Hi Peter,

I think this is a great initiative. I've been searching like crazy for some topics and had to dive into previous releases to get a grasp of some functions.

Imho should questions and issues be left to the normal forumchapters and not allowed in this section.
 

regards, Coen

I thought the msb is allways involved no matter how much you attennuate since it is determining the dc value of the output. Iow you only attennuate the ac component made by the other bits in the r2r ladder.

Am I missing something here?

Regards, Coen

Hi Peter,

Thanks.

It is solved now! The coverart issue was related to single files being in the main directory. As soon as I moved these to a seperate directory the coverart appeared .

The galleries look very promising, but I do not understand how to access them after I created and filled them. Maybe I am hindsighted but I could not find a 'show galleries'  button or something like that in the xx interfaces (no rightclicks either)....

Regards, Coen

Hi

In a quest to make better use of the potentially powerfull XX filefunctionality, I am trying to get a grasp on music directories, galleries and coverart.

Besides the fact that I am still in the utter confusion stage of figuring out how to get this operational, I noticed that the coverart is shown in the middle pane for some directories in my music root, but not for others. Actually the coverart of only the first album is shown in that case. This seems weird because the files and subdirectories within those those are very similar. FYI these are my real music directories.

The not so nice part is that I am now unable to search my entire music root or browse through all coverart, yet only the albums of the directories that XX shows.

Am I missing something important here?

So far, after a lot of reading and experimenting, I managed to create a galley a stuff two albums in there. It was a hassle, obviously I am not doing it the way it is intended.
Not shure what to do next, put x000 albums one by one in one or more galleries and make the gallery directory my music root?
Does anyone have an very, very, very simple instruction for this?

Thanks,

regards, Coen

If the Megahalems cooler and cpu get a little warm I manually turn on my extra silent noctua 14 cm fan. This fan is super silent, though it seems to leave a signature to the sound when plugged into the motherboard. Yes, on my mobo you can also select between pwm and voltage fan control.

This SQ effect gets less significant when I tap the power from an unused molex and use a little rheostat to tame the rpm of the fan. Most heat is coming from the northbridge and cpu so I only need very little rpm to keep temps very low with the i5. Probably uneccessary low for a XX only PC.

Regards, Coen

Noise, noise, noise.

Great posts

The whole xxhe pc playback is in the end about noise. Are you able to see the effect of different xx settings? Is this plot made with v07?

So this is where the Byebees come in, and everything else. Even vacuum tubes  , at least on my side!

Regards, Coen

Well,

I stubled upon this:  http://www.ultrahighendreview.com/are-9624-downloads-better-than-cds/. Mastering is a better explanation for the percieved sq differences than the inherent technicalities of the formats and conversion

But we came to that conclusion some time ago, didn't we?!

Regards, Coen

Nope! Any othe (audio) celebreties in the neighbourhood? I inquired about a retipped phono catridge once with the vdh company. To my surprise he was on the phone personally with an elaborate anwswer the same evening!

Regards, Coen

On off is managed by the motherboard via the large multi pin ATX connector. You can only plug one in the mobo so only one psu can be controlled. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which of those pins actually controls the on-off state of the psu... You can fool the other supply in being set by the motherboard by proving the right pin(s?) with probably 5V. This is tappable from a molex on the connected psu.

Am I ranting?

regards, Coen

 

Why not? They are made of many many strands of very thin carbonfibre. I have some stiff vdh internal speaker wire which is made of 5 conductors of silvered 0.6mm copper wire. Most metal vdh wire is quite flexible and made of multiple thin strands and silvered on the outside (better conductivity on the surface of the conductor). Flexibility is obviously important but I skin effect must have been taken into consideration.

If you take the trouble of asking this to him personally I am shure he will reply!

Well i agree with Scroobius that we can debate about the effect of the skin effect. My favourite Spica TC-50 cables where 2mm+ thick copper conductors (originally the core of a high power radar signal cable). Those don't fare well on my Altecs though.

Regards, Coen

This is about the skin effect, electrons repel eachother and go to the outside of the conductor. That is with a perfect conductor, imperfect -real- ones with resistance, also conduct within the conductor depending on frequency. If the conductor is too thick, group delay can occur within the conductor. This is why it is recommended to use conductors less than 0.6 mm diameter in audio, at least for the audible spectrum. If you want a large conducting surface, use a lot of isolated strands.

(source Allan Wrights cable cookbook. A very good read).

Regards, Coen

Perhaps you are looking for this: http://www.cuetools.net/wiki/FLACCL?

The cpu is easily outperformed (on single Flacs)

Regards, Coen

That was my finding too. Getting the same conclusions on quite different systems stems hopefull for a general PC setup guide.


I will take this tip seriously ! I have kilos of transformers etc lying around waiting for such a little project.

regards, Coen

Thanks!

I have a different mobo but applied a lot if the same tweaks, though some are new to me. Setting number 5) did the same for me on the Atom d525 motherboard (current cpu has no HT), ht on may be speedier (slightly) but off sounded better.

Off course there is more. Do you use the disc on ide or ahci mode?

Just recently I switched over to a new casing since the huge Megahalems cooler (no fans here when going for ult sq) didn't fit in my old one. No surprise I had to change a few xx settings to get my sound back again.

Regards, Coen

This article starts out nice but gets off track at the end. 1-bit (or multi single bit like dcs and ess) conversion is a can of worms that for shure does not adress the mentioned a-d conversion problems and has loads of issues on its own (like hf noise and increased jitter susceptabily). Most stuff said about sampling also hold true to 1-bit sampling, more importantly practically all pcm hires material is sigma delta "1-bit" sampled and decimated to the desired output (like 24/96). Too bad sigma delta conversion cannot be explained in laymans terms like lpcm since it is based on a highly abstract and mathematical process. Simple in excecution but very tough to grasp.

I agree that our da process, recording and playback chains aren't at all up to getting a resolution of 24bits. But for our xx playback the 24 bit DA is darn handy to attenuate digitally!

Fwiw I am in the camp that for most material I cannot observe a difference that is only due to the sampling rate/bit length. At best it sounds as good as 16/44.1, but that may be Peters' accomplishment.

Regards, Coen