XXHighEnd

Hi Peter,

Wishing you & all the forum members Merry Christmas.

This has happened to me for the first time since using the 9y-4, last night, as soon as I clicked on play, there was a high frequency static sound, I muted my preamp & switched of XX, restarted it & it was playing normal. For a moment I thought I would blow my tweeters.

Arvind

Hi Arvind,

Did that happen on one channel?

Grtz

Hi Arvind - Sorry about that ! Never happened to me (if it did I would say it), and I can't think of why it would happen if it is not repeatable. In theory though, after a reboot -when Vista is still busy with other things- I can imagine that bytes get skipped and next are not in line with how it should be (think of audio samples consisting of 2 bytes (per channel) and they should forverer and ever be in the proper sequence. If not, you will receive static. But again, I never saw this happening, and I don't even know how the OS keeps it consistent. IOW, aparently it must be very "difficult" to (internally) skip bytes for audio, but if it happens the situation must be severe (like in out of resources).

Does this happen sometimes to anyone else ?


PS: Please notice that this just can happen in the driver software, and even in the DAC software ...

I have noticed something similar.

My music server consists of essentially two Vista partitions. One is dedicated purely to XXHE and is very bare. This is the environment I use when listening in earnest.

The other partition is primarily set up for video playback and processing, to which I have added XXXHE. When using XXHE on this partition, I occasionally hear a chirp of mainly high frequency content that lasts for about 1/4 second I estimate. There seems to be a time element at play here though. I may not hear this chirp for an hour or so and it will happen again. Another period of ( lengthy ) time will pass and it will occur again. I haven't fathomed out exactly what is occuring in the system to cause this chirp , but i'm guessing there is some interupt happening (likely lan related ) causing this. If may not occur everyday either. I can't recall it happening on the partition dedicated solely to XXHE playback.

This has only started occurring in recent times though (maybe last few weeks or so ) so I'm guessing it is something on the system that has changed.

I don't believe it is something inherently caused by XXHE itself.

Cheers,

Russ

It was in both channels & I doubt if this could be from the DAC & I do use the same DAC with my CD Transport too. Having said that I must repeat that this is the first time it happened playing through my notebook. Since then I have been playing again & it works fine. Just a one of thing, but it would be best to get to the bottom of it. Fortunately my volume level on the preamp was quite low, had it been higher it could have caused serious damage to the tweeters.

Arvind

I fully agree.

You may email (FileMail) me that track ?
Also, try to have the exact same settings as when it happened before and send the XX and X3 log files after playing that track once more.

Peter

Same happened here tonight,

Had to run for the volume button, almost tweeters gone.
But this happend when the album had already finished and about 20-30sec later,.......RUN!

Very LOUD noise, this is kinda dangerous.
This was the first time, that it happend here

But me stupido, had no logging on, so.......... :(

Album ? track ?

John Scofield - 2000 - Bump

But it happened after the last track was finished playing.

Just tried it in Foobar, but it seems to be in the last song. (@ 02.38)
http://www.filemail.com/dl.aspx?id=HOMTMRMWGHYQEIK

I didn't try it yet Roy, but do you mean it's just in the track ?

Its in the track.

The last track 13 is a data track!?! Perhaps this is causing the trouble?

Yea, I was thinking of that, and have disabled "crack detect"
But anyway, I just cut the song of at 2.36 or delete it at all

Hi Peter,

I ticked Log File & played the same track which gave the high freq static sound (no problem this time) but I could not find the Log data as there is no Temp Data sub folder. Could you help me with this?

Arvind

Hmm ... it is called TemporayData and will be automatically created under your current XX folder.
This may not happen when XX is created under \Program Files but if all is right you didn't do that.

:scratching:

XX is created under C:\XXhighend\0.9y-4 but smowhow the temp data folder is not created. Maybe I have done something wrong. Since Audiodidakt had the same problem maybe he could send you his log files. I can of course give you the name of the track which gave me the problem; Hoobastank/For(n)ever/My Turn 16/44.1 .wav file.

