XXHighEnd

Hello,

I'm running Windows 7 in minimized and am happy with the sound quality I'm getting on my system but am wondering if anyone thinks the sound from Windows 8 is a definite improvement and worth the upgrade.  I've looked through the forum and nothing seems to convince me yet. I am running the latest version of XXHighEnd.

Has anyone upgraded from 7 to 8 and been impressed by the improvement in sound?  Also,  I am only using this on a music PC so is there any reason to get any version other than the basic?

Thanks,

David

Hi there David,


It depends on what dates exactly you looked, and might you read posts in between April 2013 and January 2014 or so, you will see that it's all Windows 8 for those who tried (but not all that many tried in the first place to my belief and *this* is related to all thr SQ troubles from prior to April 2013).

After around January 2014 it will have been me and me only who started to stirr the port again and at one stage I reverted to Windows 7 (because 1.186 just allowed for it !). So, quite many others did too, and what the status up to date is I don't know (but I hope some will tell you about it) but at least I went back to W8 again. But possibly I did not tell that officially in the forum because there's too much stirr about this already and I felt I might keep on changing forever.
The last thing I mentioned about it though is that W8 should be the technical better one and that it's only not so easy for many of us to also let it sound better (than W7). I personally can at this moment but I have a bit of a wild couple of speakers and some more that seems to proove it.

So that's my take and YMM still vary.
Best regards,
Peter

Forgot :


Well, the basic version(s) will give you unnecessary troubles with getting Straight Contiguous Memory to run (but it can be done) and it won't allow Remote Desktop I think. Not that you really need that, but *if* you do hence want to use it, you can't.

Peter

Thanks Peter,

I was following the forum and almost switched to W8 when you went back to W7 and I was impressed with your new settings.  Your system is lightyears ahead of mine that I have to take some of your recommendations with a grain of salt.  That said,  I am always looking for  new ways to improve the sounds and  am still on the fence if W8 may make that much of a difference for me.

Best,

David

Advice David ? Just don't try it and you never will know.
Could be the best path to avoid confusion/obession/bad moods. Really.

Peter

Hi David - I find that W8 is much better than W7 in my system - now!!!. However you need to be aware of the history. When I first listened to W8 I really liked it but after some time I had to admit that the sound was hard and ultimately I could not live with it. Then Peter sprinkled some magic dust on the software and there was an improvement. However in parallel with that I did some pretty extreme things to reduce noise in my system - no fans, "extreme" star earthing throughout and many many tweaks all over the place. It took a lot of time and a lot of wrong turns. The end result though is that W8 in my system is much better than W7 which now sounds "odd" to my ears.

However, W7 always sounded great before all this work so I would have been perfectly happy to keep it.

So I would say that if you are not in a position to make many changes and you just want to enjoy the music stay with W7 I fully agree with Peter on that one.

Paul

Hi,

It takes some pretty extreme tweaking commitment to make win 8 to sound good. I never succeeded in making it work; traces of my dispair can be found in the various and long win8 related threads. Dispite the work Peter did on several versions to "fix" it, I never enjoyed the sound of win8. Actually I've allways been playing win7 for enjoyment, my win8 time was all spend on attempts to "dial it in". So from my viewpoint: no need to spent your precious listening time on a (likely) frustating experience.

Regards, Coen

Hello,

Thanks for the advice. I really don't want to add any trouble for myself and will stick with W7.

Thanks again,

David