Hi Joachim,

My settings are quite random and need more exploring. On the positive side in the third day with these settings unaltered (just relaxing) I still think it sounds fine. I will PM you with the details of today.

Peter, no special USB3 card. Some OEM part in a brown unmarked box. It needs a RENESAS driver. Yet on the RENESAS website it is indicated that the last drivers have been made for windows7. I could not find any 'hidden' ones for win8 or 10 on the net either.

reagrds, Coen

Hi Peter,

I'm a picky guy wrt audio and want to get the best out of mij relatively modest setup.

I disabled the fiberfill (=hiberfill, damn spelling corrector) and that reduced the boot to 35 seconds. Quite a long time in the welcome screen and then almost immediately into the windows screen.

On the driver front I found a win10 version for my video card and that actually installed without any problems. This definitely brought SQ forward. I'va also been looking for a win10 driver for my USB 3 card but those have not been made for WIN8 and later versions.

On the settings front I'm moving forward too. I think your reference settings are way to demanding for my setup and the quite nice sound I'm listening has a totally different set of values.
For now the most decisive move was increasing Q1,Q1x along with SFS. I'm far from finished exploring, but it has become clear to me that I've to go through all the settings and co-influencing ones to find the best balance for my system.

regards, Coen

Thanks for the reply,

It could be a million things in retrospect that foremost I think have to do with differences in PSU, chipset and processor. And it is not unlikely that those can lead to quite a different behavior of the system manipulation by the software. On the other end I may not have gone far enough to reap sonic benefits (like RAMDISK and the two tier fileserver-XXHEMusicPC setup).

Then there is always the possibility that we have different paradigms on good sound, however there is nobody I trust more in this regard than you. I have a post in preparation for this. I plan to visit Koningshof/Veldhoven/Xfi for a live exposure of the real ting this year, hopefully you have a good room!

One last question: should I disable the fiberfill for WIN10?

regards, Coen

Hi Peter,

My LPS is not as efficient as your SMPS so I am bound to see more effect from a little extra or less PC power consumption.

I started out in WIN10 MIN OS with XX configured according to your settings (yet no RAMdisk or remote control). That gave me 95 Watts when playing music Unattended. I set Q4 and Q5 to 0, timeresolution to 10mS and increased both first XT tweaks to 98 and 54 (the others seemed to have no effect). I noticed that the disabling of Timestability to 'not optimal' increased consumption by a watt or two.

If I wait for a minute, the idle power consumption of WIN10 decreases to a similar level of WIN7 now: 73-74 Watts.
WIN10 has a tendency to make the HDDs rattle for quite a long time during which the consumption is in the order of 85 watts.

The big difference is between 9z9e on WIN7 vs 2.02 on WIN10, when playing music the first REDUCES the power consumption by 3 to 4 watts yet the latter INCREASES the power use by 10 Watts. This is regardless of further settings, min or normal OS or enabling/disabeling of devices...

At the danger of hijacking my own thread I have another observation. The boot of Win10 in normal OS takes 25 seconds of which 16 seconds to the 'welcome' screen. In MIN OS the boot takes 44 seconds of which 11 are to the "welcome' screen.
IOW is this normal behavior or an indication that something is wrong?

regards, Coen

Even my '80s walkman sounds better than win8. I have left it behind a long time ago (win8 that i) and never put the powermeter on it. Can't remember the password even. If win10 is like a win8plus than powerconsumption could have been higher than win7. Anyway directly after boot without any application started win7 consumes 10watts less than win10. Your call, did you measure?

This power might not interesting per se, but sure it will indicate the processor and mobo running because of something that I overlooked. Drivers maybe?

After the steep climb to a min-ossed win10 config I really want this to work!


You mean full ones your way and empty ones back? 

Regards, Coen

Hi,

I'm not all that smitten with WIN10 after a week of listening. Sure its much, much better than WIN8 but that 's not really an achievement imho.

After reverting to my normal setup I am again amazed and puzzled how much better it still sounds with WIN7. Knowing that power consumption may have a part in SQ, I have conducted some measurements and it turns out that WIN10 in Unattended plays 12-15 Watts more that WIN7 attended. And that was after tweaking settings to allow for a power reduction from 97 to 83 Watts for WIN10.

