[drrd]

i keep reading about how good Vista is supposed to be with audio but no drivers from m-audio yet. i'm really keen to try it out myself, does the offramp work with vista??

[audioengr]

i keep reading about how good Vista is supposed to be with audio but no drivers from m-audio yet. i'm really keen to try it out myself, does the offramp work with vista??

I have not tried it yet, but probably not.  The m-audio driver loads code based on 44.1 or 96kHz, so there is no code in the interface hardware until the driver loads it.  Need a different firmware or new driver from m-audio.  They say they are working on it.

I have a couple of different firmwares that I plan to try in the next couple of weeks.

Steve N.

[bigamp]

Some background:

I use Jriver MC12 as my music program.  They buffer up to 5 seconds.

I would like to use a ramdisk, but it only holds a certain number of songs--there is no functionality to automatically move new songs from a playlist into the ramdisk.  As it is probably too much to ask them to incorporate this functionality, I have merely asked them to buffer a whole song, which is basically like automatically moving a song from a playlist into a ramdisk.

The kicker:

Jriver's response was that it's "horse feathers" and "bogus" that songs played from memory sound better than songs played from a hard disk.  Many people here use a ramdisk.  Does it sound better? 

Could it be that latency jitter is reduced when playing from a ramdisk?  Or is latency jitter not a factor when outputting a PCM data stream via USB to a DAC (in my case bit-perfect 16/44.1 uncompressed WAV files using DirectSound output and no DSP)?

[audioengr]

Some background:

I use Jriver MC12 as my music program.  They buffer up to 5 seconds.

I would like to use a ramdisk, but it only holds a certain number of songs--there is no functionality to automatically move new songs from a playlist into the ramdisk.  As it is probably too much to ask them to incorporate this functionality, I have merely asked them to buffer a whole song, which is basically like automatically moving a song from a playlist into a ramdisk.

The kicker:

Jriver's response was that it's "horse feathers" and "bogus" that songs played from memory sound better than songs played from a hard disk.  Many people here use a ramdisk.  Does it sound better? 

Could it be that latency jitter is reduced when playing from a ramdisk?  Or is latency jitter not a factor when outputting a PCM data stream via USB to a DAC (in my case bit-perfect 16/44.1 uncompressed WAV files using DirectSound output and no DSP)?

It's a mystery to me.  However, I have heard a LOT of different tweaks that make no sense at all make audible improvements.  It's a PC afterall.....

Steve N.

[richs]

I second moving to Vista. 

I tried a bunch of tweaks to try and optimize XP and found maybe a bit of difference, but nothing convincing.  Enter Vista: night and day.  More natural, better depth, more clarity.  Much more than I was expecting. For $120 probably the best improvement/$ spent I've ever had.  And I'm running Vista on a pretty old laptop (P4 with only 512k). And the digital volume control works great. 

For the record, I'm using J River, feeding a battery powered DDDAC via USB, going straight into a Red Wine Sig 30, and out to Gallo Ref 3.1's.  A simple system, but man it sounds good. 

Rich

[claytontstanley]

Just a heads up to all using (at least) the Tascam US-144 on Windows XP running Foobar2000 along with Executive Software Diskeeper 2009.

I was getting 'pausing' while playing back on either the spdif or analog ports on my Tascam. By pausing, I mean that the audio would cut in and out for about a second, on average once every 30 seconds, soooo annoying.

A restart would fix it, but I'm using my playback computer as a HTPC, server, and anything else I can throw at it, meaning that restarts take time (and possibly kick users logged into the server).

So I chased and pinpointed this particular problem, right down to Diskeeper 2009. If 'auto-protect' is currently on, diskeeper is constantly trying to defragment drives, which causes this pausing to occur. This happens even if diskeeper is trying to defrag a drive that's not the OS and not where your files reside... pretty strange...

But the fix is easy: just schedule 'auto-protect' on diskeeper to only be running at night when you're sleeping, on all drives. This will keep diskeeper from showing up as using active resources (in task manager) during the day, and in turn keep these irritating 'pauses' from occurring when you're listening to music during the day.

