We all fell in the W7 pitfall

[Flecko]

If you ask me not the HiFace is the problem...XLR is a profi standart not a HI-FI it's made for long feet cables with decent quality...BNC coax. you use in first place is much much better! I don't want to star another war but Class-A ...for the price you pay for it...two monoblock with tubes will make you regret for the late choice Happy and stone TL? why? are you speleologic guy?

I will give you my philosophy.
Why BNC: Here we have the same opinion, good point to start. For Rf: Constant Impedance, Low damping, good shilding.
Why XLR: It is not only ment for longer distances also to reduce aditive distortion. There is a positiv and a negative signal-> aditive distortion canceled out. I tested this with different real balanced amps. The improvement is far from subtle.
Why not tube: High distortions, microfonic effects, transformer in the signal chain. All things you do not want in your hifi-system, unless you are a fan of distortions
Why Stone: Ever touched your speaker while your hifi is on? The enlocure is vibrating and you feel and also hear that. I have a compound material made of stone, glue and wood that is dead like...like stone. That is how it should be. The driver should makes the sound, not the enlcosure. Of course the TL sounds too but just as it is mentioned to be (waveguide with additive interference in the bass)
Why metall cone: I had paper, sounded good. But metall (hard membranes) sounds cleaner. They have cleaner waterfalls untill the resonance of the cone. If you filter that resonance you got very good sound. I would not argue on that point. Paper has the advantage of a less strong resonance, so you can make the filter simpler. Both fine for me

There is only one material for TL, Horns, BL/Front loaded etc etc etc-WOOD! There is only one material for speakers-PAPER (with leather surrounds) no other place for nice or cute or interesting or whatever even if i want...that's like nature laws, it's a lemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(mathematics) ).

I know what you mean but it is not some kind of nature law, that speaker should be made of paper and leather and enclosures shoud be made of wood. You can make speakers from different Materials. That's how it is.

[Flecko]

I listened to it again. There is no audible difference between W7 and Vista.

[Chriss]

Flenco,
what is your PC configuration, your hardware?
Criss.

[Flecko]

Flenco,
what is your PC configuration, your hardware?
Criss.

ASUS P5QPRO mainboard
Core2Duo E7200
Thermaltake Fanless Powersupply
Geil 2GB RAM
XX played from RAMDisk 512mb
Samsung F1 500gb Harddrive

Configuration of Window:
(usb idleEnable=1)
All services off - (Debug-Mode (msconfig) or TuneUp 2011 Turbomode)
xx settings:
copy to xx drive by standart
sfs=150, sfs.ini=01

The rest should be written below.

[Chriss]

There is some more regedit tweak : http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=1412.0 do all from Marcin's advise and try with IdleEnable value 3 ...but i doubt it to hear some change when you don't find it in W7/Vista. Undercock/undervolt the CPU is important too. Update DIOS drivers, ram is good to be on one stick not 2 or more. It's good to put the pc chassi on tree legs on the ground or in level rack and you can put the PSU out of the chassi to the ground too(well yours is fanless but you may still try it. Buy or DIY a good power cord! Change the fuses with old ceramic ones(in main power)!  Unpluge the dvd, led's and you may try hdd in outcase not in the main chassi(f1 is a very good hdd but try ssd or little one for OS like 120gb or 80 for less power consumation and vibrations). Very good pc configuration overall fanless cpu cooler??? If not do it! If you can afford a lcd 14 inch touch displey you will get of from the mouse and keybord power consumation and big lcd or CRT monitor(I'm looking for some kind of wireless remote cotrol from my other laptop to navigate if someone can help)! Things like lower brightness and no dadicadet video cards are good to (p5q is without inboard so try to find some vga with 16 32mb ). The mobo is with decend capacitators Fujitsu RE 560uF try Mundorf if you want http://www.partsconnexion.com/capacitor_ele_mundorf_all.html
Criss.

