Windows 8.1

[PeterSt]

All,

Here is a first report about the SQ of Windows 8.1; Quite crazy I can tell you.
It is the first time since I play with Windows 8 and say 0.9z9 that I could here that now really *everything* matters and to a degree which makes me think that we learned a lot (to listen for) since W8 was introduced to XXHighEnd December 2012 (0.9z-8). I'd have to add that it is also the first time that a "drastical change" was heard to the Orelino Speakers I have here, and I feel (only now ?) that these show way more differences than my old speaker system. Anyway I can't imagine that what I perceive is not perceived generally by you all.

First there is importance in how I ended up listening when satisfied, and compared to what is in my sig (by heart), these are the changes :
- NOS1 Buffer Size = 4ms (I started using this a couple of days ago for Native W8).
- Music is on an attached USB3 disk, though connected through USB2 (USB3 did not want to work ??);
- LAN is Off permanently (through MinOS settings).

The path to those settings went like this (and this is how I learnt that everything vastly matters) :

For the last many months I play with the music on a LAN connection somewhere; This was not setup for this 8.1 setup since 8.1 was upgraded from a native W8 (so, not from my normally used OS install - actually a fresh one though with basic normal settings (like you would use them).
Music was on the OS disk and all sounded OK.

Since this was only a limited set of music, I connected the USB3 disk; this disk normally works OK, but not here. It would loose connecion all the time. So connected it through USB2.
There was no RAMDisk (IMDIsk) installed at this time.
Music was quite awful and coloring in the bass.

A note on the latter : This is all about lacking highs and how that is perceived through the Orelino Speaker and its powerful bass. So, this easily starts to overwhelme when the highs are not sufficiently there.

Since my SFS was at 4 I only now realized how this single setting can hammer upon SQ once it goes trhough a "demanding" connection, which thus was USB(2). So, the disk is used continuously because of this low SFS and actually this low setting can not be used now. So I highered it to 60.
The difference was apparent immediately; less coloring hence more fresh sound.

From there I reasoned I would need the RAMDisk so I installed that. Just from MinOS while I thought it needed NormalOS ? anyway it worked.
Set back the SFS to 4 and through the RAMDisk as Playback Drive (too) now all sounded on par with the playback through the OS disk as how it was at first.

SQ

While the latter was the situation I ended up with, I just as well can describe the SQ from the very first sounds I heard through the music on the OS disk :

Within 5 seconds I had something like "now what ?!";
So apparent.

W8.1 is the complete opposite from W8.

All the overly detailed "information" from W8 is not present in W8.1 at all. Blame the less highs but it expresses as way more mid. The tonal balance has completely shifted to this mid.

Without really taking care of XXHighEnd settings (like sort of described above) the sound is dark brown with even zooming bass, meaning a sort of standing wave behavior although I could not really detect that for certain places in the room. It just was everywhere. And like I had earplugs in because of lacking highs.
Playing from the OS (spinning) disk (without RAMDisk) presented a coherent sound unheard from W8 and - not said above - only using the RAMDisk brought back the more square bass rendering I was used to. But still no squary sound at all;

Actually - and after 3-4 hours of listening - I found myself to be in background music all the time. There was nothing all the time I put (or could put) my attention to; furthermore I again hardly could recognize the "Nice Stuff" played.
I found myself playing rather loud (close to 90dBSPL) while nothing indicated so audibly.

But is it any good ?

I really don't know. Or not yet.

If you like to be in background music all the time I guess this is it.
If you sit down to enjoy all the nice espressions which can be in so many albums (with the kind of danger that it is too much after a longer while), I think this is not it. I am a guy who goes for all the twinkles and noises and square response in good fahsion, and this does not do that.

It is not Windows 7 (at all) either. No distortions as such come across to me. So, *what* is heard for detail is the more small timed more "tick" like and is not smeared.
It is the more coherent sound from Windows 7 though, and I think we can be assured that those liking W7 for the better at this moment opposed to W8, will instantly go for W8.1. Still dangerous because I am under the impression that W7 could show more detail. But I did not compare.

After perceiving some music and finding this maybe "better sounding" rendering, I looked at some of the "data" I always look at, and found for sure that W8.1 shows this all better again. Way better actually.
Notice that in this realm W8 lookes again way better than W7 but still not good. Think about spikey things which could influence SQ for the worse, while the spikes are less in W8 compared to W7, but for that reason more apparent. W8.1 actually does not show spikes at all (where I don't want to see them indeed).

Those who are going to try must be prepared for failure for the reaons I described in the beginning of this post. I'd say that without RAMDisk (in my situation for XXHighEnd and for Playback Drive) you will end up with stuffed ears.
More important could be that you need to create yourself a situation that you can go back. Remember, Windows 8.1 is not a Service Pack as usual; it is just a new OS. So, no Service Pack to undo is present. So it needs a separate OS Disk to swap (to W8 or W7) when needed or a dual boot;
I think that the W8.1 upgrade from W8 (which is free) will especially allow for a new fresh install because this is how the license key thing has been setup (I think you will always receive a new license key). And otherwise create that new "disk" etc. from first installing W8 and next upgrade to W8.1.

