Time Stability

[Nick]

Peter hi,

I have been finding that the effect / setting of the XTweaks Time Stability setting is not engaged when XX if first loaded. I think that the effect / setting the Time Stability setting can also be lost some times after music has been played and has stopped and is then restarted.

To cover how this is noticed. (my Time stability setting is set to Optimal).

If I start XX and then look at time stability in XX it will say use "refresh". When I play music before clicking the XTweaks refresh button I get music which sounds good but is not so coherent and had what sound like small resonances at some points in the spectrum. This will be the case each time I play until the refresh button is pressed in XTweaks, time stability then updated to “optimal” and when music is started it is noticeably more coherent and better presented.

I tend to press Xtweaks refresh just before music is started each time as quite often the non-coherent sound returns if I do not do this.

I seem to remember that this has come up before in another support post (although it was a side conversation to the main support question IIRC).

I was not too effected by difference in sounds but with the clarity that my system is giving these days it is now easy to pick out the effect of clicking the Xtweaks reset button.

Is this intended behaviour of the reset button ?

Kind regards,

Nick.

[PeterSt]

Nick, whatever happens I will 200% stick to this : XTweaks problem.

But if clicking that button helps you for better sound ... by all means, do so.

Peter


PS: I can of course try it myself because everything can or may matter ...

[PeterSt]

To make you feel more comfortable : This is a boot setting. Can't be changed on the fly. So only the "Change" button will change it and it requires a reboot (as you can see).

Regards,
Peter

[Nick]

Peter hi,

I understand that the settings are "preset" but I am very sure that something is happening to sound quality after refresh is pressed. It could of course be coincidental and be caused by something else other than time stability, but there is absolutely a difference to sound quality. Im wondering what the cause might be.

I leave the OS settings to XX these days (much better than sound than with "local" OS tweaks). My DAC is changed but I could hear this "refresh" effect before the last round of changes to the DAC and I suspect that these have increased resolution significantly to the point that the "refresh" click is much easier to hear now.

Paul is making a vist to my place this weekend, I will demonstrate the difference that clicking refresh makes and we can report back. Also it might be possible for Paul to try clicking refresh before playing in his system to see if a difference can be heard elsewhere.

Regards,

Nick.

[PeterSt]

Hey Nick,

I just looked in the code and tried to see what could be happening, but all I can see is "too much to judge". So, for all the XTweaks settings the data is obtained which is a lot of stuff that just "does" something like adding an Album to a Gallery does quite a few things (meaning : as unrelated, but many things happen anyway).

What you could try for fun is opening a Command Prompt with Administrator Rights (Run as Administrator - and Exit when it's there) because those kind of things happen in there too, and possibly it changes some general higher level things which imply a SQ difference ?
But I'd say this really is a too long shot because this (Command Prompt etc.) happens at the start of Playback as well, although not always ... (you can see the Dos Boxes popping by after a boot session ... until they stay away at some stage ... hmm ...).

Maybe somewhat more to the point is that these specific activities needs certain Services to be running, so they are started. But, they are stopped as well when Playback starts, though in the main time they may leave something behind (to die out etc.). But this would actually be counter productive to the better sound.


Meanwhile, looking into that code it reminded me that I never "set" anything for this Time Stability as well as the Time Performance Index in my new W8.1.
So, Not Stable and Note the Best respectively, and now I have this coherent sound ?

Peter

[Scroobius]

Hi Nick & Peter,

I have noticed this "problem" in the past with time stability. Some time ago I tried to judge if it was impacting sound quality but I did not really hear any difference. But since then there have many changes in my system so I will have another listen tonight.

Cheers

Paul