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Topic: For High End Audio Lovers (Read 18358 times) previous topic - next topic
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For High End Audio Lovers

[code]I am absolutely enthused about Foobar, as it fully accomodates all my (extensive) needs in terms of listening and organization/management of my library, which spans >150.000 mostly lossless tracks, stored across 4 Network Storage Servers (approx. 10 TB).

In order to give something back to the community, I decided to share my config, use of my Creative X-Fi and the hardware/Software architecture. This post is targeted to fanatics like me with large libraries with high end audio requirements  and a multi-computer/network setup.

1. Hardwre Configuration

Devoted Multimedia Computer (XP, 2G Ram, 5000+ Dual Processor, Creative X-Fi Soundcard)
Fiber Optic Link to Harman Kardon Surround Sound Amplifier
          2 Magnapane 6foot Front Speakers
          Polk Audio Center and Surrouond Speakers
          2 Channel Specific Subwoofers via Onkyo Pre-Amp in the Rear
1 Klipsch Subwoofer direct via Soundcards in Front (separate Controlbox)

2. Software

1 One of 2 Screens is fully devoted to MM/Foobar GUI, all needed info and controls must be available at all times
2. For convenience, XFI Remote is enabled in Foobar (Component)
3. Creative XF iinterfasce is set to Audio Creation Mode (allows for much fiiner audio tuning and channel mixing)
4. Foobar Interface (screenshot below) is configured for high contrast, no-nonsense audio monitoriing, controliing and track/library info and management. (I could not care less about artwork - only the music counts)

2.1
Foobar Job Description
- Play and monitor Audio
- Format conversion for quick MP3 CD burning on the fly (burning with Rexternal Software (Roxio)
- Easy Playlist management and adding individual tracks to specific Best Ofs
- Tagging of tracks for search, retrieval and quick on the fly playlists

Foobar Components:
All standards plus WMA, DTS, FLAC, APE Decoders
Remote control, Gapeless Crossfader, which works perfectly on Foobar 9.5.3 except with DTS files)
Channel mixer, V level, Peak meter

Enabled DSPs
Equalizer, Channel Mixer, Crossfader and VLevel

Creative GUI (set to Audio creation) used for Bus and Channel mapping and on the fly front rear tuning
96khz Master sampling rate

This screenshot shows the Interface(s) and the respective Foobar UI file is attached.



I'd love to exchange with other crazy people like me and of course exchange any experiences.
Regards

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #1 –
I am new to this forum and somehow the attachment upload did not make it.

Here a direct link to the File:

http://h1.ripway.com/MCZala/MichiStandard.fth

My Foobar Theme File

Hope this works.

Regards

One little hint:

Even though, when starting up Foobar, it will complain that the gapless Cross fader will not work, in fact the dsp will work just fine.

Only when playing DTS files, will there be a short gap, which is however not very disturbing. All other file formats are being handled perfectly.

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #2 –
Looks nice. I'm just wondering why your using an EQ for such a setup and having gains above 0db at that.

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Whatever6750 on
Looks nice. I'm just wondering why your using an EQ for such a setup and having gains above 0db at that.


Oh yes. Gains around +8 dB must yield truly high end effects... Come on,  high end with stereo files fed into a 5.1 setup, X-Fi card and a crossfader on classical music??

Quote
only the music counts
Looks like knobs and faders count more... ;-)
Ceterum censeo, there should be an "%is_stop_after_current%".

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #4 –
Is in fact confusing...... sorry - the EQ does not reflect the standard setup -  Just moved the sliders for an example....

EQ is pretty much levelled at Zero, especially for classical music.

Since there is however a distinct soound field difference between DTS, flacs or MP3s, I do use the EQ on the fly to adjust.



Needless to say, that I would never use the fader for Classical Music - Come on, Guys....

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #5 –
One more little trick I may share with you guys -

As opposed to Switzerland, where I grew up, here in the US and especially CA, houses have predominantly wood floors. If you have massive speakers and/or a setup like mine with 3 individual Subwoofers ( center front plus 2 channel specific in the rear) and huge Magnapanes in the front, you may well experience resonance issues -  meaning vibrations resulting in  "wet", slurry bass frequencies, while usually getting a warm vynil type soundfield, many people like.

I personally like my sound dry and punchy in order to get the most real representation of soundfields such as Dream Theater or good old Pink Floyd type music. Hence I rememberd from my playing time a trick we used to "insulate" Speakers -  The Good Old Egg Carton. Hence I put my speakers on a foundation of thick hard foam, then a layer of egg cartons.