Peter

[AlainGr]

Thanks Peter... Now you have me very curious about the differences you perceive with less "crisps highs" that I find "too much" with W8...

I will do some backups and then put my music pc to work...

Alain

 

[PeterSt]

Joachim, I removed your offtopic post but sent it through PM to you to post it elsewhere. Can be here I think :
Windows 8 disappointment.

Peter

[PeterSt]

After another evening of listening :

And about how placebo's hopefully never work with me :
At first the sound was awful and I thought I have been a sort of too happy for unknown reasons the day before. But then I started to recognize what I heard and ... found that I had rebooted the PC while I the day before applied the RAMDisk Playback etc. reference in the RAMDIsk version of XXHighEnd. So I was playing directly from the USB(2) disk again. And no, that thus really makes such a difference that it is a do or die.

What I forgot to tell yesterday is that it now occurred to me that even leaving the Monitor on makes a rather huge difference. This, while I liked to have it on because I have the Wallpaper working in W8(.1) again. But we shouldn't. And notice that this is about the XXHighEnd "Shut Monitor Off" setting and that just powering it down doesn't help. So XXHighEnd has to do it.

With all set again I was able to judge the sound by means of albums I don't play so regularly because they tend to be too, well, wrong ? Think Rock genre up to maybe even Pop.
These all sound so natural to me now.

The main difference - merely in aftermath - is actually about my more or less main remarks about (the beginnings) of W8 : cymbals are too small. So, they lack a kind of layer under them which therewith takes away the better sound of them and they sound "light" and too small. This nasty habit now has gone with W8.1.

I think it is because of this that nothing (??) jumps out in an unnatural way anymore. Possibly it is also the reason for some overly detail, although I never experienced this as "overly" really. But now it has gone it can well be for the overall better.

At some stage I found myself thinking that this huge coherent mesh was just a "mess", but this too is actually a complaint I (and more) had about W8 - that strange Left/Right separation. But I think we all got used to that - at least I did. Now this is the other way around and maybe we should not fool ourselves to find this worse. It just is normal again. The robots stopped playing the music and people do again.

Still not sure, but yesterday I was already thinking :
I don't need to go back to native W8 but maybe I also should not try it ever more; it is too easy to fall in the pitfall of "detail" which all so often is fake.

More of it tonight.
Peter

[PeterSt]

First this :

I just found out that - because I forgot to set it - my Time Stability and Time Performance Index are at Not Stable and Not the Best respectively.
I wonder whether I ever used this combination (unless from when both were not settable yet (beginning of W8 endeavours)) and to what degree this is related ...

Peter

[PeterSt]

By now we can say that this topic is a kind of false alarm. I mean, since what I described here : Add some noise ( Windows 8 ).

Still it is good to know that Windows 8.1 is good to go;
Whether there is a real difference with native Windows 8 ? I can't tell because I (thus) suddenly adopted a new means of "setup" (see link). But what I heard of it through apples and apples (not explicit) comparison, there is no real difference in SQ or otherwise not much. But don't pin me down on it.

The mere important message is that Windows 8.1 is OK, knowing that we can not obtain native Windows 8 anymore.
Notice that this self-denoted "OK" includes the now startup of the Metro Desktop (which is killed during playback in Minimized OS / Unattended anyway) and a W8.1 "Start Button" of which I myself think it is very well surviveable.

Also don't forget that to me the behavior of W8.1 looks better. FWIW of course.

Regards,
Peter

[BertD]

Still it is good to know that Windows 8.1 is good to go

Okay then, thanks to all for trying and report back!

I will update to W8.1 in the next few days. Peter, expect a new Activation Request soon ...

Bert

[PeterSt]

Bert, if you really Upgrade as such (thus not a fresh install), no Activation of XXHighEnd is necessary that I could see.

Peter

[BertD]

When I upgrade Windows then it is always a fresh install ... 

[Jud]

Some conversation going on over at the CA forums I thought might raise interesting points for the people here who have been following along with Peter's progress.  Just to give the most general summary, at CA they are just starting to discuss some of the things Peter has been exploring for a long time in relation to noise, jitter, etc.  Anthony (acg) has made several excellent contributions.

The particular thread in which I made the comment I'm going to quote below has to do with "Superdad" (Alex Crespi) determining that his Mac Mini sounded better playing from an SD card than from an external or internal drive via any interface.  He'd become curious about this when I mentioned having bought a larger external HDD for my music that originally used a USB3 interface.  With my USB DAC playing from a Mac laptop, this did not sound as good as the old external FW HDD I was using.  So I bought the FW base for the drive (it's just a regular SATA drive, and which base you use determines what interface the SATA will be converted to) and things improved.