Also, on other 'pausing' issues: I've also had 'rf interference' cause sound to cut in and out while playing. When I turned a fan (with a speed setting control) on and off, or turned flourescent lights on and off in my living room, my sound would cut in and out, even while running the PC on battery power (meaning that this was not a power spike issue). I narrowed this one down to rf interference, interfering not with the wire, but with the sound card in the computer (i guess the wavelength was just right to resonate). Verrrry strange, but this problem appears to occur only for crappy on-board spdif asus soundcards, so all should be good that are using an external usb soundcard (like the tascam us-144)

Hope this helps some,
-Clayton

[claytontstanley]

Add the 'windows indexing service' to the list of processes that contribute to pauses & stops during playback. You can disable it without harm; also note that windows does an absolutely horrendous job at indexing anything anyways, so if you want indexing with windows like you have with a mac, download 'google desktop'.

-Clayton

[Noseyears]

You can also make some soundcard tweaks/mods for improving the sound quality, you can see the huge difference when you make them.

[rogerdn]

Steve,

Running firewire 800 from my external HDD on my Mini server, have you played with FW cables, do any improve SQ over stock ?

Are you any closer to building/ordering parts for the next batch of Monolith PS's ?

[audioengr]

Steve,

Running firewire 800 from my external HDD on my Mini server, have you played with FW cables, do any improve SQ over stock ?

At RMAF in 2009, we tried a different FW cable and my room partner heard a difference.  We were using Fireface400.

Are you any closer to building/ordering parts for the next batch of Monolith PS's ?

I have all of the parts, just waiting until I have a handful of orders.  The orders are stacking up, so I will probably start another batch in 2 weeks or so.  I like to build about 8-10 at a time.

Steve N.

[BobMajor]

I am using the Offramp 3 with Ultraclock into the Overdrive via I2S.
I moved from Windows XP to Windows 7 64bit and the improvement was the most powerful change I'd every heard in my system. I tried various Foobar2000 itterations but none sounded nearly as good as J River 15. I haven't posted this before because J River has a few operational quirks that I'm just living with. I don't mind because the sound quality is so stunning.

[tarquineous]

Just from reading comments of others, the Oyaide and the Mach 2 Music Firewire cables, are an improvement over generic.

I haven't tried those yet, but I did try the Z-sleeves. Those improve the sound and picture, when used on the Ethernet cable, the power cable, and the USB cable. Each one made a difference, so I assume the sleeve may work on a Firewire cable.

My preference is on the Ethernet cable, so far.

Mach 2 Music, also modifies MAC mini computers.

[WGH]

I second moving to Vista. 

Agreed. 
I have tried ASIO4ALL, paid for and used the USB-Audio driver, and tried the AQVOX ASIO driver with XP and none have compared with the quality of Vista with WASAPI. The differences between XP drivers is similar to asking what color blanket do you want to toss over your speakers.

Wayne

[kyrill]

I accept for windows based machines (Vista and Win7 only, not XP) nothing less anymore than Jplay
See Jplay.eu

it is NOT a player! it extends the player you normally use, by taking over the rendering of the files.
So what you have to expect is that Jplay on its own looks bare and to the "ugly" It only accepts files from "paste" which has been "copied" before from for instance Foobar. You can directly copy files from the folder on yr hdd ( that is what I do) bypassing Foobar altogether. The drawback is Windows does not allow users to copy simultaneously from different folders. So the searching, looking up, etc is not meant to be done in Jplay. It's only function is to transform the PC in a better sounding source than Apple or Mac. ( according to one user who tried both machines)

Is it true, maybe not, but it is the best software to make the PC best sounding. It likes KS ( kernel streaming)  over wasapi or Asio4al. With KS it sets the latency to 1 (!) sample even with 96 24 HD files depending on the Quality of your USB/spdif converter or USB dac. It is very cheap for what it does. Its effects are much greater than the effect of different cables. People who use Steve's gear should really try it out when you use the PC as a music source. The demo is free. I bought it immediately after hearing it for 10 minutes. It is that good.
The more transparent your system is, the easier you will hear its analogue and wonderful effects. ppl who are happy with mp3 SQ should not really buy it
Also you need at least 2 gig  (the more the better) memory and a dual core CPU of 1.6+ G

it sounds more analogue than Pureplayer or Jriver

[audioengr]

I am using the Offramp 3 with Ultraclock into the Overdrive via I2S.
I moved from Windows XP to Windows 7 64bit and the improvement was the most powerful change I'd every heard in my system. I tried various Foobar2000 itterations but none sounded nearly as good as J River 15. I haven't posted this before because J River has a few operational quirks that I'm just living with. I don't mind because the sound quality is so stunning.

If you have the disk space, you might consider creating a new disk partition and do another OS install on this partition.  Then install Jriver on this partition and try it.  You may find that the quirks go away.  This happens with Amarra on Mac.

Steve N.