Having said that, If you own an average low cost speaker system, you actually may want to place your speakers on a wooden surface allowing for some resonance. The experience is almost like a low to middle frequency amplifier.... Bu tthen again -  every room has a different acoustic and every set of ears is different too -  in the end it's gotta sound right for you and you alone...

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #6 –
Possibly your weakest link:

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #8 –
Your set up is impressive but my philosophy to hi-fi is less is more.  My pursuit is to have what goes to the speakers (and to my ears!) is exactly what the producer intended.  To that end, adding nothing that modifies the bits is of first and foremost importance.  You've clearly done a nice job but this is not the way I pursue hi-fi.

For just one example, I use foobar with direct kernel streaming to avoid the Windows kernel (I disabled kmixer through windows just in case).  In foobar, I have gain set to max and no DSP at all.  Not even replay gain.

Try this link to get a flavor for my set up and pics of my big Maggies and VTL amps.  I have some picture links about halfway through the lengthy thread.

http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showfla...rt=all&vc=1

Good luck!

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #9 –
Don`t be afended but that gui is 100% "Nonsense Gui", to much of everything!

Moderation: Removed unnecessary quote of first post.

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Bruce-in-Philly on
... my philosophy to hi-fi is less is more.  My pursuit is to have what goes to the speakers (and to my ears!) is exactly what the producer intended.  To that end, adding nothing that modifies the bits is of first and foremost importance.  You've clearly done a nice job but this is not the way I pursue hi-fi.

[...]

http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showfla...rt=all&vc=1

@ Bruce-in-Philly:

If your "pursuit is to have what goes to the speakers exactly [as] what the producer intended", why use tube amplifiers?

From wikipedia: "Some audiophiles prefer the sound that is produced by the distortion characteristics of tube-based amplifiers".

If you want the sound as close to original why distort it?

In that thread you linked to you talked about ABXing WAV rips against the CD, saying "for some reason the sound is not as good as my direct CD player".

1) My understanding is that you'll get bit-perfect (soundcard etc.. allowing) playback from a PC rather than from a CD player (due to realtime error correction / error concealment by CD players).

Quote from: spoon on
Quote
I'm still a little hesitent to treat flac off of my computer as being as good as CD off a dedicated hardware player though.


So you should be, if your computer is digital out, and you are using a secure ripper to create your flac files, then the PC would win in a contest over any dedicated hardware player on the market (right upto the $40,000 players), secure rippers can recover from errors, realtime players do not.

Quote above from: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=561139

2) If your WAVs sound different from your CD then you're doing something very wrong.

3) By the way, why not use FLAC, TAK etc? [metadata doesn't affect the sound quality, and you'd get approx. 50% space saving for no audio quality loss]

Also on that thread, you said: "any lossy compression is unacceptable due to sound quality degradation".
I find this a rather dubious claim (which if made on HA would require ABX results). Are you saying you can ABX say LAME MP3 at -V 0 ?

By the way, I'm in no way suggesting that the OP's GUI is of any value whatsoever, I just found the claims and setup in the Stereophile thread rather odd.

C.

[EDIT: Minor typo]
[EDIT2: Added Spoon's quote]
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #11 –
Carpman, good questions:

