Try to rip the same track from your new drive again - it may be possible that it sounds different too. I don't ever tried to find the reason, but I'm shure it's not the drive but it's the harddisk. If the specialists are able to recover files even when data are overwritten by special patterns - what could happen with music data if they are stored at different locations on the harddisk? Another aspect are the algorithms for data correction. With ever growing data capacity there are more complex highly specialized algorithms which try to compensate the increasing error rate. There could be an experiment: Rip the data to a NOS harddisk and a modern high capacity harddisk. Will there be a sonic difference? It's speculative but reported sometimes.

Mystical greetz 
Georg 

I feel that the hirez tracks need a new point of view. The first time I heard them I was a little bit disappointed and thougth that the sound is too "cool". But with every step lessening the electrical and acoustical interferences I got a better and more interesting soundstage. I think that this was only the start for a new experience. What do you think?

Georg

Hi Ed,

I'm using maintenance free batteries for solar equipment buffered by polarized capacitors (chemicon) and some low pass filtering capacitors. The equipment and the handling is very basic because I'm using high efficient loudspeakers - alnico coax for the satellites and alnico horn for the bass. I reload the batteries every 2 weeks or so mostly

Georg 

I did things as usual - disabling everthing what is not necessary. The only unusual I did was disabling hyperthreading.

Georg

The cpu chips are more complex systems than ever before. From my point of view it is not possible to "reengineer" the behaviour. It could be interesting (but costly ) to build up a chip with the components only which are necessary for computing the datastream. But that is another project 

Georg

I followed the tread with DannyD and my problem is solved too with this workaround 

Georg

I made two screenshots: The first shows the right behavior the second the interrupted playing. There is an additional constant load in the second cpu core. The music playing is interrupted when the performance peak arises in the first cpu core. I can hear another characteristic symptom: There is a little relay build in the Beresford DAC which disrupts the output if it is searching for the correct sampling frequency. It is clicking exactly at that time - he SPDIF output ist disturbed. 

Yes, it's attended but I'm using double with arc prediction.

Georg

There is a little strange behaviour: Sometimes the first title from a playlist plays flawless but the second title (and the following titles) are interrupted by memory load frequently. If stopping the replay of the second title and starting the second title again, all works fine - until the next title of the playlist. What could be the reason?

Georg

I got two of ATOM-330 based PC's. I modified both as written above and found a problem with the second one. I had to decrease the CPU clock to 2 GHz because the installed RAM was too slow Apart from that the systems are working stable.

Georg 

I found a solution in the mean time - I need speed, speed, speed. I tried all combinations but always had similar problems. I found the help in some overclocking forums and that's what I did:

• Disable the two hyperthreading cores via BIOS
• Overclock the ATOM 330 to 2.1 GHz. That works fine if there is only XXHighend playing. I determined core cpu temperatures of about 45 °C, 85°C is specified by Intel
• Spend some extra PCI latency for the Juli@ via BIOS
• Use Scheme-1
• Set split memory to 12 MBytes

Until now I'm happy with double sampling / arc prediction for 16/44.1 and 24/96. Thanks a lot for your experiments.

  I forgot to write that the system is right now very sensitive of electrical interferences from the power side.

Cheers,
Georg

If I'm using an ATOM-330 based PC running XX there are sometimes pops with low buffer and low Q1 settings. Looking at the task manager I can see a good balanced CPU load over the 2 cores and the 2 hyperthreading cores (every core appr. 5% load). If the pop happens the load of one core increases to 100% load for a short time (as shows Engine3 in process explorer). What could be the reason?

Cheers,
Georg

I looked forward to hearing "Rene Clemencic and his flutes" this evening and read the message about the new version concurrently. My first impressions after a short music session: I was able to find the optimal working point immediately in adaptive mode. The different ancient flutes sound for the first time without that little acute sound - really impressive. Addionally I feel that especially with high definition records  (I tried with 2L) string instruments sound very expressive but without agression.

Congratulations Peter!

Georg

Hi Peter,

is there an interdependence between the Q1 value and the upsampling rate?

I can play setting Q1=-2 with upsampling (double). But if changing to normal mode the sound is disturbed and I have to increase Q1 to -1. Is it an option to deal with?

Cheers,
Georg