Gave these settings a quick listen this evening and found the NOS Driver Contol Panel buffer setting of 2 a bit too "airy" sounding. Leaving the SFS at .1, I increased the buffer to 8 and felt the added weight to the HF's sounded more "correct."
This got me thinking to the sense of "too airy ? can that exist ?".
After being used to SFS=0.1 for a couple of days, I thought to seek the limits of it, and first went to 0.08. All still played well.
I'm almost sure I heard more detail right from the start, this time in the highest frequencies, or maybe better the "transient freqencies" (?). So, the ultra short ticks which may be there in my by now well known "ambient sh*t". But let me tell you, how so super interesting something like Infected Mushroom has become; this is really Goa (say stomping house-like), but the stomping is totally overwhelmed by all those quare sounds, them always different easy new measure (like in 4/4 etc.). I was nodding my head regularly of which I myself recognize that when I do that I can't understand anymore.
At this setting the Woofers felt quite the same as with W8 but "more of it". But also bass seems better integrated with the rest, or/hence with the music itself.
So I'd say 0.08 is better than 0.10 again.
What I suddenly started to notice is related to Brian's remark about the airyness; possibly it was still in my mind and without real focus I am fairly sure by now that this is related to very fast L/R "flanger". Possibly I heard it as a property for the first time with the 0.1 setting and it is generally there in many tracks. For synth work this seems natural, never mind I really never noticed it before. So just envision a whatever sawtooth wave of higher frequency (maybe between 2-3KHz) and now you can easily hear that the frequency is not playing "in line" for left and right. Previously it came from the middle hence both speakers the same, now there's a whatever small delay between left and right and it creates ... air.
Now watch out, because I actually heard this more profound already from the lower frequencies and where flanger is normally used (electric pianos of the early type would explicitly do that). So think 200-500Hz but also way low (but way low isn't used that often). Thus, the past few days this has become an explicit property in really many tracks, and this wasn't heard previously. Yesterday, with the SFS=0.1 it became apparent with the higher and highest frequencies.
Then went to 0.06 and apart from a small out of sync (on/off on/off) for a second (well into a first track played) which repaired itself, all still played well. And, 90 minutes or so later, good to go because only that one anomaly. But :
Now something strange happened to the sound and it is something which I wouldn't have noticed at all say a few months ago. But today this is totally apparent and actually this springs from all playing so well (and so much better than in W8).
It became congested. Yes, I put that in bold because I think it is of more importance than we ever could see before. Again watch out for this alien, because I tend to more and more come up with my own ideas about things :
Energy will not get lost.
Going back to the first minutes of playing with 0.06 I right away could hear that all was changed. Detail was again more, but dynamics went down. Better for background music, but along with it, with less fun. Strangely anough I easily could last for those 90 minutes of it, but possibly this was because I was now focusing on what physics played a role here; it was so obvious ...
If you think back on my expression on the high frequency "flanger" (but delay is the better word) and you can indeed envision that there's this difference between left and right, but really tight together. Mind you, mentioned 2-3KHz really is fast and it happens in between that (wave cycles). So, speakers are at a distance of 6 meters and room is 8 meters wide. What would happen if we brought that back to half of it ? Well, something like the distance to travel from left to right (and back) would allow for half of the time hence the frequency had to be half of pereceived 2-3KHz in order to let it work as good. Of course the pose is moot, but it is something about the width in front of us and how our ears can more easily detect this (phase differences) when the speakers are more apart.
Still with me ?
Ok; SFS=0.06 makes the L/R changes so fast that the separation gets lost and the sound becomes mono-like.
Ahum.
You can so easily see that suddenly all is literarrly beamed between the speakers, and while I could not discover any anomalies or distortions or something else wrong, this happened :
- Detail becomes even more if only the transient is on its own;
- Dynamics drop because (again) the way to the peak receive a relatively way long envelope.
The latter (and about the "again") I have described before (I think as a virtue of the Silverstone card) and you could say that all becomes way more fluent. However, the downside is that when the freuency is higher it meshes with itself. This doesn't make it more grey and merely more white but it is the underlaying "fundamentals" doing it. This is how a "transient on its own" keeps on working, because it doesn't bear the fundamental.
Actually this is more "right" so to speak, but it doesn't work out.
Congestion ?That phenomenon again;
I am pretty sure that the music is all still there, but it is now congested into a smaller beam and while energy will not get lost, all now needs to play in a small space and the understanding of how the music will sound now is (I think) not so difficult to understand. It sounds up to compressed which would be the physical thing happening. The airyness actually totally disappears and you could say that this is because there is no (free !) air left in that small beam.
While the above is my outlay of how the audible result can be explained, this does not explain at all why it happens. So, I really don't know at this moment. But maybe I don't care so much either, because there's now something else which is way more important :
It can be controlled.
So that airyness, which I btw only dedicate to L/R behaviour and not so much to depth can be set from ultra-wide to ultra-beamed (notice that I use horn speakers which beam to begin with). Uhm, apparently. Now, nothing tells me that SFS=0.08 was the widest setting, nor did I try 0.09 or 0.07 plus it seems to urge for another decimal (so 0.084 etc. can be dialed in).
The way it works
generally is easy to see for me because it is all about "beating" of internal processes and matchmaking with processor frequency and much more. So, I didn't try, but I am sure that when I now change my processor frequency from 500MHz to 600Mhz the SFS setting has to be different to let it work out the same way. And remember, this is how all the Q3,4,5 (1,1,1) stuff emerged - explicitly for this.
That it takes me two months myself to learn how to go about with it is something else.
Thinking what to say more I can only again see myself sitting on a bar stool looking towards the floor, nodding my head. Things get really crazy for differences already, and by now I can't see any more that even dimensions will stop to emerge weekly. So you know, that L/R flanger really is another new dimension.
One last remark :
Before people let float their DACs in order to be able to perceive possibly the same, this time my NOS1 was flat on the floor (no footers). It has been so for the past 3 days ...
(there is a reason for this, but it is not related to an explicit trial or something - it's just on the floor).
Peter
