Windows 8 disappointment.

[minzyman]

Coen,

FYI, I also did the upgrade path from Win7 to Win 8 then to Win8Pro via one of those credit card serial number upgrades (which included Media Server). I could never get it to work. So I went to the Microsoft store with my two installs and told them it wasn't working for me—I wanted t a full Win8Pro Build Installer. They gave it to me for free. Now my Win8 install works great. A few minor annoyances with the Win7 shell, but sound is really good.

LM

[PeterSt]

Coen,

This last post is exactly the situation I had in mind which urged me to propose that your install maybe "failed" somewhere. Again, I don't think I ever said something like that (just can't imagine it to happen), but this situation seems to be such a case.

We still need to be careful because many issues can spring from XXHighEnd (hence me) and they are not always obvious. Example : My current W7 install "suddenly" can show cpu usage times in Taskmanager which run as crazy (like 5 seconds per second). As far as I know (but never looked at it) this won't show in the running time of an album, but still this "suddenly" happens and without doubt this is related to one service too many shut down. I don't care about it because it doesn't show anywhere (but I always use Unattended where no time cursor is visible) ... unless it starts to bother others. It *could* be your situation.
IOW, let's be careful not to start seeing ghosts while it can be a sheer bug on my side.

And I too never can keep my icons in place, but this possibly is a W7 Shell issue ?
And yes, I am pretty sure W8 behaves like a drag when the chips are down, but this only occurs when you try to use it for something else like the regular thing (meaning our playback of audio). Still totally nothing bothers me, but I use it as how I am used to. One thing though :

I am quite positive that strange things can happen with NOS1 drivers which suddenly fail, file names which cause problems and which do not under W7 and other strange anomalies I never saw with W7. However, strangely enough they can all be dedicated to bug and/or too much shut off by me (XXHE) and it takes a bit of learning/experience to find out where the problems are and what exactly causes them.

I guess my message is that nobody with these kind of issues should give up, but instead should try to recognize what the cause is. Only then I can solve it.
But of course, if one thinks the sound is not OK it can be the most frustrating, and reason enough to give up. I have been there too (on and off). In the end though it is very much worth while *if* you can get it done. At least for me W7 by now sounds totally distorted, no matter how happy I was only a few months ago.

Regards,
Peter

[stefanobilliani]

Coen,

At least for me W7 by now sounds totally distorted, no matter how happy I was only a few months ago.

Regards,
Peter

That is my experience also , I remember going to a couple of concerts in the last times using W7 , and ... and .... remember commenting like : nobody would mix a record the way I listen to it in W7 ...


stefano

[CoenP]

Please understand me correctly, I am not saying that the win7 sound is without flaws. Actually win8 isn't either. I just prefer it over win8 at the moment. This is still about musical flow, naturalness of instruments, especially the voices and freedom of "stress". Now, Win 8 highlights different aspects of the music. I have to add that tweaking improved this significantly compared to a previous win8 trial, but not to the extend that it "wins" over my win7 sound.

Peter, What do you suggest? I have reported some of the issues in this forum, I could add the ones I run into from now.

Regards, Coen

[GerardA]

Just read this:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/164209-windows-8-banned-by-worlds-top-benchmarking-and-overclocking-site
maybe this is related?

[GerardA]

Any comments on this?
Looks important to me...

[PeterSt]

Hmm ... Gerard,

I thought I already responded to this, but apparently that response was in my mind only;

I did not read the article again (since 3 days ago), but IMO that is already covered for. But, denote "Time Stability" Yes.
Or No.
Anyway, just try whether it makes a difference for those who have the idea that something is wrong. To my ears Yes is the better one. But the change is marginally, as I recall.

Regards,
Peter

[CoenP]

I've been re-reading this thread, because I still feel like Arvind in the first post. Moreover I've tried so many things that I do NOT believe anymore that there is a reasonable chance that I will ever succeed.

Worrying is that after carefull listening to my current win8 setup:
- i hear less detail than in win7
- the bass is allways booming and "thick"
- i hardly can differentiate between low end drums, bass and other percussion instruments
- voices allways sound "dark" or "heavy" with little character and are less intelligable than in win7
- high pitched instruments are subdued exept for small rough bursts of noise (hints of triangels)
- strong instruments eclipse others. (Ie when the violins play crescendo I have trouble to hear hobos, flutes and the like)
- it remains a bit mechanical and sometimes "hard"
Plus the stuff I mentioned a few posts back

That is a whole frustrating lot of negatives especially because this is the best I could do after hours and hours of tweaking. The sound moved in many directions, but never enough in the right one. This gives rise to issues out of the scope of the software. Where to proceed? Pc? Power? EMI? Grounding? Could I ever get fine win7 sound with big issues in these areas?

To be blunt all my cd players including the 14 bit philips cd-104 of 1988 do a better job still.
I will categorize the above as Peter's "bad windows 8 sound" that seemingly cannot be cured on my system.

