settings, nevertheless sq remains impressive at all times!

In the meantime i will also evaluate this version on win7 and report back to you all.

Regards, Coen

Hi Nick,

That would be great!

regards, Coen

Hi

I just wanted to update on my experiments with the PP card.

As stated above I was not satisfied with the sound of the stock PP card. Assuming that noise is an issue and that the grounding scheme is a little odd I went to look for hidden potential in the card. As result I have tried and tested an alternative clock connection and different routings for the power supply of the card and clock board.

In chronological order I tried the following:

First I moved the leg of the transformer secondary from the clock board to the PCI card ground at the location of one of the removed capacitors (boy are these components small!). The whole idea is to vastly reduce the return path for currents generated in the secondary.
Soundwise this added some welcome body to the sound and better dynamics. Still the low end lacked power and it all sound a little 'rounded'. 

Then I moved the 5V/GND power supply from the PCIe molex directly to the clock board using a molex to SATA psu adapter cable, leaving the Paul Pang supply wires in place. The thought is to have a cleaner ground and 5V for the clock than for the USB cable. This is another big step in the right direction. The whole sound became louder and very musical, natural and organic. Perfect for classical, but unfortunately just not that suited for rock and the like.
Maybe important, but I did not modify the PC PSU molex, so in this setting there is no double 12V/GND routing anymore, only 5V/GND.

This inability to rock motivated me to disconnect the ground wire to the PCI-e card on the clock boards power supply. In the end there is an extra ground path created with this wire connected.
Without this wire only the 5V is connected, supplying to both the clock and the USB cable. Ground for the PCIe is provided by the motherboard.
This experiment was short lived, since now all naturalness and body was gone.

The next step was to disconnect both supplies from the clock board, now there is no 5V anymore. Now clock and PCIe card are fed by separate supplies from the PC PSU and no 5V is available on the USB cable.
This sounded better than the former, more dynamic and fresh. Closer listening learned however that cymbals sounded muted without body and that on crescendos the sound became thin and disorganized. Also, though I am not really good at this, there was no illusion of depth anymore.

FWIW reconnecting only the ground of the 5V to the PCIe, the roundness of the full connection returned.

Now as I feel a little tired with this card-in, card-out business, I switched on my lab supply and fed 5V/GND to the molex of the PCIe. Just as a hunch. Now we're talking! A rich dynamic sound, super musical, fantastic voices, tight bass and forever decaying sounds.

Now whats left to do is to swap the linear supply to the clock board and connect the PC PSU to the PCIe card molex.


Anyway all these experiments support my theories of grounding as well confirm findings of others. Some stuff I took away sofar:

1.  there is something with the 5V on the USB lines. It just sounds so much better with the 5V in place. This was already established in the USB cable thread.

2. The clock should have a SEPARATE 5V power supplies from the PC psu to the clock board and PCI-e card. This is the only way to be shure they have a common reference ground. I am inclined to state that only the 5V should be connected at the PCIe cards molex and not the ground, but I did not test that with an extra PSU wire.
Anyway a separate clock supply to avoid ground currents in (loops) in this apparently sensitive area is a great idea from the above findings. This is probably one of the reasons that the DEXA clocks work so well (if they do  ).

3. In retrospect the improvement in sound is amazing. For reference I refit my old USB3 card. No chance, a familiar sound but now mechanical, flat, harsh. Not that I ever noticed before! At this moment I can hardly imagine further improvements, but as we believe Nick and Paul, there is a vast potential still waiting!

I hope we can get to the bottom of this USB thing and address it in its root cause. For now this was a great learning experience.


regards, Coen

p.s.: please note that I have been talking about the PP v2 card!

edit: I noticed that my report missed some rationale. Now that only few have read it I have updated.

Hey you dual Dexa clock guys, what about the USB cable? Does another cable still make a difference?

Some (audio) USB cable manufacturers claim an influence on dataloss....

regards, Coen

Not to forget that noise also can get in a dac chip circuit by EMI or RFI or can be correlated to the incoming signals (like on chip switching noise for the data line).

You can address a lot of this noise by design (also on the chipdesign itself), but vhf will remain hard to beat.

This noise either translates to imperfect timing (even if the input is perfect) or to physical noise on the outputs (which can be very HF) disturbing the analog stage.

Anyway it will be both the noise level and spectrum that matter. Both can be manipulated with software and hardware measures like grouding schemes etc. While Peter may focus on the software part lets not forget what allready has been archieved on the hardware level. Imho there is further potential in the two to explore.

Wrt to dropped data: it is allways dangerous to not know what you assume! For one thing results of the past are no guarantee for the future especially with an operting system that is not your own (hint  ).
Ultimately it would be interesting to know what data is offered to the driver and what data arrives at the dac chip. It should not be so hard to design (or buy?) a card that is able to capture the dac interface signals and store them as  music data in a file. Then software can be applied to analyse the correlation. If we find perfect correlation we can rule out the data drops and it will be a noise only problem.

Regards, Coen

Peter,

Wrt the dataloss, is it relevant for the USB interface? I mean that contrary to SPDIF, the USB interface will arrange for a resend if a fault is detected. How on earth can we else transfer programs over the interface that have to be "bit perfect' to work? There is no such thing as a lossy streaming over the USB async mode or is there?

Some psu experiments with the pp board suggest to me that is is all about noise patterns and that we neither want strong noise components nor large semi random spreads. What still puzzles me is the profoundness of this noise on the sound. Anecdotal reports on other forums suggest this is the effect a small amount of jitter entering the DACs can have.

regards, Coen

This is exciting stuff, but not at our control at the moment. Like said before the mechanism that causes the very big audible changes is not known. For shure it has to do with powersupplies, clocks and data transport.

Lets not forget about the latter. I remember posts that some usb cable made the biggest difference yet (this was before the Nick/Paul clock experiments). I wonder if USB cables still make a big difference after the dexa clocks have been installed....

Anyway it must have to do with the same underlying causes, like noise profiles, signal degradation and (a)synchronicity. We must have an extraordinary sensitivity to the resulting effects because I think getting these gremlins in focus would need extreme measurements.

Hopefully our future experiments will reveal more about the direction to look for. For now we know that we have an awfull lot of parameters to tune and if we believe Paul and Nick (and I do) an expermimentally derived working solution is available. Now I am going to puzzle to get the one clock thing going.

Regards, Coen

A lttle update:

There is a significant difference in sound between the two USB ports. One (furthest from the mobo that I use normally) sounds round and a little thick and the other sharp and a little restless.

Furthermore I used a MOLEX to SATA power adapter cable to harvest the 5V and Ground (red and black wire) and soldered them directly to the clockboard supply, leaving the PP wires in place for the USB 5V.

Now this little change immediately sounded like an improvement: more looseness, natural detail and melody. Though this is a little hasty conclusion, I will give it some time and come back later wheter I still think it is an improvement.

Regards, Coen

With the standard pp card I posted before that I felt it was delicate and natural sounding, but with less drive, less highs and especially less bass.

That is compared to my standard oem usb3 pcie card (earlier version of the NEC chip with onboard switching regulators for the chip and 5V). Reversely this sounds more loose and melodious, together with more realistic highs and dynamics.

Now with the little modification (secondary grounded near NEC chip instead of clockboard), I concur with Paul. i have to add that the sound is still a bit less dynamic (smaller?) and it seems more tilted to the right channel. The latter could be or is a frequency balance left-right thing.

Is this the kind of report that is addressing your question?

Next I plan to do some psu connection experiments, before taking the plunge to a one-clock setup.

Regards, Coen