Peter,

Yes the ticking went away after I took out the resampling of x16; however thinking about it now I am going to try values from x1 to x16.

I will leave the two USB cables as they are, i.e. change nothing else.

I will be opening a few more support threads so I will post findings in that section.

Alan

 Diary of a Break-In

Please note that the following relates to using TWO USB cables to run my iFi iDAC and iDSD Micro; at the start point I had not removed services nor used MinimizeOS.

Day 1 - the cables arrive and both are put into the system replacing the iFi supplied cables. Initial thoughts were nothing much changed, slightly thicker sound in the mid, perhaps a touch more detail at the top and possibly a little more bass. I ran this for a couple of hours only.

Day 2 - Dynamics have improved, for instance on Michael Hedges 'Aerial Boundaries' when he plucks the strings or raps the guitar body the effect is visceral, it reminds me of my best vinyl setup. Bass is extended but tight, top end is nicely detailed. Played Piano, Orchestral, Jazz - all sounding better than yesterday.

Day 3 - I decided to set Time Performance Index to Optimal, rebooted, all seemed OK for a few minutes and then I noticed some low level ticking noises and distortion. I checked the connections, rebooted the pc, no change. So I reset TPI, rebooted, played the same music - the low-level ticking is still present as is the distortion. I went from x16 upsampling back down to x1, i.e. Redbook, and the ticking/distortion went away. I know that in my days running cMP2 I always ended up running without any upsampling. NOW the imaging is all over the place, front to back is reduced, central images are a little indistinct sounding almost out of phase. After a while of head scratching I took the cables out of the system and watched the TV for the rest of the evening. At midnight I relented, put the cables back in, set the pc to repeatedly play a Telarc sampler and left it to run overnight.

Day 4. What an improvement, sounding better in all ways, imaging, detail, bass. Played some choral works - groups of voices and individual voices are easier to hear and locate.

Day 5. Only manages to listen to some Arvo Part - quietly - again good imaging, detail, vocals.

Day 6. Trying to sort out a neighbour's subwoofer.

Day 7. Oh dear - back to the thick voices - just listening to Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner - sounds a little chesty as if she is getting a cold. I have just read 'boleary's' post and I can relate to most of his findings (at least today!). OK today may be because it is a weekday when the mains is at its worst but so was day 2.

What is that Chinese curse? 'May you live in interesting times'.

The iFi dac is normally powered by the iUSB, but just for the sake of identifying any other problems I will run it battery only which removes one of the new cables.

Does it include an update to Windows 10

Peter,

The iFi dac and USB power units are small and light, the cable is strong and does not bend easily, so the cable is quite capable of pushing these little boxes around hence the need for a heavy weight on top of them.

I assume the Phasure NOS 1 is somewhat heavier!

It reminds me of the time I had some Proac Tablettes and used a VERY thick microwave cable as speaker cable, the Tablettes had to be stuck firmly to the speaker stands.

Alan

Peter,

Cables have arrived and are in the system - I think a brick is needed to stop my iFi dac being moved by them!

Update on the sound at the weekend.

Thanks

Alan

Peter,

I put the WAV and CUE file (with the umlauts etc) onto the local drive and it all worked. So I reset the CUE file on the NAS where all my music is stored dragged/drooped the WAV file. It listed all the tracks, came to the one with the umlauts and stopped, the yellow box for memory cleared. So I thought I would send this reply - MUSIC STARTS PLAYING - so it seems that it does load the tracks but for some reason it is very slow - possibly a couple of minutes to load the odd tracks over the network.

My network has 1gb speed at the slowest points so why this happens I do not know. I have been thinking about putting the WAV & CUE files on a 1TB SSD and the speed of loading from the system disk which is an SSD would seem to justify it.

I will repeat the exercise and look at the timings for loading each track over the network.

So in my previous tests I was too quick to say that it had stopped loading, it does load just s l o w l y.

Alan

OK Peter,

I will look for some more files and get them to you.

I use Windows Explorer in Admin mode, I drag the .wav file into the playback area. The file is split into its parts and the names with accents etc are displayed. When I press play tracks are loaded into memory one at a time until it stops at the track with the questionable characters.

Alan

Having resolved my space problems I needed to get my WAV files behaving correctly. The vast majority of my WAV files were generated by EAC as a single .wav plus a .cue file.
These were used by cplay which drives from the .cue file; XXHE drives from the .wav file - this lead to my main problem as most of my .cue files were not correctly named - they were "filename.wav.cue"!
So I spent today correcting over 700 cue files - Windows was useless and I ended up doing the conversions on a Mac Mini.
Then I found that some of the .cue files contained an odd bit of text which had to be removed.
Finally the cue files were found and all track were now listed in the window - however it still did not play - then I noticed that some of the tracks had German characters. So I edited the cue files removing these characters and tried again.
Finally, finally tracks all listed and loaded into memory and playing.


I assume this means a few days of going through all the cue files to make sure there are no odd bits of text in them and that all German / French characters are removed??

Sorted!

I had noticed earlier in the day that the names of the tracks contained some odd characters and had removed them - obviously not all of them. I renamed the tracks M11,M12,M13 & M14 and they loaded and played.

I did try some longer single tracks and they loaded without a problem.

Tomorrow I will try to find out why the different behaviour on WAV files.

Thanks

Alan

Peter,

I am using Arc Prediction set to x16, RAM Disk of 2GB for Playback disk, XXHE is also running from RAM disk.

At the moment I am listening to another WAV file which is playing as a single track, no memory problems at all.

I will have to have a look at the WAV files to see why some seem to be split into individual tracks and others play as a single track.

Perhaps it just does not like Mahler.

Alan

I am running my W7 pc with the same hardware / configuration / settings as Peter except I had to use the full ATX version of the mobo.

Every now and then I feel I ought to listen to Mahler so the other day I selected Mahler 1 and tried to play it. Now either the machine has developed AI (and knows my tastes) or I have a problem. The last track refuses to load and comes up with message "Not enough space on the Playback Drive etc". Pressing the C button does not appear to help.

The track is over 20 minutes long, AIFF; Playback Drive is 2GB RAM.

When I was using cPlay each CD was ripped to a single WAV file with an associated CUE file. If I try to load one of these then there is no problem, XXHE very kindly splits the WAV file into its tracks (I assume it finds and uses the CUE file) and plays correctly.

One other setting might be relevant - I upsampled red book to 705,600 I.e. X16.

Alan

Peter,

I would like to confirm my order of two cables but is it possible to make them 75cm (or thereabouts)??

That would be A to B and A to Female A.

Alan

If the Silverstone USB card is the SST-EC04-P then it is still available from:-

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/silverstone-ec04-p-pci-express-card-with-4x-usb-30-ports

I bought one just a couple of weeks ago.

Peter,

That is correct.

Alan

Peter,

My first post was misleading/incorrect! The iFi iUSB has two male usb output sockets, both type A, so the lead would need to be Female type A to Male type A. I was confused by the otg socket on the side (that is my excuse).

So it would be very much like an extension cable.

(Thanks for the note re Fan controller)

Alan