Please understand me correctly, I am not saying that the win7 sound is without flaws. Actually win8 isn't either. I just prefer it over win8 at the moment. This is still about musical flow, naturalness of instruments, especially the voices and freedom of "stress". Now, Win 8 highlights different aspects of the music. I have to add that tweaking improved this significantly compared to a previous win8 trial, but not to the extend that it "wins" over my win7 sound.

Peter, What do you suggest? I have reported some of the issues in this forum, I could add the ones I run into from now.

Regards, Coen

I suspect the sq part is due to my pc setup, apparently better suited to win7.

Others experience(d) also problems like cracks and stops with win8. I think all the booting and shutting off issues are due to "infant diseases" (a nice Dutchism eh!) of the OS. I am not applying any updates since they are shut off and have no permanent internet connection.

Regards, Coen

I purchased a win8 upgrade disk and I use a dual boot configuration with all practical programs on win7 and win8 as audio only. I suppose this does not work well. Maybe some of the stuff is used between OSses.

Well I thought these are the usual bugs with new software. Could be also be about the RAMdisks, but I prefer the sound with them.

Regards, Coen

Hi Peter,

Never upgraded in win7, dunno why....

Win8 is like in my sig 09z-9b.

I've done a lot of q5 experimenting in win8, it does make for significant diffences but so do other settings. It also about the annoances with the OS though.

Regards, Coen

It is time to admit it (again): I cannot reconcile with XX and windows 8at this stage. It is not as bad as the title of this thread suggests, but dispite the many improvements in sound  made by tweaking, I still prefer the trade-offs that XX and windows 7 have.

Do not mistake me for stating that windows 8 does not have excellent sound qualities, it does, sometimes. Yet everytime I (un)voluntary boot into win7 and play some tunes I realise I still much prefer the gentile, spacious and easy presentation .

Next to that every time I boot or shut off win 8, anything can happen. I've had many stalls of the process, sudden hybernates, changed BIOS settings, disappearing and reappearing icons, clicks and interruptions in the sound, etc,etc. and the latest is the systemclock running at half speed.

Win8 seems to work for the forum members with Extreme series CPUs and premium mobos, like the XXHE pc. They are also experiencing some strange stuff though.  Maybe my system is not fit for WIN8 yet I cannot compare.

Regards, Coen

Next to several other inconsistencies between boots and playsessions caused by WIN8, I am now stuck with a typical situation that the XX timebar is running at about half speed. Maybe it is half speed I am not shure.

I mention the first because WIN8 seems to have a mind of its own. Stange stuff appears and sometimes disappears without my (consious) intervention. This issue appeared after a regular boot some time ago.

I couldn't find an running issue on this, maybe someone raised it allready in another thread.

The thing is that after the music ends (iow the track is finished in the indicated real time), XX plays silence until the timebar time ends (indicating the original playing time). So that is the same track again but without sound!

Sometimes XX stops at the end with the message: "audio device could not be determined" or an "Engine #4 did not start in time".

After applying almost all tricks in this forum, every now and again I hear good things in WIN8 but it is very very véry inconsistent. Too much work and too little pleasure I'm afraid. Let's cross our fingers for 8.1.

Regards, Coen

P.s. i just saw that the systemclock is also slowed down.

Hi

If 300 Watt is minimum, 1.000Watts must be enough: Musical Fedelity KW amps or some of the pro sound stuff should do the trick.

As an unrequested and maybe unwelcome advice:
All amps increase distortion at increasing power levels. In addition a low efficiency speaker waists all this power into heat (more than 99,9%) heating up the voicecoils and changing the speakerparameters. I have yet to hear a system that makes this high power - low efficiency concept work.
Many systems on this forum are based on high to very high efficiency speakers, not conincidently!

Regards, Coen

Hi George,

I have an official Primo licence, but found IMdisk to work as well and is a little easier to setup. I have created the imdisks with two .img files with the first checkbox checked in order to save changes in the virtual disk  to their corresponding files.
Actually IMdisk created the files, I only set the filename (with .img extension).

This works like a charm in min OS. I now only use the IMdisk as playbackdrive.

Regards, Coen

Not even mains power??!!

That would be something!! :

Regards, Coen

Hi,

I can't see a good reason why (wired) Ethernet would make a positive difference to USB.

1) it is still an electrical connection transporting both data and noise

All the noise will still be generated:

2) the data has to be encrypted/decrypted by the ETN chips for suitable transport
3) you need an OS to tranform a music file into commands to the ETN card/chip
4) you need a PC to do nr 3)

It will likely be different from the USB noise.

regards, Coen

FYI

Neither did I. I just like the sound with the Playbackdrive (accidentally on the IMdisk) better than no Playbackdrive!

Not shure yet if I subjectively agree with the second statement on SQ. Maybe this is just a matter of settings.

regards, Coen

Hi,

I installed one IMDisk with this tool and check "launch at Windows startup", than I mounted another IMDisk with the "IMDisk Virtual Disk Driver" utility.

I don't know if the above has anything to do with it, but both drives are installed at the WIN8 boot. Bug or feature....?!

If you are into using the two IMdisk drives than this could be convenient.

regards, Coen

Hi,

I made another sep forward to better WIN8 sound by switching PeakExtend to OFF.

This made for a much bigger difference than I can remember from my WIN7 environments. The hypercontrast sound went away together with the sharp silibants and booming lows. Voices and bass sound way more natural now. The "emotion"/"music" quality is also improved.

regards, Coen

Hi,

I have a dual boot configuration win win7 and win8.

I have fond that when I reboot from win7 I get the "win7" boot selecting screen, that is the simple black selectionscreen. If I boot from there into win8, the cracking and stopping occurs.

Booting from win8 into win8 for the second time, brings up the fancy blue win8 boot selection screen. If i go from there into win8, there is no cracking anymore.

I consider this issue for me as solved!

Furthermore, my computer stalls at boot when I perform a restart from win8. A total shutdown and restart does not exhibit the behaviour. Win8 needs an update!

Regards, Coen

Hi,

"Emotion" or "music", these are the things I am lloking for too in win8.
I found that this quality is served by NOT having XXHE on a Ramdisk (or IMdisk) and with a timesres of 1ms. Xxhe is in this case on the c:\ os partition.
When xxhe is on the IM disc crescendos are unlistanable and the sound is reminiscent of a hi res mp3. The higher timeres calmes the sound and causes more "flow".

That is on my system of course.
Unfortunately it is not on par with win7 (yet).

Regards, Coen