[Flecko]

Thank you for the advice and kindness. I will try some of them. But you see my system is not that bad. my hdd for example is mounted in a zalmann cooler which decouples it from the enclosure. My pc has two very slow moving fans and is damped from the inside (bitumen + foamed plastic). It can barely be heard. My TFT powersupply humming is louder than my pc (I turn it off for critical listening).
When I tell friends, I want to improve something on my hifi, they say things like: "how this can get any better?/are you crazy?". Yes I am, I am an audiophile and of course it can be better. What I want to say is, if there were a significant sound difference between Vista and W7 I should hear it. Maybe a little difference can be heard if you set up two identical systems, so you can switch between them quick. But if the difference, you might hear, will come from the OS or from slightly differencies (production deviations) of the hardware you could not tell. And further, W7 is essentially Vista with improved performance. How should a more efficient OS be worse? That makes no sense if you assume that shutting down background services and less load increases audio performance. Unless there have things changed, touching the audio processing itself. But if xx with kernel streming is affected by something like that, is also not sure.

[PeterSt]

Hi Adrian,

W7 works totally different for most aspects I use in XX, and it is actually totally out of (my) control.
Vista is not. Not at all, in fact.

Btw (might be important) I explicitly agree with everyting you told in your lasts posts, also knowing you somewhat longer of course. I -although- also know that your findings are not always consistent with others' - and maybe there is some key. Some base you might have "wrongly" so to speak. *If* you really *have* no difference (where "have" is different from perceiving it) you might have some lucky combination of things, though things you can't recignize yourself (otherwise you could be explicit about it (the setting etc.)). This chance is small I think. And so the chance is higher that something prevents you from perceiving the difference, with maybe at #1 not knowing what to look for. For example (but this is a combination with the equipment), the "silkyness" I perceive from Vista (opposed to W7) is very similar to the difference between a well setup i2s connection (silky) and SPDIF. So, in my theories you'd only need poor jitter figures to end up with a similar sound in both OSes. A very long shot of course, but totally plausible if so (poor jitter) in the first place.

Here, the difference is a 2 second job BUT I (of course ) coincidentally use those very good jitter specs in the first place.

Maybe this helps you ? (and mind you, with the reason of getting the sound better and not with you being wrong or anything all over).
Personally I'd never blame very poor sound on the PC hardware. It may matter, but it's a bit BS too. At least I don't care about it, and I have the best sound of ... ah ... that's not true anymore I guess. Haha.

HTH !!
Peter

[Flecko]

W7 works totally different for most aspects I use in XX, and it is actually totally out of (my) control.
Vista is not. Not at all, in fact.

Ok, good to know.

Btw (might be important) I explicitly agree with everyting you told in your lasts posts, also knowing you somewhat longer of course. I -although- also know that your findings are not always consistent with others' - and maybe there is some key. Some base you might have "wrongly" so to speak. *If* you really *have* no difference (where "have" is different from perceiving it) you might have some lucky combination of things, though things you can't recignize yourself (otherwise you could be explicit about it (the setting etc.)). This chance is small I think. And so the chance is higher that something prevents you from perceiving the difference, with maybe at #1 not knowing what to look for. For example (but this is a combination with the equipment), the "silkyness" I perceive from Vista (opposed to W7) is very similar to the difference between a well setup i2s connection (silky) and SPDIF. So, in my theories you'd only need poor jitter figures to end up with a similar sound in both OSes. A very long shot of course, but totally plausible if so (poor jitter) in the first place.

The strange thing is, that I can hear a different, as said before, from 9z2 to 9z3 but I can not clearly hear something between W7/Vista. I would not say that there is absolute nothing, it is just that I could not hear and name it until now. But that means, the difference can not be so big in my case. But you agreed on that already I think.
The things people say about the w7 sound, I don't hear (hard highs for example). I get silky highs and tight bass also with w7. And there are also a lot of people using w7 in this forum. It can not be that bad. And the ones changed to vista, a lot of them didn't had a chance to make a listening test right, because w7 was erased and instead vista installed. I wouldn't trust myself if I had done it like that. And you can argue like this: If there are tweaks for vista that make it sound good and that should have no effect in w7, then maby vista needs this. This is just an assumption, and I of course don't know how the things are realy be done, but from my point this is a valid argumentation. If things should change for me, you know, I will report. I will keep vista because of hd-dvd ability and then I will check from time to time.
I do not think I have poor jitter. The hiface has about 45ps and the pll in my dac has about 21ps typical. It is not great but good. But this will definitly be better after I get a better usb-spdif converter (I hope it will be some day).