1) Tubes and their distortion characteristics:  When you read about tube amplifiers distortion characteristics, the understandable interpretation is that tube amps add something, distortion, that transistors do not.  This is misleading.  What is more accurate is that both transistor and tube amps impart distortion but the characteristics of that distortion is different for each technology.  Each technology adds a differect spectrum of harmonics (distortion) that sound different.  Tubes do even-order harmonics and transistors odd - there is much more complexity to this than what I just wrote so you may want to do some research on it if you are interested.  So, due to this different spectrum of added harmonics, tubes sound warmer and transistors harder or brighter.  As an aside, tubes began a resurgence in audio reproduction as CDs became popular in the '80s as tube amps tend to "smooth" the harshness of the nascent technology and transistors tended to "heighten" this brighter, harder, harsher sound.  To summarize, tubes do not have more distortion, just different distortion from transistors. (By the way, harmonic distortion is only one type of distortion and its measurement (total harmonic distortion-THD) is a compromise/summary of various types of harmonic content and not an accurate description of what is really going on nor what you can hear or can not hear - the development of the measurement is quite interesting and was invented as a reaction to the then new technology of transistors which sounded/behaved terribly and therefore required a set of overall measurements - while valuable then, we are unfortunately stuck with its imperfections as a measurement today)
2) Regarding the difference in sound from my CD direct in my Accuphase a/b's from the PC, this has puzzled me.  It may be from a few different sources, the one I suspect the most is jitter or something resulting from the path/electronics of the Accuphase stream handling components.  Jitter is super-slight timing variations in the arrival of the wave carrying the on/off bit data.  The discovery of the detrimental sound effects of jitter was a story of a triumph of the audiophile and caring engineering crowds who complained about the early sounds of CDs.  Once discovered, the Philips "red book" standard was modified to specify a max amount allowable in the transport chain - the only modification to the standard after its initial publication (so I understand).  I discussed the issue via email with Accuphase and they told me the data ins are not buffered/retimed and therefore the stream does not enjoy the tightly designed control of jitter between the CD transport and DAC within the player itself.  Indeed, when I added the Audio Alchemy DTI Pro 32 in the chain which reduces jitter, the sound improved to almost exactly as the CD.  However the imperfect cables and length, connectors etc. could add a bit of jitter back.  CD players, in particular my stupidly expensive Accuphase, are designed to reduce jitter while a PC is not.  PCs don't care about jitter (as long as it is not massive) to pass the letter "A" or "4" through the system for display on your screen.  Reconstruction of an analog wave is a totally different endeavor so your assumption that a PC produces a better signal is very inaccurate when it comes to jitter.  Regarding errors, CD players like computer CD reading all has error correction built in and uses the quite robust redundancy built into the CD encoding to reproduce misread bits - this error redundancy and correction opportunity was all part of the original Philips "Red Book" spec and has nothing to do with PC vs CD player.  Now should a CD be so scratched up or the laser pickup failing or impaired by dust, PC and CD players, according to the care of their engineers, "decide" how to handle words that cannot be reconstructed and all PCs/CD player manufactures do it a bit differently.  So, neither technology is a guarantee of a pure bit stream as was recorded although well designed CD players purposely mask unreproducible words as to not sound harsh or irritating - but this not a problem with CD players, it is just CD players are more polite sounding than a PC when the data is damaged as through a bad CD scratch.

3) Regarding my selection of file types and loss less compression: You have a very good point here as lossless is lossless and I do get a 50% reduction in space with it.  The biggest reason for my selection of bit-for-bit WAVs is a combination of my ignorance at the time I started this and a real drought of good information, oh, and throw in some risk reduction. When I started this, there was really no way I could compare a decompressed compressed file with an original - I had no tools.  Furthermore, regardless of what is possible, you are still at the mercy of the folks who wrote the compress/decompress programs for being complete and thorough - in other words, I was a bit suspicions at the whole deal.  Now keep in mind when I started doing this, there was little out there and few who could answer questions without getting really nasty towards us audiophile nerds.  So given that, and that I am now at an age and position in my life that I can afford storage, I thought why take the risk?  I just threw disk space at it as it was no big deal to me.  While everyone got excited about 50% reduction like it was heaven-sent, free pizza at the frat party, I just did not care.  Also, being an older IT guy who got into the business on big IBM iron back when we called it "Data Processing", I've seen technologies come and go and when it goes, just try to use the old stuff.  So all of these new file formats, to me, are risky.  Remember I have a pretty massive CD collection that I purchased.  I stuck with plain old bit-for-bit rips by dear old Microsoft with the belief that should the market shift, Microsoft will be one of the most likely winners and if they don't win, all vendors will still support their formats for a long time.  I guess younger folks would think I am way out there on this one, but after nearly 30 years in the IT world, I have learned that nothing is certain but the safest bets tend to be with the big guys - and I want to be listening to same music I love today 30 years from now!

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Bruce-in-Philly on
CD players, in particular my stupidly expensive Accuphase, are designed to reduce jitter while a PC is not.  PCs don't care about jitter (as long as it is not massive) to pass the letter "A" or "4" through the system for display on your screen.  Reconstruction of an analog wave is a totally different endeavor so your assumption that a PC produces a better signal is very inaccurate when it comes to jitter.
You are right, a PC does not care whether a chunk of data that it writes to the audio hardware's buffer gets there a few milliseconds sooner or later - as long as it can keep that buffer sufficiently full. (If it can't, that will result in drop-outs, not in jitter.) The audio hardware then feeds that data into a DAC or a digital output, and whether/how much jitter is introduced there depends primarily on the quality of the clock it uses. Like with CD players, there are differences between cheap and expensive soundcards (or onboard audio hardware). If you examine the properties of individual components of your audio processing chain, please consider that a PC has several components as well, it is not a monolithic unit.

