Hmmm,

I cant' lock in on settings with 8-2. I start out with sound that has great potential, tweak and tune, only to find myself losing interest in the music very fast the next day and set it all back to start all over. Next to that I cannot zoom in on settings, it sounds like 10 dB less loud (which reflects my volume settings) . It never gets annoying like all my win8 trials, but it refuses to get fantastic. 8-2 is extremely sensitive to settings, sometimes it really sounds strange, sometimes it is frightingly realistic (wood hitting riveted cymbals, never heard that before). The bad thing is that it sounds great one one album but not on the next.

The faults in my preferred 8e settings have become much more apparent.  Anorexic, sharp on the silibants and edges and a vague soundstage. Nevertheless time and again I find myself listening to and ejoying complete abums, never having the urge to leave my chair and change a setting. Dispite its wrongness something fundamental is very very right.

I've been wondering what it is that makes it so easy for my brain. Things that occur to me is that the instruments sound very fast and dynamically nuanced and echoes/reverb never seems to end. Maybe this is a side effect of the 'wrongness'. Drums and bass have impact and are perfectly timed with the rest of the music. 'Loose' and 'unrestrained' are words that come to my mind. These traits are found only with the very specific settings for my system. Even the disabeling of motherboard devices needs to be undone for maximum effect.

I am pretty shure this is more about the pc and dac than anything else. I had to change interlinks the other day because my unshielded diy cables started to pick up interference permanently. To support Peters opinion that cables do matter only little, I have found very little difference in sound dispite the fact that the cables could not be more different (copper vs silver, coax vs braid, wbt vs eichmann, 25 vs 5 years old).

Well, I hope the 8e qualities can be reconsiled with those of 8-2 one day,

Regards, Coen

For the record:

This message appears now and then when playing music with 8-2. Sometimes in a track that I just started, sometimes along an abum, but sometimes i can listen to a complete range of 60+ minute albums without a stop. When i switch tracks i've encountered 8-2 won't start playing the new track at all.

This is a 8-2 thing on my system. No such behaviour in 8e. Settings are really different though, now pa is engaged (-1).

Removing engine3 by pressing the "off" button in the q settings area helps for all above stops or not-starts.

Regards, Coen

Thanks for the excellent lecture.

Another remotely related observation about 'what do we really know about our hearing' dropped in my mailbox today:

http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/headphone-cable-measurements-wrap

The writer tries to deal with the (barely) audible differences between headphonecable and cites a really interesting article about the unexpectedly acute human auditory perception.

I personally really like the part about timing and missing harmonics .

Regards, Coen

In the only 2 minutes i listened this morning to 8-2 in min OS, this was not particularly apparent to me.

I will respond again after some more listening, but first I have to sort out some strange power outages in our house (in daytime).

Regards, Coen

Hi Arjan,

Seasonic is great. Take a model over 500W, it has extra capacitance over the "smaller ones. Quality comes with a price though.

Also the Corsair dsp 7xxW units are worth investigating.

Regards, Coen

Jud post #279 describes exactly what I am observing in my system. No setting or tweak up to today has been able to change that. In fact when I switch back to win7 ANY music I play sounds so engaging that i find myself listening to complete albums, where in win 8 it takes an effort to listen into 2 minutes into a track. This IS about the musical fabric that is lacking in win8.

That's the way it is here, I do not intend to judge anyone in this forum on an opposite experience.
The pro-win8 lot have something fundamentally different in their systems or rooms. This could be about the filtering or absence thereoff in the playback chain. I don't buy this is a matter of (bad ) tase.
We should be able to sort this out together.

For your entertainment hereunder some stuff I tried:

XX on a primo RAMdisc on win7 did no good to the sound, adding a nasty edge and destroying some of the musical magic. I was under the impression that Primo does not support win8, so I did not try. I might as well give the IMdisc a shot. I suspect however that this will not change win8 into a super win7, but if it does that would be nice.

I got some progress in win8 and win7 with disabeling the motherboard devices that are not in use (mobi usb3, com ports, unused usb2 chipset, etc) with "device manager". The sound gets a little more coherent, nothing really big.

Regards, Coen

You are not alone. There are very few posters here with a superb win8 sound and it took them some work to get it going.

I just started with this, but my win7 sound is miles ahead of win 8. I guess in some way we all tuned our systems to win 7 in the past year. I do believe though that this will not explain the difference in experience.

Apparently the powersupply and grounding play even a bigger role with the new os.

Anyway what I am hearing here with win8 is an unnatural appearance and disapearance of tones (attack and decay). As a result the sounds are a little thick and restrained and it all does not blend into a musical performance. However the timbre and separation of instruments are traits that could complement my win7 sound. Furthermore I percieve a "loudness" or "disco" effect being a little bass and top heavy. This while it actually seems to sound less loud....

I've tried a truckload of settings to get closer to the sound magic of win7, I am afraid I have to look elswere (pc? Grounding? Supplylines?).

Regards,Coen

Joachim,

Did you check the windows 8 mixer (volumesliders)?

Regards, Coen

Ok, you didn't activate!

Regards, Coen

What a bad example pic. There is even a phaseshift between analog and digital domain, never seen that before.

This is a totally useless pic to make any other point than that the drawer didn't understand sampling either (probably a marketeer).

Just a warning: Digital theory is highly abstract and mathematical. Not much if anything in there that is inutitive or will explain "better" sound. Implementation of it in electronics is more of an experimental art than science, though Peter is on to some principles by now! I think the field of psychoacoustics will provide for better insghts in our sound perception of various formats and recording/playback means. Much generalisations in there and little attention for the "high-end audio" however.

regards, Coen

The first one looks clipped to me, the last one compressed. The first one obviously having much less dr and level, the last one having the most harmonics.

Pffew, this does not add up. What source could possibly be clipped and low in level at the same time? A bad lp rip? I hold you in higher regard!

Lets give it a shot:
1: cd
2: sacd
3: lp

Regards, Coen

I only have w7 here, so no opinion between about w8!

In due time I will move on with Windows.

Regards, Coen

I'll let the initial windows 8 exitement wear some time, so windows 7 for me the coming times.

I have however no real progress in the settings: I keep coming back to the initial ones.
I got nervous this night when I thought they were all set but SQ was downright horrible (something like a worn record scratchy, thin, unpleasant). It turned out that I had left the "time performance index" at "optimal" yesterday. So thats another setting that does not work out here.

Well maybe i have allready found all there is in this setup with 08e, yet sq is actually excellent so it was ambitious to get more out of it in the first place.

Thanks for thinking along,

regards, Coen

Here is a tutorial for a clean install with the upgrade:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/clean-install-windows-8-upgrade.htm

regards, Coen

This is exactly what i wanted to add to my post from yesterday (another thread)!
The nos1 xxhe combo has created its own version of a sound with the traits many appreciate in vinyl playback. My personal favourite: a natural musical flow, which has everything to do with speed and realistic dynamics.

Not that vinyl has no raison d'etre anymore. It has its place for unique recordings, a meatier sound (working on that), the joy of the whole recordplaying ritual and the tactile challenge to get the setup right. All in all its a different experience to be appreciated for its own merits.

Regards, Coen