Fortunalely the win7 sound is still delightfull and does not suffer from the items above so no worries for those who run into the same situation...

Regards, Coen

[acg]

Coen, this might be a stupid question, but sometimes the simple places to look are the best solutions.  I can concur with some of the sound symptoms that you describe when I switch back to XX after using another software player and forget to change Switch 5 on the NOS1 to the 768 position.  It could not be something as simple as this could it?

Anthony

[PeterSt]

Hey Coen,

I just looked at your Sig and see a couple of tubes in there. Not even sure whether that includes a preamp.

So tell me, volume fully open ... from what distance can you perceive noise from the speakers ?
And don't you dare to come up with more than 1mm ...
haha

But you know ...

Regards,
Peter

[CoenP]

Hey Coen,

I just looked at your Sig and see a couple of tubes in there. Not even sure whether that includes a preamp.

So tell me, volume fully open ... from what distance can you perceive noise from the speakers ?
And don't you dare to come up with more than 1mm ...
haha

But you know ...

Regards,
Peter

It is NOS 1 into de ECC88 (correction: ECC83) of the amp so it is at full gain. I can hear a very low level 50 Hz hum form the ac filaments at my listening position (@3.5m). For hf noise i have to proceed to 1.5m from my HF horns. It is a white noise hiss. Even with my ear in the horn it isn't very loud or annoying.

Regards, Coen

[CoenP]

Coen, this might be a stupid question, but sometimes the simple places to look are the best solutions.  I can concur with some of the sound symptoms that you describe when I switch back to XX after using another software player and forget to change Switch 5 on the NOS1 to the 768 position.  It could not be something as simple as this could it?

Anthony

Thanks for the hint, I checked the NOS1 and switch #5 is on.

Regards, Coen

[PeterSt]

Ok Coen. As far as my experience goes, don't let W8 loose on that. I mean, I think I have sufficiently proven that not the slightest "noise" is allowed to be there, while you have the hum at -50dB or worse. Not acceptable.
Well, not acceptable in any event in my (persistant) view, but for W8 a no-go really.

So, easy; just give up on W8. And why wouldn't you ? Right now you only get annoyed and instead of listening you are always working on this issue. And whatfore ? You just don't even have the reference. Only a couple of guys blahblah-in that W8 sounds so good. Well, for you it does not and you don't even know about it.
Period (I'd say).

In the end (much later, whatever) you really should be looking for a noiseless (amp) design. Drop the tube idea and try to adopt good THD figures instead. That really works you know. Just because I say so ...

Peter

[CoenP]

Thanks for the reply Peter,

Ironically my little tubeamp has less noise than a gainclone I slammed together a couple of years ago, actually less noise even than any solid state amp in my possession. Yet those are not the great ones for shure.
The noise thing has to be addressed in due time, not even leaving the path of vacuum bliss. 50 year old carbon comp resistors don't help in this department.

Anyhow I now feel confident to look outside of the settings into the hardware settings involved.
The recent grounding scheme revival seems a good place to start without changing everything. I haven't given this consideration for at least a year now and stuff has changed. Its got some potential for improvement.

True that I have no reference, you all could be happy campers with this cr*ppy sound and I allready have better sound here than most of you.  . OTOH I know you and feel capable of identifying good sound, so no chance!

One wonders how minute noise levels influence the macro sound of win8 so much. Intuitively I would suspect someting like win8 playback to trigger more hf resonaces (oscillations) in the amp distroying the sound. Such a marco phenomenon better fits the sound impact.
 I do believe that going from very good to great one must take care of everything and that includes the tiniest amount of noise.

One more thing:
This thread is really a big warning for newcomers to XXHE that want to embark on a WIN8 platform only to get disappointed for reasons outside of the XX software. Some "minimum" requirements for getting it all going would be very nice in the future. I realise we are not there yet!

Regards, Coen

[PeterSt]

Coen,

Let me first correct myself with mentioned -50dB; I realized that you use horns which a. are more sensitive in the first place, but b. won't drop SPL much because of the directivity (but both are a bit of the same of course). Anyway, I think my -50dB should have been something like -65dB or so. Or -70dB when "just" audible. No matter the 3.x meters distance.

About W8 and how it does it ? I really have no idea other than that the OS itself is so much more lean that other frequencies of noise become more profound. But that is just guessing.

I didn't want to propose Gainclones because it may be "vloeken in de kerk" (curse in church if that's an English expression at all) for you. But okay, since you already were on that path ... mine are totally silent. Notice though that for their first 2 years or so they were not silent at all. But at that time I didn't know. So that was all mains issues as it turned out. My Gainclones are just silent (mesasure at -140dB or so), but the sh*t around it needs to be under our control.
Well, I think we know that by now ...

Regards,
Peter