Alain,

Just thinking about your remarks. The hum comes when you decrease attennuation, so that will be hum on the signal side. If you want to know how silent your amp is, just short circuit the INPUTS (signal direct to ground). It probably is very silent.

The DAC is probably also very silent if you would have the means to establish that. So I think a line filter will solve a non existent problem.

I recognise this hum phenomenon, and it boils down to proper earthing, good shielded cabling and positioning of the components (no transformers or powercables next to signal cables etc).

Regards, Coen

This developement did not go unnoticed by the Cat:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=1&postID=19794#19794

High praise for Bert (and Peter) indeed, with the usual characteristic rough borders.

Regards, Coen

Hi Peter,

I just noticed Phasure and B-D designs presence on the x-fi in Veldhoven next week.
This looks like an ideal local opportunity to get myself a reference for WIN8 sound with Bert's latest creation the Orelino which looks mighty interesting.
I guess they are running in and being tuned at your place right now...

Regards, Coen

Thanks for the reply Peter,

Ironically my little tubeamp has less noise than a gainclone I slammed together a couple of years ago, actually less noise even than any solid state amp in my possession. Yet those are not the great ones for shure.
The noise thing has to be addressed in due time, not even leaving the path of vacuum bliss. 50 year old carbon comp resistors don't help in this department.

Anyhow I now feel confident to look outside of the settings into the hardware settings involved.
The recent grounding scheme revival seems a good place to start without changing everything. I haven't given this consideration for at least a year now and stuff has changed. Its got some potential for improvement.

True that I have no reference, you all could be happy campers with this cr*ppy sound and I allready have better sound here than most of you.  . OTOH I know you and feel capable of identifying good sound, so no chance!

One wonders how minute noise levels influence the macro sound of win8 so much. Intuitively I would suspect someting like win8 playback to trigger more hf resonaces (oscillations) in the amp distroying the sound. Such a marco phenomenon better fits the sound impact.
 I do believe that going from very good to great one must take care of everything and that includes the tiniest amount of noise.

One more thing:
This thread is really a big warning for newcomers to XXHE that want to embark on a WIN8 platform only to get disappointed for reasons outside of the XX software. Some "minimum" requirements for getting it all going would be very nice in the future. I realise we are not there yet!

Regards, Coen

Thanks for the hint, I checked the NOS1 and switch #5 is on.

Regards, Coen

It is NOS 1 into de ECC88 (correction: ECC83) of the amp so it is at full gain. I can hear a very low level 50 Hz hum form the ac filaments at my listening position (@3.5m). For hf noise i have to proceed to 1.5m from my HF horns. It is a white noise hiss. Even with my ear in the horn it isn't very loud or annoying.

Regards, Coen

I've been re-reading this thread, because I still feel like Arvind in the first post. Moreover I've tried so many things that I do NOT believe anymore that there is a reasonable chance that I will ever succeed.

Worrying is that after carefull listening to my current win8 setup:
- i hear less detail than in win7
- the bass is allways booming and "thick"
- i hardly can differentiate between low end drums, bass and other percussion instruments
- voices allways sound "dark" or "heavy" with little character and are less intelligable than in win7
- high pitched instruments are subdued exept for small rough bursts of noise (hints of triangels)
- strong instruments eclipse others. (Ie when the violins play crescendo I have trouble to hear hobos, flutes and the like)
- it remains a bit mechanical and sometimes "hard"
Plus the stuff I mentioned a few posts back

That is a whole frustrating lot of negatives especially because this is the best I could do after hours and hours of tweaking. The sound moved in many directions, but never enough in the right one. This gives rise to issues out of the scope of the software. Where to proceed? Pc? Power? EMI? Grounding? Could I ever get fine win7 sound with big issues in these areas?

To be blunt all my cd players including the 14 bit philips cd-104 of 1988 do a better job still.
I will categorize the above as Peter's "bad windows 8 sound" that seemingly cannot be cured on my system.

