Simon Chick

I bought the 24/192 version. Leaving aside all the debate above, has it struck anybody else as strange how low the flac bit-rate is for a 24/192 file? In my experience, a 24/192 flac normally shows a bit-rate around the 5,000 kHz mark, yet as also noted somewhere earlier in this thread, Ladies is typically showing about 1,900 only. Now that seems to indicate an abnormally efficient compression rate, or ... 24/96 dressed up to turn on the 192 light. I just did a simple sort in J River, and Ladies shows an average bit-rate of 1945.1. Of about 50 other 24/192 albums, the lowest average bit-rate is 4177, and they range from there to over 6000. Seems like something wrong there. Is it just me?

I recently reported in another forum that, contrary to expectations based on the advertised spec, my Xtreamer did not play 24/176.4 or 24/192 files. The same files play fine through my PC/MediaMonkey setup. I bought the Xtreamer as an experiment, so it is not a tragedy if it doesn't work. It is just irritating. It was then suggested to me that in fact spdif cannot carry 24 bit. Googling does indicate that the spdif spec is only for 20 bit, but it 'can be' modified to carry 24 bit. Obviously there are also quite a lot of soundcards and DACs which claim to output 24/192 via spdif. This forum seems the best place to ask for a definitive answer. Is spdif really limited in this way?

Your comment about clipping prevention is well made, so I turned it off again. I have just spent time listening to rock music with the highest recording levels I could find, right up to Iggy doing Raw Power, which has a calculated album gain level a jaw dropping 16db over the target level of 89db. No audible clipping, so I will now leave that item unchecked permanently. I think the clipping prevention must be some sort of mp3 related thing. I remember years back when I first started investigation of playing digital files through the hifi, I nearly gave up because a lot of the files distorted horribly. Then I found mp3gain, and that issue was solved. However, I gave up on mp3 ages ago, but kept the belief that gain control was still necessary. It seems it wasn't. I am however going to look at alternative streaming options now, to bypass the PC completely. Thanks again to all especially Peter, for the time spent helping me.

I found a list of other click points on tracks (all classical) I had written down a couple of months back. Now none of them have audible clicks, at least when replayed using MM on the XP PC. I can't get to the big system and the Vista PC until my wife stops watching TV! Also, I have re-enabled "Clipping Prevention" in MM, apparently without ill-effect. A lot of rock music tends to clip if not gain adjusted, at least it did when I used mp3s in the distant past. So I felt this was still desirable so long as it does not re-introduce clicks.

Peter, thank you very much indeed for giving this issue so much thought. (And Hi to Grimaldi. We get everywhere don't we ;-}) Inspired by the comments in Peter's earlier post, since getting the sample file, I unchecked "Level Playback Volume" and "Clipping Prevention" in the options menu of MM. Voila. No click any more on that track. So I think this is final confirmation that the pops were coming from processing, not the file, and it's something of a smoking gun for MM. I will keep listening though, to see if any other music still has pops. EDIT I forgot to mention, switching to the 44.1/16 bit setting in Vista did not actually solve the issue, as you predicted. The downside is that now I no longer have gain levelling. Switching from the Ting Tings to Chopin is going to require care! At least almost all of my listening is album based, not random. FYI, I convert to flac as part of the EAC rip process. I did see the rather uncomfortable levels near the end of the file when I opened it in Audacity, but assumed they simply reflect the level on the original cd. Replay Gain is applied in MM afterwards on an album basis. The analysis just adds a track and album level in the tag. I am fairly confident that it does nothing to the file itself. I believe that if playback volume levelling is unchecked then MM simply ignores the Replay Gain values in the tag. I don't think there is any issue with the DAC (as Grimaldi will understand, this must be an article of faith). So now the question is: Can this undesirable side effect of Replay Gain be solved, and is it a factor of my particular setup, or a common issue? I wonder if this will help Roseval too?

Goodness me, this is getting very complicated, and is maybe going to take a while to approach a conclusion. It is also difficult at present to give proper time to focus on all the issues. Temporary silences on this thread will not mean loss of interest. I think that one simple answer I can take from this is that the pops are being created in the PC. They cannot be seen in the waveform of the file because they are not there. All my ripping is done in EAC with Accuraterip activated. However, having surfed the XXHE forums earlier today, I see that there is little faith even in EAC now. I identified a pop, louder than the norm (at 1.09 on final track of cd25 (de Falla) of Harmonia Mundi anniversary boxed set, in case anybody can reproduce this). The click always occurs at the same spot on my Vista HTPC. Also using Media Monkey but on a different PC, running XP and a different on-board sound driver, the click was identical. BUT opening the file in Audacity then using the Audacity player, NO CLICK, in the same XP PC. This simply confirms I think that these pops are a processing issue. No offense to Peter, but I am not really interested to try XXHE. I'm not that intense about it, I just want to lose the clicks. I am wondering if it is MM and/or flac processing (Audacity converts to its proprietory format I think) and/or the lack of a WASAPI plug-in for MM. If Audacity can play the file without clicks, then other relatively convenient software must also be capable of it. I just don't want to lose the attractive and feature rich MM interface. Meantime I need to lie down in a darkened room for a while. I will think further and study the responses more carefully before posting again. Further comments and shared experiences always appreciated.