I had never thought that WIN10 was so power savvy and this may indicate some potential for SQ improvement. I wondered if the rather high power consumption has anything to do with windows vs custom drivers. Are you using WIN10 plain or with special win8 or win10 drivers?

regards, Coen

Hi Peter,

No messing around with the "driver needs not be signed". I wouldn't dare!

Rebooted four times just only checking if the NOS1 was in the panel. NOS1 was there each time. I also did a reboot after playing some tracks in XXHE, no problem either.

Much better SQ returned so this was no imagination.

Don't know what causes the NOS1 not to appear in the panel or mess with the sound, let's hope it stays this way. Maybe my previous installs of 1.03 and 1.04 messed the OS up under the hood or something. Whatever.

regards, Coen

thanks for the replies,

I just booted again and no NOS1 present in the driver panel. Replugging the USB does not make a difference.

Does this all work when at Min OS?

regards, Coen

Hmmm,

Started the PC and no NOS1a in the driver panel appeared. Rebooted and it appeared again.
Saw the sample rate moving along all rates in a loop.
After starting XX and playing a track and the error message "failed to set sample rate" appeared. After two tries the music started playing. Imho this is about "catching" the right sample rate in the loop.

Now the music played, but shoot me I think it sounded pretty cr*p compared to the other day. Also later in the track there seem to be hiccups in the music. I also saw some kernel streaming errors.

I reinstalled the 1.04 driver, rebooted and the driver showed the last sample rate without looping to others sample rate. Sound seems still improvable and I experienced some hiccups (and errors). I wonder what happens in one of the next boots.

regards, Coen

p.s. the was in normal OS mode still.

 

Thanks Peter,

Changing to "Drivers need not be signed"  via XXHighEnd settings (and not Windows 10 settings...  ) with a reboot in NORMAL OS mode allowed the 1.04 version to install.

I feel sorry for Johan, but hey it could have very well been me not noticing MinOS. I hope you will be able to solve it without a reinstallation of WIN10.

regards, Coen

Hi Peter,

I don't think so. The instructions say that you may have to do something, but I cannot figure out what. Googleing did not bring any useful answers.

regards, Coen

Hi,

I've got the same driver "problems" here. Installed the old 1.03 first on win10 10074 and ran into the next things with an unactivated v2.02:

1) driver does not see the NOS1a after the driver installation reboot, another reboot is nesseccary to see the dac in the driver control panel. Actually i dont know if this is installation related since I ran into this twice.

2) first play after executing xxhe2.02 gives a "buffer overflow" error, restart the track and everything plays fine

3)  saw the flipping of the samplerate, but no big deal to me

4) the nos 1.04 driver will not install. "Preparation failed" error no matter what I try.

Probably all known stuff, just sharing to provide support for the courageous that dare to wander onto the win10 path.

Greets, Coen

Hi,

No RAMdisk in here, but I didn't notice any SQ differences between FLAC and WAV anymore since my NOS1(a) days. On SQ I couldn't tell them apart.

They are handled slightly differently however by the software though since my FLACs play without hiccups, while the same music in WAV (and all other WAVs) tends to stop for a brief moment after 20-25 seconds. It happens with all XXversions higher than 0.8 yet this hardly bothers me since most of my music is in FLAC for "real-estate" reasons.

regards, Coen

Hi Peter,

I quasi randomly played around with the XTtweaks an Q settings and I found the XT settings not that significant to the power consumption. A couple of watts at most. In fact changing the SFS made more of a difference.
I think I do observe a correlation between power consumption and sound quality. The lower the better it seems. This gives motivation to see how far I can go here more methodically.
I fear that there are too many things in my computer system different from yours and that not all effects of your reference can be reproduced here.

Cheers, Coen

Hi Peter,

Ok, I understand.

Now my finding is that the Q settings make a big difference when playing music.
Qx:1x;
Qn: 12,0,0,1,1. 93 watts;
Qn: 12,0,0,1,0. 83 Watts;
Qn: 12,0,0,0,0: 69 Watts.

I've to look closely to the powermeter display since the digit 8 is very similar to the digit 9. In my first post I mentioned the heat and humming that was with the 93 watts setup in stead of the 83.

I will look into the XT tweaks for further effects.

Regards, Coen