Sorry for not being a big help.

Arvind

Hi Arvind,

It's not about the track, but merely how you use it (and the log files will show that).

I am really puzzled why that folder wouldn't be created (or be (visibly) there).

Ok, although this is about (in the end everyone's) expensive tweeters, I feel that I may cause you more trouble than the chance it will ever happen again. If you feel the same, let it rest. But if you do not :

Are you sure you run XXHighEnd from the folder you mentioned (you may check your shortcut).
If so, what happens if you create the "TemporaryData" folder under your XX folder yourself ? Maybe then the log files appear in it ? (don't forget to tick the "Log Activities" checkbox (Settings Area) ... which you said you did. :))

Peter

Hi Peter,

Found the temp data sub folder, stupid of me to have missed it in the first place. Anyway I am attaching the log sheet of the track mentioned above. Hope it helps in finding a solution.

Arvind

Hi Peter,

Sorry forgot to attach the XX log sheet in my previous message.

Arvind

Hi Peter,

It seems you havent seen the XX & X3 Log files as yet. Would be great if you could find what caused the HF Sound, presently I start XX with my preamp at very low volume & then pump it up later, just as a precaution.

Arvind
:15a:

But I have !
But with the time I took for it I couldn't see anything "strange". And of course, this isn't about strange, but just the way you operate XX so I know in which area it can be.

Together with me myself never having it *and* as how it looks nobody else reporting about it, it must have been some strange coincidence ? (in which I *never* believe btw).

Can it be about the connection you make to the DAC ? I mean, by now you could be using a strange USB/SPDIF etc. converter ?

Another question :

You describe this as high frequency sound, right ?
Do you actually mean something different from "static" ?

IOW, can you please - and to your very best - describe what you heard ?
I am now thinking that you didn't perceive static (which I thought before) but something else ...

Hi Peter,

My sound card is still the Off Ramp connected to the DAC via I2S. It would be high freq static, thats the best way I would describe it.

AUDIODIDAKT also had the same problem as mention in this thread.

Arvind

Nope, AUDIODIDAKT has (had) something very different. Besides, that was "data" in the track itself.

But now I still don't know what you perceive(d). I mean, do you know how normal static sounds ? that is not high frequency at all, and it blows out your windows. Maybe the tweeters too, but first the windows.

If you indeed had something like "high frequency" static this never can be caused by XX. There is no way to make something "high frequency". Don't ask me what can, but the DAC looping in a piece of music which coincidentally is high frequency may be an example. I won't say the DAC itself can do that, but drivers sure can. The XX software can NOT.

The only thing XX can do (but drivers and the OS itself can do that just the same) is generating real static. Static means : feeding the DAC with a "random" bunch of values, caused by a wrong byte order. In such a case the least significant byte of an audio sample (word) has become the most significant and while it normally takes care of the finest resolution (the smallest volume steps) now it manages the highest steps. Normally this LSB has "full values" all the time, and in the case of static this means "full volume". The relation with music has gone in that case, just because the bytes are mixed up.

The energy of static is many dB higher than normal full volume, because the nature of it causes squares, and squares carry much more energy than sines.

The squares themselves are a tearing phenomenon because the volume - and voltage jumps are from max min to max plus all the time, and this happens, say, 44100 times per second.

Static is a literal blasting sound of pink noise in the appearance of squares. Pink noise is random for frequency, and nothing like "high frequency".

Peter

?

Hi Peter,

I would call this sound more like a pink noise but without low frequencies.

Arvind

Hi Arvind - Thank you.

I guess here it stops. Thus, despite what I said before it is only a wild guess and I never heard (of) such a thing.

One other option maybe :
Supposed your DAC (including the OffRamp !!) was set to a different sample rate just before you started this playback when it happened ...
And notice that normally a DAC will stay in the mode it was last set to;
Also, in your case (IIRC) the DAC has to be set manually to this other rate, so that can be excluded as the cause (see below) in this case ...

