RAM-OS Don't Forget the Foundations & What Went Before

[Scroobius]

Those of us incredibly lucky individuals who are sitting back luxuriating in the almost unbelievable quality of the sound afforded by RAM-OS disc should perhaps cast a thought back to everything that went before.

RAM-OS obviously is only part of the story. Without the many incredibly well conceived and engineered other parts that form the foundation of our systems (both hardware and software) we would have absolutely nothing. Suddenly NOS-OS has smashed open the door and NOW we can REALLY hear the benefit of all those many other things that went before.

Maybe even Peter is surprised at just how good this sounds now. But one thing is sure, this is the story of a complete end to end system engineered from the ground up by someone who did everything his way and in the process coming up with many unique ideas. This is not like any other HiFi out there - Peter "did it his way". With his undoubted exceptional engineering skills and incredible hard work we have ended up with something truly remarkable.

It is now many years since I stumbled upon the XX forum. As a result I have been fortunate enough to follow the development of the complete system. It is one thing to be able to listen to a system like this, but to also have been able to follow and, maybe to a very small degree, feel part of it, is something else. At the time I stumbled upon the XX forum I could never have anticipated ending up with what I have now.

Peter - heart felt thanks for everything you (and of course Ciska and Bert) have done.

Paul

[PeterSt]

Thank you for a very warm post, Paul.

It occurs to me that through the years I got myself quite some true friends and that happens (can happen) even without meeting people in person. However, I am very confident that when time passes, all those fine people will have ended up at our place for a visit, and if not that then we visited them at their place.

Without exception this promises a great time, each individual occasion never to forget.
It is quite strange but very thankful to see people announce to be in the neighbourhood and whether it is okay to give us a visit. And you know, this even happened with people from New Zealand and Australia so they can't come from further - and everywhere from in between. But after 100+(+) emails in advance the bond is already there and is of course 10 times stronger afterwards.

This is how we love this hobby and how it stays that instead of growing into a business.
What did I say ? Hobby ? I think it goes beyond that by now and it can be called achievements. So yes, to that regard this is a strange hobby because it is about the ever hunt for progress which is not related to spending money really. Of course it is a little but what I mean is that money does not buy good sound from loudspeakers. It is all limited until we ourselves have the new idea and be creative.
"We ourselves" is us and all of you. A very strong community with many mutual friends ...

Peter

[AlainGr]

Hi Peter,

No matter the angle I see things, I never have followed someone like what I am doing today, nor have I seen a community so nicely oriented towards a common goal. Somehow I can't explain the fact that there is no destructive irony like I see on other websites about Audio and just this is the most strange, but the most positive.

It took me a lot of trust to get into that journey, since I have always been a "distant" follower, but I am so happy to be part of "our" group !

And yes, there is a friendship that grew through time... That is also exceptional for me. I can only be grateful for this friendship that took place naturally.

I could add more thoughts, but the words cannot always convey the value we attach to people and what it brings into our lives.

And I know that you understand

Warm regards, from a cold but beautiful winter morning,

Alain

[manisandher]

Well, I can't really add anything to what has already been said so eloquently by others (Alain has always come across as a thoughtful guy, but Paul, I never knew you had it in you!). Other than perhaps to say that it's been one hell of a journey to date. I took a look at my first post on this forum eight years back, almost to the day. Nothing interesting to report there. I then took a look at Peter's first post on this forum, less than a year before mine. I think all forum members should read this, so here it is. Enjoy...

Being busy with the best audio playback always, there came a time when I thought playback with the PC as "transport" means should just be able to beat all.

After some years of thinking about it, February 2005 I bought a (Momitsu) networked player, showing me that indeed better playback quality could be achieved by avoiding the "improper" reading of the CDs as, how I expected that as a reason for improper playback. However, such a networked player, in fact playing from the harddisk somewhere in the network, is very awkward to manipulate when it comes to track selection and all.
Anyway, the sound coming from it, connected to my dedicated audio DAC was better, stronger, more "steady", than what came from my TEAC P1 drive connected to the same (Audio Note) DAC.

July 2005 I bought an external soundcard (Fireface 800) allowing me the passthrough of S/PDIF -with decent reclocking by the soundcard- to the audio DAC. From there on began my struggle for audio playback which could match the quality I was used to, even from the old TEAC situation.

I started with XMPlay, then found Foobar, explicitly searched for all of the others, and none could bring me consistent playback to start with. The quality somehow varied per (ripped) CD and per day, and worse of all, all the players sounded differently.

My support activities over at TheaterTek.com allowed me to meet my now good friend Carlos Rodriguez, who just asked me to perform some tests on the Fireface. This was March 2006.
Carlos is able to instantly hear / judge jitter, and via hundreds of emails I started to learn what he actually hears. A dangerous job by itself, because Carlos justy can't stand jitter, hence gets crazy of some types of it.

