XXHighEnd

Hi,

I recently acquired XXHighEnd. After much fiddling I got it to work for the most part. By work I mean play music without extraneous noises. If I've achieved the best sound possible is another matter. However....

When I try to play HDCD encoded music, the music starts and stops and starts, or just starts and stops (often it stops at the beginning of a new track but not always). I've tried countless settings and the only difference I achieve is shorter and longer times between stoppages (times not being longer than a few minutes). I also have to reset (disable and enable) my sound device after many of the stoppages as it somehow becomes unavailable. Even the simplest settings, no upsampling, services off, and unattended don't work.

I'm using 9-z2 or whatever the number of the latest version is > Hiface > Music Fidelity V-Dac. The music '81 Goldberg Variations, Gould, Flac. I mention this because it's a bit unusal in there being so many shortish tracks (31 on a cd's worth).

And now for something completely different. Is there a place where I can set the music to gapped? I don't know what the great desire for gapless is about. Personally, I like my music to breath, or maybe it's me that needs to.

Chris

Hi there Chris - welcome here !

About your HDCD problems ... I already knew at starting this (decoding) it would be a problematic thing. And it sure is. In the version you have it all completely depends on settings and base formats (like FLAC vs WAV) and other things like Normalized Volume and more;
I just yesterday finished all the adjustments needed to let it really work, which I already thought the day before after working on one problem the whole day. And, at pressing Play for the real listening in the evening, it immediately went wrong again. But I changed one setting.

Allright. In the version you have, better don't use it, because too many things are wrong. One of them is that it (again in occasions) only seems to work, but really is not. This becomes apparent with the HDCD logo on the WallPaper now (at Unattended).
So, shut it off in the settings area, and all should be fine (but no HDCD decoding of course).
In 0.9z-3 all should be solved ... which is what I thought for 0.9z-2 while really 20 things were wrong. It's just hopelessly difficult.


About your "gapped" question ... I'm afraid I don't understand.


It looks like you're telling that "breathing" is related to gapless ?
It may look stupid, but I better tell what gapless is about, to avoid further confusion;

Gapless is about the 2 seconds or so which are physically in between tracks, are skipped, so a (classical) piece won't have any silence in between tracks, while there was no silence in reality. From a normal CD player you will never notice such a silence, because it will manage to detect it, and skip the silence. This is not the complete truth, but the most easy for understanding.
For a software player it takes special processing to get the two tracks connected together without any anomalies. So, sometimes players can't do it, and then you'd always have a gap in between tracks. In the very beginning, XXHighEnd too couldn't do it, but once it could, there was an option to switch it On/Off. Stupid of course, because why to switch it Off while that would never be natural. Unless someone has a special reason, like maybe you this time. Anyway, the switch has long gone, so only gapless playback is possible, just like a CD player would do it.

Right, so that's set. Now, what did *you* mean by it ?

Peter

They made these gaps on the original CD as a LZ (landing zone) for the laser, used when you fast skip to the next track for eg.
To give some headroom for inaccurate drives.
 :)

Hi again,

Thanks for your answer re HDCD, I was hoping something like that was the case. I don't really care that much about it, but when something doesn't work, I get obsessed....

As to gaps and gapless. I like a little time between my songs/pieces/whatever. Classical music I guess must have pauses built into the tracks, just as there are pauses between movements in a live concert. But even when it concerns separate songs or pieces, I like to put space between them. Other players (software) I've used (J River comes to mind) have that option, and I was wondering if XXHighEnd had it somewhere.

And then there were the pauses between tracks on lps and tape. I think I never got over them.
Chris