Peter,

Thanks again. I will wait to see how your DAC turns out. Any better ideas of dates yet?

Cheers,

Matt

Peter,

Thanks for that. I'll check the link out and see if I can make any sense of it all. The thing that spurred my interest in DSP was actually that I was looking for a reasonable cross-over solution. I decided to go for the bi-amping/active cross-over option over passive cross-overs. In terms of analogue active cross-overs most reasonably priced ones seemed to use opamps and add colour to the sound. The external digital ones didn't include NOS DACs (my preference is for no oversampling) and again some not ideal components. The PC based cross-overs didn't seem to implement with XXHighEnd and well to be frank I think XXHighEnd sounds a damn site better than Foobar etc. and am very reluctant to go back to that in order to get a cross-over.

Any ideas/views? How do you approach the cross-over issue?

Cheers

Matt

Hi Peter,

Thanks for that. I have started to 'Log activities', so will post when it happens again.

I don't have it in unattended mode

To get a new playlist I 1) stop the current song, 2) click the up arrow at the bottom of play commands area (pop-up reads 'clears playlist area'), 3) click on 'Explorer' button, 4) add the songs I want, 5) play them and then.......after a few songs one of the songs from the previous list often starts playing. This is intermittent so I can't predict when it will happen.

Any ideas?

Matt

Is there any software based DSP I can use with XXHighEnd to flatten out the frequency response of my system. I know some may find this herectical, but I fancy giving it a go to see what it sounds like.

Thanks,

Matt

Often XXHighEnd plays a track from my previous playlist instead of the intended track. Any ideas how to stop this?

I will post setting if someone can tell me how to find them.

Cheers

Matt

Peter,

I can't seem to find where I change the Q factors on the newest version of XXHighEnd. Where are they? Particularly in playing around with Q1.

Thanks,

Matt

Peter,

I haven't got time to put my settings in my signature at the moment, but I do use a 16-bit DAC.

Matt

I saw this nice looking DIY schematic 'Lightspeed attenuator' that uses optocouplers to attenuate the signal and my soldering iron started to get itchy, when I had the thought that maybe the digital attentuation inherent in XXHighEnd was as good/better. Any thoughts?

I have to admit that I am probably going to have to build one of these babies because the 'Legit' volume increments in XXHighEnd are too large  for my system - in one step it goes from quite quiet to waking my children up, although I guess there is always soundproofing.

Thanks Pete. As I said I am a psychologist and understand very little about physics, so your explanation of the speakers representing mics was very helpful. When I was talking about a phase shift from a point source vs two sources I was thinking of phase shift between the left and right ears, but as you have pointed out it is about the phase shifts between the mics being replicated by the speakers. Makes sense. Sorry I'm a bit slow.

Now when you say "There is one anomaly I can foresee : when it is in the data *and* it happens again at playback, it happens double. And it might be the latter which I "see" happening in my room. Thus, it gets over-amplified.", do you think that the wall might actually help with this (although you obviously disagree with the 'ambiophonic' explanation)?

Your critique of what the ambiophonics website said was interesting, but I have to be honest that I hardly read it myself as it sounded like a mixture of gobbledegook and c*"p to me too (although my opinion wasn't really bsed on any knowledge). I just wanted to know if it sounded any good, but I am pleased that there are more intelligent guys like yourself around to figure that out for me before I go and build a massive bloody sonic wall that makes no difference....haha

Matt

I understand what you are saying about phase shift being the key determinant of positioning sound, hence physics are crucial. I am not arguing that phase shifts are not how we determine where an sound comes from, however, the phase shift from a real instrument (point source) is created differently from a phase shift from stereo speakers (two sources). I think that with an ambiophonics separation panel down the midline you should be able to create phase shifts without interaction between sound waves from left and right channels.

As always I think that the best solution for me is to try it and see what my ears think. I found that the digital processing to create ambiophonics created nice 'atmosphere' but at too much expense of details, so I will try a panel and see (I mean hear).

Out of interest, here's another idea to ponder. I am partially deaf in one hear to a set range of frequencies (approx. 1Khz - 4Khz). My other ear has normal hearing. This prevents me from localising sounds of objects in really life and localisation sounds using the ambiophonics system (most things are shifted towards my good ear side), but not obviously in stereo production. I have tested this by comparing to my wife's ability to localise stereo images to mine. Also I would think that images for set objects would 'break down' if their frequency spanned beyond my auditory frequency range for my bad ear, but fortunately that doesn't happen......I should probably wear a hearing aid one day to see if that changes my expereinces

Well guys I am pleased that my question has caused a bit of a debate - shame I can't understand half the technical stuff My background is actually in psychology, so I'm pretty surprised that more attention hasn't been paid to the psychological aspects of audio. Unfortunately, at Uni I studied visual perception rather than auditory perception - boo hoo. Despite having no idea about how the brain processes sound I would still think that understanding the perceptual processes behind it would be useful in sound reproduction in addition to understanding the physics as hearing is clearly an active rather than passive process e.g. you will hear your own name in a noise room when you would not hear other words (selective filtering); if you think the lyrics of a song are something different to what they actually are you will generally hear that incorrect word(s) until someone points out the error of your ways (top down processing); you can choose to focus on different aspects of the music (selective attention); I also imagine that we are much more sensitive to variations in tones/timbres in voices than in other instruments/frequencies (adaptive function) in the same way that we are more sensitive to subtle variations in facial appearance in people who are the same race as ourselves, but that is pure conjecture.

As stereo is fundamentally an illusion, the brain's processing of auditory information has to be a factor. If the brain was perfect in deciphering localisation cues stereo reproduction would always sound like it was coming from two sources (60 degrees apart). Thank heavens it doesn't. With ambiophonics the illusion is that the sound comes from outside the speakers instead of between. Sorry can't help any more than that, but if someone wants to see some neat visual illusions I will see what I can rustle up......

I

I found a site (www.ambiophonics.org) that describes ideas about improving the imaging of music so that it sounds more like it would if heard live by correcting the localisation problems inherent in stereo sound. I don't really understand the technical side of things, but one of the main focussing appears to be the removal of crosstalk between left and right channels. There is some software which tries to do this digitally (RACE). I found that although the imaging was good and the sound was 'realistic', it lacked quite a bit of detail relative to XXHighEnd. A more traditional approach appears to build a sound absorbant barrier to place throught the midline of the room so that sound from the left speaker stays in the left half of the room and the sound from the right speaker stays in the right. I was just wondering if anyone had tried this with XXHighEnd or if there was any reason why it might not work with XXHighEnd i.e. is there any attempt in XXHighEnd to reduce crosstalk digitally. Any information would help me before I take the plunge and build the barrier. Either way will post results
Cheers,
Matt

Sweet! Thanks Christian & Peter

Pete,

Can I just check that I understand. Low latency sounds better to most people and you can set-up an ultra low latency mode in the later versions of XXHighEnd that won't work on my machines. I don't think that I have another way of obtaining low latency (how else can you do it?).

Have you had much luck trying to find out why it wouldn't work on my machines? Judging by the other thread, I don't appear to be the only one.

I am a bit curious that the later editions do not work on either my PC or laptop. Makes me think that either I am doing something wrong or the music files are the problem, so I will rip a few tracks using a different programme (I used EAC) and see if that makes any difference (probably not, but I might as well try).

Cheers,

Matt

Pete,

Pardon my ignorance, but how does latency affect playback audio quality? Under what circumstances would I need ultra low latency playback?

Cheers,

Matt