It was August 2006 that I (or we) decided that all the existing players just "did" something to the music unknown, and there was one solution to that only : create a player myself. And since I'm into programming, say, all of my life, I did ...

I put myself to the task of creating audio playback software, that would pass on the audio data to the DAC as much 1:1 as possible, *never* touching DSP (digital sound processing) stuff.
Knowing that this would be the way already before, some earlier I bought a non-oversampling DAC, with the theory of that too passing the data far more 1:1 as the more "normal" oversampling DAC (like the Audio Note I had). For the insiders : the oversampling DAC makes a sinus of a square wave (the more oversapling, the more real sinus it gets), while the nos-DAC doesn't change anything to that. My thinking was : never mind the lacking filters, I just jump in because it must be better from the 1:1 theory.

By some coincidence, the nos-DAC I searched the internet for for quite some days, was found to be collected only 20 Km from where I live. It must have been the summer of 2006 where I met my now another good friend Bert Doppenberg, who not only sells that nos-DAC (the TwinDAC+), but who also appeared to be a builder of very fine horn loudspeakers. The greatest coincidence, however, was that he promoted PC playback instead of the boxed CD players, and so far he was the only one I found explicitly promoting that, from an audiophile point of view. Apart from myself, that is.
Of course, many people use the PC for audio playback, but note that here we are talking about "spoiling" all of your finest equipment to a PC playback means ...

For those of you readers who are not experienced to the XXHighend Audio Player ... together with the jitter knowledge or Carlos and the -if I may say- ultra high quality of the horn loudspeakers of Bert ... this is where it all came together;

The speakers of Bert could very well unveil the quality of XXHighEnd as how it was from off Augus 2006. From that point on, if somethings sounds wrongish, we say "it sounds like Foobar" (which is not meant explicitly negative, but for us indicates the type of sound which comes from there, and in fact comes from all the software players although no one is equal).
It all, by means of Berts ears for a great deal, allowed me to improve the quality. From that came, that Bert could better hear how his speakers could be improved, and from that came that we both could hear better that XXHighEnd should be improved. And up till today, this goes on and on ...

A few months back we all started to be in lack of "amplifier quality", with the sidenote of now being able to explicitly judge that it was amps doing it to us. So both Bert and me started to look for the holy grail in the amp world.
Well, to make a very long story short, that ended up by Bert creating himseld his BDCrazyA amp, and I state that the mixture of XXHighend, TwinDAC+ and Orphean/BD15 speakers produce the best music playback of the planet. And I mean, by far.

From off the August 2006 XXHighEnd version it was already the best, and so many times it - and other things were improved hugely. You just cannot imagine what happened. And what it will do to the audio playback world ...
Note that an even *far more* better version exists, not open to the public. I only want to say, we're not done yet.


Lastly in this topic, let me try to express a very - very important phenomenon I discovered along the way;
We all now about room anomalies, or better : how the room can negatively influence good audio playback. This is about reflections and standing waves.
Believe it or not (but better do yes) but if the playback is good to my standards, they do not bother you anymore. Not in the slightest means.
I could say "standing waves are not there anymore", but this is not true because they can still be measured.
While you could think "that is nice", there's something far more important coming from it : this has become a measuring device ! I mean, once you encounter standing waves, something MUST be wrong somewhere. Go and find it, and keep on looking until they are gone.
Now, assuming that your equipment is rather okay (which includes proper impedenance matching as one of the most improtant factors to let things go wrong in this area), try XXHighEnd and compare it to whatever other player and watch this phenomenon ...  evil

Hope you enjoy it !
Peter

To answer your question Peter... yes, we certainly enjoy it!!!

Mani.

[AlainGr]

We sure are very spoiled ! I know I am. I even think I have gained weight because of this 

[hbrew]

I for one had a journey of 40 years that included building hardware which included a search for a great audio source that I could afford. I changed my turntable to a Rega RP8 which was a huge cost for me then continued with a digital audio source. From a very good CD transport to iPad to AppleTV to many players and finally landing on XXHighEnd.

XXHE started another phase toward excellence. I got onboard late with 0.9 then 1.186 -- so many parameters! Tried them all. At some point I felt XXHE was better than my turntable.

Finally took the plunge to RAM-OS. After a couple of days I was settling in and hearing what it brought. Then I tried the different USB ports -- 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1 on the motherboard (3.0 seemed best to me). I read that many of you liked the Silverstone EC04-P so I tried that and was finally hearing amazing 3-D sound. I thought it was great before. 

I appreciate all the work that goes into programming an application such as this (I work in factory automation programming and making modifications). I'm just now really enjoying music! After 40 years of messing around with this and that.

Thanks so much and thanks for creating RAM-OS!