Fortunalely the win7 sound is still delightfull and does not suffer from the items above so no worries for those who run into the same situation...

Regards, Coen

A reboot cured the last problems, so a "solution" is available . The post on how to use a RAMdisk was very enlightning and much of my mahem might very well have stemmed from a too small disk. No troubles so far.

Am I happy with this result? Well in one way yes, in another no. I still would like to find out why I am experiencing unacceptable sound quality with windows 8 no matter what settings I try or what I do with the BIOS. Een the best combination is rather poor. I had secret hopes that my inconveniences were a symptom of a problem that also would lead to better sq... No luck this time!

Regards, Coen

This setting is driving me nuts. I suspect PE of adding hardness and zip on loud passages of the music. Occasionally it gets nasty.
Turning it off the sound looses some naturalness and colour, and that is a pity since WIN8 is allready very low on that quality (here). Next to sounding less "hard" and more pleasant, it gains some momentum and dynamics, but thats not the weak spot of WIN8.

Cant make up my mind here.

Regards, Coen

I managed to add an increase to the XX program IMDisk imagesize. Actually a made a new one in NORMAL OS.

I ran a track of 9:12 minutes and the next track started seemlessly. I am cautious to conclude it is due to the larger IMdisk size (2Gigs) it could also be some WIN8 boot magic. Yet it worked, however...

Next problem arose: if I pause or stop the music now (or something similar like pressing the PE button while playing) It won't start anymore. I have to clear the XXEngine3 to get it started again....

Regards, Coen

Just add one with the "ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver" utility (also on the IMdisk site). They even both seem to boot if you check "virtual disk drive access image directly" AND boot from WIN8 into WIN8.

And use a different drive letter off course.

In the timebar thread Peter advices to have the XX program IMDisk at 2Gigs (minimum?). For now this seems to cure some problems (not shure yet).

Regards, Coen

A few WIN8 boots later, the timebar runs fine, yet EVERY track ends in an "engine #4 did not start in time" error message.

I lowered q1, q1x and sfs toget rid of it, but without success.

No problems with XX on the spinning disk,it works at the cost of SQ.

Regards, Coen

FYI: "Needs 24 Bits" does not work here, only static noise. Anyway I did not expect an impact on sound.

Regards, Coen

This post is not about a formal sq setting, it is about an selection option in the settingsarea of XX to make it work at all.

I refer to the DAC settings section where the " DAC is zz Bits yyy.y KHz" can be set. Now there are two working values for the NOS1.

Strangely this option for the NOS1 has quite a profound influence on the sound. That is that there is a quite noticable difference between "DAC is 24 bits 768.0 KHz" and "DAC is 32 bits 768.0 KHz".

Since nobody states this in his/her sig, i assume that this is an afterthought for many of us.

My finding is that setting it on the 24 bits option sounds more balanced, gentile and natural.

The caveat with WIN8 is that it responds to allmost everything you do either to XX, the OS or the BIOS. So this conclusion is only valid in the light of my current settings.

I am however very interested in your findings wrt this setting. Please share!

Regards, Coen

The IM disks seem to work fine here, followed the instructions on the site and it worked immediately. AFAIK I did nothing after the WIN8 install wrt DotNet.
Maybe important: I installed them OUT of Min OS thus in NORMAL OS. Running the whole package left me with two icons on the desktop. With the "ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver" you can make and delete disks of bring them back from an image.

They all show up after booting. Well, with the side note that after rebooting into win8 from leaving win 7 one of the two disks does not start on my system.

I'm experiencing some strange stuff on WIN8, which could be related to having XXHE on a ramdisk. With XX on the normal spinning OS disk I have less anomalies.

Since WIN8 is interactive as hell, I think I get the best sound with both XX and the playbackdrive on seperate drives. I still have to dig further for an SQ in WIN8 that suits me and might come to a different conclusion in the end (if I succeed into an end ).

Regards, Coen