When Superdad reported things sounding better playing from an SD card versus an HDD, I decided to try it, even though with his newer Mac Mini the SD card slot is on the Ethernet bus, while with my older MacBook Pro laptop the SD card slot is on the USB bus.  I also ordered a slightly better FW cable (AQ Cinnamon, when I had been using AQ Forest), to see whether that would make a difference.  During my testing, here's what happened:

Funny you should mention yanking cables. I got an AQ Cinnamon FW cable and two 128GB SD cards today and have had a brief chance to listen. Prefer Cinnamon FW to Forest FW I've been using. Preferred SD card on most selections, but then ran into a track where SD and Cinnamon were much closer. SD didn't seem to have the usual clarity. Got up from the sofa in the middle of the track and saw the FW cable was still plugged in, though I'd unmounted the drive. Pulled out the FW cable, sat back down on the sofa, and SD card was back to sounding its best.

In that same CA thread and a related one, RAMdisks are also being heavily discussed.  Seems to me these measures (attachment of external drives via LAN rather than other interfaces; use of SD cards rather than external drives, and detaching external drive cables; application and/or playback from RAMdisks rather than physical drives) reduce one or more of electrical noise; resource use; vibration, and also can result in faster communication between app and music file with a memory player.

Also interesting to think that when a memory player plays a file from a RAMdisk, this is in effect "double buffering" the file in RAM before playback occurs.

[PeterSt]

People, do NOT hop over to Windows 8.1 yet.
I have a few more things to check to be sure, but as of now I don't think it is right ...

Peter

[PeterSt]

Have I been confused with this !
And djeezz, I just read back on my first post in this topic and I am actually a fool to even start thinking something could be right ...

In the mean time I have been writing various posts about this and tweaks and that, and I wish I had never wrote them; In aftermath it looks like those posts fooled me. Wrong focus. Bad idea. Listen too much to others (to my own posts). Wanted to get something going which is inherently failed in the base.
And as usual, all was in my first impressioned post already ...

Never have I heard something that bad, or it must be so long ago that it is not in my memory anymore. Characteristics :

1. Totally out of control fuzzy though pestering explicitly zooming bass;
2. No highs.

I think I have been working three days in a row to get it right after I felt it was very wrong, and I changed all kind of things up to chipset drivers and what not. Yea, it included "tweaks" like connecting a USB harddisk, just idle. Ok, I went mad.
My previous post popped up after I went back to native W8 and an OMG pointed me that I was pulling a dead horse.
Yesterday I spent a last day on working the other way around in order to let W8 fail for the similar characteristics. Couldn't do it at all, and don't we know how difficult W8 actually is.

W8.1 is actually so bad that I wanted to apologize to W8 for accusing her of exhibiting nastyness. Heck, nothing of the kind ! But listen to W8.1 for a couple of days - it will cure you;

I was over and done with it when I day before yesterday played a quite (electric) bass heavy track with a most pure lady voice on top of it (Patricia Kaas). This bass so much destroyed the whole pureness of the woman voice that I at first thought "that's it - over and done with it !" ... but that I first wanted to try one more thing : Sabbath Bloody Sabbath because this can be so lightweighted (bass lacking, highs profound). Well, maybe I did not want to try anything anymore as such, but I wondered how the bass would work out there. And you know what ? nothing worked out. But now it was the other way around, sort of, as with the woman voice; this time there was so much lacking highs that I couldn't have any focus on the bass. But this brought me the final verdict :

The highs I did hear were plainly distorting !
huh ?
Yea, huh. So, somehow there is 2 ton less highs and what remains distorts. It's in the somewhat higher frequency area (top end of cymbals) and nothing like the distortion we may perceive from W7 (which is more an on/off distortion in everything).

Well, what to say more than that you'll only appreciate how far we are with native W8 when you listened for a week to W8.1. All the clarity and openness and air and GOOD bass. And remember (not sure I said it in this topic), the excursion of the woofers already goes bananas with W8.1 and don't ask me why. Total-uncontrol.
What about it this time really not being bit-perfect ? What's the relation with the clearly rewritten or amended resampling for Shared Mode I reported about ? Well, never mind.

Small problem : It will be very hard to obtain native Windows 8. So if you don't have it yet you could be out of luck forever.

I am actually angry you know ...
Peter

[Robert]

Peter Don't beat yourself up.

Perhaps give it a break, I know you will crack it as you did crack W8. Just going to take you longer.

I was heading for W8 and guess will wait now with baited breath for the cure to W8.1.

I'm still happy with W7 but not having heard W8 don't pine for it.

[PeterSt]

Robert,

Thanks for the heads up, but I don't think I will do that. W8.1 is too inherently bad. Sorry.

My advice is to get a native W8 (Pro or Enterprise) while you still can.

Regards,
Peter

[Jud]

Argh.  Already on 8.1, and kind of a PITA to roll back.  But it may be quite some time to Win9!  What to do, what to do....  (I still have a Win7 installation on the same machine - wonder if I could "upgrade" to 8 there?)