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #13 –
Quote from: Bruce-in-Philly on
... My pursuit is to have what goes to the speakers (and to my ears!) is exactly what the producer intended...


I have read this quite often... but I have a hard time believing it. We get to hear what the label wants us to hear, not what the artist/producer wants us to hear... no? Doesn't the label get the master from the producer just to give it to some mastering engineer who is supposed to "enhance" the sound for... well, I don't know what for. Like the Greensleeves-label gives all masters to Kevin Metcalfe just for final mastering; he has nothing to do with the production (the recording) itself.
Back off haters - strictly love we deal with.

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #14 –
All this "i want to listen to the music how the (insert random artist/band/producer) intended" and all the flaming of EQs etc becomes pointless if you don't have reference monitors. A flat EQ and ASIO output with cheap 100$ speakers don't even come close to how person x intended the music to sound (not to mention the importance of the room etc).

Most of the "normal" speakers are -meant- to have "their own" sound (unless they are just really cheap). People have different taste in how music should sound. Some people prefer a warm sound with lots of bass and some prefer an analytic sound etc. Nothing wrong with that. Also if your speakers sound shitty (or you just don't like the sound of your speakers) then you can either try to change the sound by using EQs/DSP etc or get new speakers. And most of the people aren't willing to spend 1000$ (or even more) on new speakers only to hear the music how person x wants you to, and not how they like it.
 

For High End Audio Lovers

Reply #15 –
Regarding your and my listening goals:

1) What you or me want is our business, afterall, the point of all of this is a very personal experience with music (or to play with equipment which is also fine).  So really, there should be no dissagreement with any of what I write or what you write.
2) I should restate my objective as it obviously can be interpreted in different ways: My goal for a system is to have it impart its cumulative sonic signature as little as possible.  How does this play?
3) Given my goal above, then there comes a few rules-of-thumb that generally help me accomplish this:
- Less is more - the less complex your system is, the less opportunity for distortions to enter the chain
- Equilizers or any type of sound processing is usually is not in the service of this goal
4) When to break the rules
- If you discover that a piece of hardware or software, for example, is imparting a sonic trait to the passage of the music stream, then you have to choose between removing/replacing that piece, or doing something to mitigate the effect.  The challenge with this point is accuratly identifying where there is a sonic discrepency, identifying the culprit, and then properly crafting a solution - I have found that experience listening and listening to a ton of different components with different music content is the most valuable tool for determining this.
- Example 1 - Wood floors with open space under them (excellent example by the way).  I lived in this environment for a short time was also a time I had floor-standing speakers.  This combo was horrible as it created a frequency reinforcement at the low mid-range.  It was terrible.  The only way i could knock this out was to add in an equalizer.  The system sounded way better, closer to my goal, by applying this band aid.  Unfortunatly, the equalizer (an old fashion analog device) imparted its own sonic signature of a bit of muddieness but the end result was better with than without it.
- Example 2 - Inexpensive CD players or DACs don't sound very good (to me) - In my ears, The Philips "Red Book" CD standards were short of where they should have been (maybe sampling rate and or word length) and as a result, CDs just don't sound naturual in the highest audible frequencies with most CD players and DACs.  The only way I have found to improve this, or more accuratly mitigate or mask this problem, is to use tube amplification.  It simply sounds more natural with tubes.  I also smoothed this out by using Martin Logan Quest Z speakers for a time that seemed a bit rolled off in the highs.
- Example 3 - You throw all kinds of money to build a super simple, high end system and still sounds bad. - Accoustics.  Actually, this is really the first and final frontier.  I can write forever on this but let's say the room shape, construction, speaker placement, and treatments have an unbeleivable effect on perception.
- Example 4 - Beatles.  Yep, you throw on an old Beatles disc and the thing is way too tizzy.  Here is a good example of the challenge in interpreting artist and producer intent.  First, the Beatles in their early days, really didn't have much influence over the sound quality of their product.  Secondly, George Martin purposly turned up the high end on the masters because, as he described, the rest of the manufacturing chain dulled the highs.  So now, when discs are made from these masters, the highs are not what he intended.  Any way, you can deal with this situation as you desire.

Lastly, my tastes and desire have matured over the years with my objectives when I was young was to have boomy bass, tizzy highs, and watts watts watts.  But my tastes have matured to a simple desire for accuracy.  All this stuff about monitors et al is really not relavant in that it is all about your choices and servicing the music (or your hobby to futz).