Now when the sample rate has to change, this is a piece of software that does it and it has to do all things (consistently) well. What could have happened is that the OffRamp flawed here. Now, with i2s it is (I think) not all that difficult to create a strange situation because of the physical clock lines involved. If that goes wrong anything can happen, and -I think- including something which incurs for a high frequency sound. Just imagine the speed of the track would play a 100 times faster, and you'd have something similar (including the pink noise effect because everything being so fast that it expresses as random noise).
Officially very strange things should have happened, like the bit clock acting as word clock (= 32 or 24 times too fast) or something.

But I still never heard of such a thing !
Peter

I think I had this problem when I went back to Vista, which was installed before on another disk including XXHE.
I started XXHE and there was still some songs in the playlist from before. At start of the music I got a loud 'static' or rattling(?) sound.
XXHE gave a message the songs could not be found. With a good selection everything was normal again.
This is with a DAC that has automatic samplerate changing.

But the big question is : was this from a next song (being loaded) while a first gave the problems, or was this about the song itself (the one not found) causing the problems. I can tell you, it can't be the latter. Unless ...

Unless the converter concerned (like FLAC) is able to write a proper header without data. But I'd say sufficient protections are there not to let such a thing pass (but *this* never can be guaranteed :no:).

Btw, if it sounded like rattling, this merely would be the buffer being in a loop (which can be a few ms up to a few 100 ms). Again a faulty driver can do this. -> something goes wrong, the sound device must be stopped but it won't. In that case it keeps on playing the same buffer.

Oh, I just thought of this :
When this really would be about static and something wrong in the data or my processing, this would be captured by the Crack Detect function. Also, since 8 months or so the Crack Detect is in the very last loop before playback starts. This leaves the setting of the DAC (by the software) and the playback itself which can go wrong.
Of course then Crack Detect has to be switched on (which in 0.9y-5 can be done again without a disturbance here in there from a highly dynamical track).

Well, I can't say much more about it, maybe it can be reproduced by selecting songs from an external disc, playing them, turn of XX, turn of the external disk, start XX and play from the playlist...

My recent observations may help here.

I have, for a week or so, been experiencing intermittent shorts bursts of what sounded like a "stutter" ( from as short as perhaps 1/4 second to near one second or so in duration ). I had initially thought it isolated to XXHE playback, but then I occassionally heard it while watching TV ( I have a digital TV capture card in the PC ), and watching movies. I had also thought is was isolated to my general purpose partition (Vista) in which I run all manners of apps, rather than another partition dedicated purely for XXHE. Alas, the latter partition also exhibited these seemingly brief stutters.

Time warp back a few weeks ........

The motherboard in the PC has 6 main SATA ports onboard and these are all in use. I had need to add another temporary harddrive to juggle music data around, so I hooked this extra drive up to the secondary ( supplementary ) SATA controller , and all seemed to work as intended and I didn't give it a second thought.

A couple of days ago I had an epiphany that the use of the secondary controller may have been the cause of these random "stutters", so I disconnected it. Low and behold, the existence of the brief burst of "static" have ceased. Of course, being a PC, nothing is certain, but it's been clean an errorfree since that disconnection. I can only conclude that the other controller needed some routine polling of the drive, and if circumstances were right, it took precedence over the rest of the system to cause a pause during audio subroutines.

Hopefully this might help others here experiencing a similar fate.

Check your drive controllers and make sure you have latest drivers for the motherboard components. Try swapping the order of the drives within available SATA ports also.

Cheers all,

Russ

Ignore what I wrote above about my cure ... I still have the occasional buzz (which sounds like a repeating sequence of data in very quick succession), but it does seem to be related to disc activity taking I/O preference somehow.

Will have to put on my rubber gloves to get into this one more methinks !

The joys of PC 's .. LOL

Cheers,

Russ