SQ inconsistency

[Nick]

Marcin great find 

I have tried Raj's suggestion of running DPC Lat minimised whilst playing XXHighEnd. The changes are significant in my system. Up untill this point I had suffered a little loss of musical timing with Z03 and was using .ini value of 21 to obtain good dynamics (.ini of 11 being a little flat in my system). Also I had started to use raw 2X sampling of 44.1 kHz material because Arc Prediction was sounding a little too smooth at the top and lacked a little presence.

The system timer change makes Arc Prediction sound correct again and I can use the .ini setting of 11 which give a more musical sound. Overall I find this a very musical tweek, there is more space, better tonal accuracy, frequency is extended at both ends, timing much improved and generally there is much less hash.

I have not had chance to run the Sysinternals system timer diagnostic yet so I do not know what default duration my PC has.

I would like to add my veiw to others that this would be a really good standard upgrade for XXHighEnd. It would be great if Peter might concider the timer value to be set via a parameter in the .ini file so we could try different values.

Nick

[Flecko]

I cannot hear a difference if I use the 1ms or 15.6ms setting.

[Flecko]

Tried these settings again. This time I turned off my fridge (got one beseide my pc  ) and my monitor that both make some noise. I used the test track "05 - The Hunted - Kodo". There are a lot of different drums scattered in the room and also very quiet parts. It is difficult to hear for me and it could be the "everyone is hearing that, I must too" effect but it seems, that setting this timer to 1ms makes the space between the drums a little bit blacker and the drums itself a little bit cleaner. It is not easy to hear at all in my system. I am impressed that you all can hear it so easily.
Just as an example: If I change the stop band attenuation from 130 to 90db of my digital filter, the difference is obvious hearable. Not problem to hear even with humming monitor in front of me.

[manisandher]

Have you ever wondered why your PC 'sounds' better one day and worse another and this is without making any changes in player or OS?
Well, here's a clue - ever heard of system timer resolution? The default value is 15.6ms, but some applications can force the windows timer resolution e.g. Media Player, iTunes, WinAmp, Flash all set the timer resolution to 1ms. The interesting thing is that this change is global  so all applications get the new high resolution timer while one of these applications are running. So gentlemen, start your browsers with some lightweight flash content and play some tunes How crazy is that?

I hope people realise how important system timer resolution is to sound quality.

If you're not doing anything yet, I suggest you download dpclat.exe and have it running in the background as you play music. Even better, download JPlay and simply minimise it... or use it to play 16/44.1 of course! Personally, I use JPlay minimised. This improves SQ substantially when playing XX. Peter, you should definitely incorporate this into XX if possible.

A massive thanks to Marcin for coming up with this, and for Josef for incorporating it into JPlay. Cheers guys.

Mani.

[PeterSt]

Peter, you should definitely incorporate this into XX if possible

It's in XX allright since a week or so. Now it's only waiting until I upload it (0.9z-4). But, working on some other "impressive" stuff first.

[listening]

Hi all,

if you can't wait there is a little tool (XP for free) which tries to set the maximum possible resolution of the default windows timer.

http://www.lucashale.com/timer-resolution

Good luck!

[blaine78]

Hi all,

if you can't wait there is a little tool (XP for free) which tries to set the maximum possible resolution of the default windows timer.

http://www.lucashale.com/timer-resolution

Good luck!

Thanks for this software link, The improvement on sound is quite large when listening for long periods of time. Having the OS time resolution operating at 0.5ms, seems to bring the music into focus, cleaner, with blacker background. This is my first post here, and have to say this site has been invaluable for advice and tweaks on the windows OS.

[PeterSt]

G'day Blaine, welcome here.

It is good that you like it, but be "warned" this is not the best at all. On the other hand I'm fairly sure this will matter per playback software (and further settings).
But since you're here anyway, just for trials try XXHighEnd; in there (latest version) you can set it yourself to the possible values for your OS and perceive the difference. Of course all starts with the difference in SQ anyway, so I mean relative withing XXHighEnd. But use Engine#4 (Kernel Streaming) because WASAPI (Engine#3) really is history here for a long time. But you can try that too of course.

Anyway, nice to meet you here.
Thanks,
Peter

[BertD]

Hi all,

if you can't wait there is a little tool (XP for free) which tries to set the maximum possible resolution of the default windows timer.

http://www.lucashale.com/timer-resolution

Good luck!

Thanks, this made me understand better the way this tool works (within XX already implemented). I thought 15ms was high but apparently 0,5ms is higher (resolution, not value) and since I changed from 15 to 0.5ms the sound does improve here...

I will keep it like this for a while, thanks for the "reminder"!

Bert