Maybe this helps you ? (and mind you, with the reason of getting the sound better and not with you being wrong or anything all over).
Personally I'd never blame very poor sound on the PC hardware. It may matter, but it's a bit BS too. At least I don't care about it, and I have the best sound of ... ah ... that's not true anymore I guess. Haha.

I don't know. At the moment it would help to get together and hear, discuss and show eachother what we hear. But that is not possible. It is difficult because everyone has its own standard, so you never know what other people think is good sound or bad sound.

[PeterSt]

Hey Adrian,

Currently I am listening to W7 again (after being used to Vista for some two months). The difference (nothing much different from what I described back in December 2009 and indirectly what I wrote in the beginning of this topic, but now looked from W7 again) :

In W7 there is an ultra fast on/off sound. It influences everything and all. Especially horn instruments get over-emphasized. Women voices are not clean anymore. High-pitched instruments (cymbals) incur for overtones near the audible level (12KHz for me). It flares.

Generallly it is more rough. Just not clean. But careful now, because the sound I have here may be described as the most clean (it's not only me saying that anymore, and it's just the NOS1), so everything which is not jumps out.

Furthermore the sound is somewhat more dynamic (maybe not good) and the bas is generally less fuzzy (good), seems more tight (stiff). Maybe there's more slam too (would be the same as the stiff bass).


The on/off I talk about can be at a frequency higher than audible - would it be a sine. But it is no sine, it's just on/off (like a synth could physically do it).
Right now I'm listening to a "side flute" (???), which is one of the most clean sine instruments when leaving out the flowing air. With W7 it is not clean (pure) at all, and goes towards a tenor sax ...


As always, not to be right on things, but knowing this, maybe you now can hear it too.

Regards,
Peter

[Marcin_gps]

You better install SP1 RC1 before making any judgements about W7...

[PeterSt]

Man, what's wrong with you. Take some time to get a decent vision of things.

Maybe, just MAYBE you mean well. But I don't see it at this moment.

[Marcin_gps]

There's nothing wrong with me. Install SP1 and write your findings about SQ again. I'm sure they would be quite different as the SP1 boost SQ a lot, like a loooot. It's a piece of advice, nothing more. I don't see anything wrong with it, do you? Maybe you're trying to find sth wrong with my attitude, but I don't mean to be rude

Cheers,
Marcin

[Marcin_gps]

I encourage everyone to insatll SP1 RC1 on W7. The sound is a million times better and I'm sure that there's someone to back me up on this at the moment. But that's just the tip of the iceberg

I guess nobody can be 'smarter' than you on this board, but I'm not trying to be! I'm just very confident, because my ears 'are telling me so' and I want you all to benefit from it too. Gosh... Why would I want to start discussion anyway? I've learned so much here and I'm very grateful to you and everyone else for great support. Maybe you'll change your mind once you lay hands on SP1 and start to believe in my words.

Kind regards,
Marcin

[PeterSt]

I guess it's ok Marcin. It only looks that you like to go against anything you can find. Remember, me and Adrian were talking about W7 as we know it. So let my judgement about that be. Also remember that there's another way to express what your findings are, like you did before (PM); apparantly that didn't last long  (see ?). And it happened before. Well, you know, and also you know what a stir can imply once it is too soon to be real.

So, you mean well, and it's okay. Just don't forget your own "protective" expressions which you sure *can* have.

Lastly, it may be my mood. But I won't tolerate "bashing" on someone like Mani with a seemingly background which we'd call the "kift". I don't know the english for it, but it's in the directrion of jalousy. You will understand (think further) and *not* to offend by any means. I only want to say, I'm a bit biased, and my thinking shouldn't be emphasized.

Again, you mean well, and your judgements are (much) valued.

Cheers to you, and let's continue on anything for the better !
Peter

[Marcin_gps]

OK. I'm looking forward to your findings about SP1 than.