XXHighEnd

As a newbie to this forum, but not PC audio, I would appreciate some advice regarding a new music server decision, with Win 7 as the OS. Does XXHE perform better with a low powered, under-clocked type of setup, or can a faster, more powerful one be used (ie, regular dual-core/4-8 G RAM)? The latter will simplify my choice and relieve me of the chore of optimizing the PC, ala CMP/Cplay.

Thanks in advance.

Hi, and welcome here !

I myself respect the efforts and tweaks cics applies, so in general there is nothing wrong with that IMO. However, in here we approach things differently, meaning that you (the user) shouldn't be bothered with that. So, XXHighEnd indeed arranges for these things by itself (under the hood), and for more explicit things you might not want, settings are there. Besides this we have a topic about eliminating Vista's (and higher) I/O's, but let's save that for later and when you are bothered by ever flashing disk lights (like me :)). So :

No, I don't think anybody in here is going into the nusance of underclocking, less consuming memory and the like, but if so, I recon they'll anounce that right after this post. This is a kind of similar as the explicit preparation of albums to be played (making cue files of it etc.), which happens anyway and very much the same, but without your attention, thus automatically.
In order to get the grasp, tick the "Unattended" checkbox at the bottom, and notice there are some settings in the Settings Area (tab) to make life more convenient, for coverart showing and the like, while the actual Windows environment just disappears (not because we don't like Windows, but because it differs for SQ, nothing much different from CMP/cPlay).

Any feedback (good or bad) is appreciated, and please notice this is all about SQ and any slick GUI has no priority. This means : not yet. Conveniency of playback is however, and in the end don't hesitate to scream about anything you want to. All is for the better, and without complaints that's hard to accomplish.

Thank you for now,
Regards,
Peter

I have an E5300 dual core 4G of ram and W7 x64 Home premium. The machine is powerful enough to do real time filtering and crossover. And green to use like 10W.
So, both goals can be accomplished :) I highly recommend this kind of setup.

PS: underclocking makes no sense (u would have taken a slwer and chaeper cpu), but undervolting, if your motherboard allows it can save a few more watts.
Why? Because i can.

Well, I have been hesitant to reply because I may have wrong notions.  I know cplay calls for underclocking/voltage under-everything... but for awhile I was under (hehe) the impression that xxhe, the way I run it (copy file to c: drive; it copies all formats mp3 aiff flac,,, into wav first; loads into memory; galleries; Q settings that need more power in a system; uses vista/w7 rather then xp...???)I thought there were several things that benefit having a faster/more powerful computer,,, but we reached that threshold awhile ago, so probably don't have to reach for top/fast computer 'performance' anymore.  All I can say is I built mine (see link in sig) for XXHighEnd and I couldn't be happier (oh really SeV??? hehe) and don't seem to have (m)any difficulties others have had (dedicate your machine I say).  I bet Telstar's rig has it going on too... I'd like something like that.  I've tried cplay and liked it very much, but, and maybe I didn't do all the tweaks recommended and I'm sure I could have eeked out more SQ from cplay ... but XXHighEnd is The Best I've heard and it's easy to set up, ... and I'm a single WAV/CUE file user, right up cplay's ally... but XXhighEnd continues to amaze me with it's sound quality.  I'm looking forward to trying it with W7 soon.

Thanks for the nice welcome and great responses. This makes my task simple. I look forward to using XXHE once I've selected the laptop.

Hi

I read in a photo magazine that they considered W7 a major impovement over VISTA, in particular regarding memory handling, which provided for images loading much faster in Photoshop.
Does this improvement in memory handling aslo play a role to improve XXHIGHEND (0.9y-4)?   I am using VISTA 64x Premium on a dual AMD Opteron machine with 6GB of memory and often get a XXHIGHEND Out of Memory notice if I play for a long time while also using the computer for other tasks (such as loading CDs to disc with EAC).

Bjorn 

I'am a very very happy W7 (tweaked) user.
Still on the W7 RC 7100 version.

I would recommend to not use any other apps when ripping your precious albums with EAC to hdd.
Also use "copy image and create cue sheet" option in EAC
You will get better results (100%)
Then make from it what you want.
So no converting to FLAC during ripping

But I can do almost anything during playback of XX.
This is not good for SQ, but yes I can.
If I go to far I get crackels in my sound (but running a very stable system (with SSD) so far, and without virus-scan)
SSD is my best upgrade for speed.
Latest version of xx is very stable, no problems at all, only the things we know already.

Roy

Skrew Vista get W7