Well this just gets more and more interesting. I am amazed that I have never before come across any discussion of the phenomenon, which seems to go to the root of successful ripping. I am still posting before properly absorbing the wealth of data being offered. However, why could I not see the glitches in Audacity once magnified to bit level? And indeed why are classical music cds the main culprits? The type of gross click due to interefence from other Windows activities was always very obvious, although fortunately rare (and non-existent now I never multi-task when ripping). As I recall it was normally just one bit spiking out of the waveform. Manually put it back into the curve with the Audacity draw tool, and problem solved. These soft pops do not seem to exist in the waveform, which is why I thought they arose in processing in the PC. However, why they should be in the same place always continues to confuse me. So, one simple question to be going on with - why are these soft pops not visible in the waveform at bit level?

Roseval - that is very interesting indeed. It EXACTLY mirrors my own experience. I am now trying to remember which tracks and where in them I noticed the problems. Clearly I need to address this more scientifically. It has not been long enough since I changed the 'preferred' output setting in Vista to tell whether it has actually changed anything. From Peter's comments it sounds like there is no reason why it should unfortunately. If I am not the only person experiencing this issue then I am already obscurely comforted, at least that it was not my imagination. I will try to gather more specifics then post again. Anybody else out there suffering the curse of the classical click?

Thank you both for a lot of very helpful comments. I really should have edited my original post down to something more manageable! The great thing doing a post about a problem like this is that the exercise itself as well as the responses makes one think about the issue in fresh ways. As an initial exercise I have changed the Vista setting to 44.1kHz 16 bit. So far I have not heard a single click, but it's still early days. I had it at 96kHz 24 bit because that is the highest quality out of all the files I have, but it is actually only an infinitesimal proportion of the library. After reviewing my own post and seeing the replies, I wondered if the unnecessary upsampling by Vista was causing the perceived popping. I will post further to report progress and to respond in a better way to the many points made. Thanks again.

I am trying to sort out the best set-up for my digital music playback, while running Windows Vista. I have been registered on this site for a while and have read extensively in the forums here, but this is my first post. I’m afraid it is also a very long one. I keep reading that XP is better but that Vista ought to be better, if implemented properly, if there is a WASAPI plug-in being used, if …, if etc etc. However, none of the posts clearly and authoritatively address my issues, which are all essentially “How to make the best of Vista in a real world HTPC?”. I suspect that quite a few others have similar set-ups to me, so I hope this thread will provide a central point of useful information for all of us. In part my quest is based on obstinacy, as I want to use a PC running Vista, I want to use FLAC files and I want to use Media Monkey as the interface. So there is no point in saying words like iTunes, Mac and Foobar to me. I’m not interested! Nor am I interested in the extreme set-ups using XP stripped back to minimum, legacy drivers etc. The PC is required for other HTPC duties too, and I refuse to accept that I cannot still get 99.9% of the audio replay quality that the extreme rigs can achieve! I have a large (approx 40,000 track) music collection, almost of all of which is EAC-ripped and in FLAC, and residing on a 4TB Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. It is delivered across a wired gigabit ethernet home network to a self built PC in a Zalman TNN 300 case, selected after about two months of internet research. (I was pleased to find that you had also identified this as the ideal case, when I found your site sometime later, but it is a dreadful shame that Zalman have discontinued it.) It has an Asus P5E-VM(HDMI) motherboard with an Intel Core Duo 3 GHz processor, and 2 modules of 1GB RAM. The motherboard was chosen for two reasons. Firstly it was one specified in an advertised ready built PC using this case, so I knew it would fit – as you know, it is vital that the motherboard layout is compatible with the heat pipes in the case, but the published compatibility lists are woefully out of date. It was also vital to ensure that the processor did not run too hot, and so the processor spec was copied in the same way. There was no point in installing more than 2GB of RAM as I am using the 32 bit version of Vista. Vista was chosen - rightly or wrongly - to make sure that Blu-Ray playback would be well handled. I had no knowledge at the time of Vista’s different implementation of audio. The other reason for choosing the motherboard was that it has a coaxial spdif output on the back panel. I had it in my mind that taking the audio straight off the board to the DAC ought to be ideal (but now of course I’m not so sure). With the previous, noisy, HTPC I had been using a Scott Nixon tubed USB DAC. From reading around on the web, I had my doubts about the quality of a USB feed, especially about jitter issues, and wanted to change to the Cyrus DAC anyway, which does not have a USB input. I have to say that switching to all-Cyrus was a huge step up, but as changing the DAC was part of a wholesale simultaneous upgrade, I can’t say how much of the improvement rested specifically on the DAC. Wrapping up the hardware spec, it also has a Sony BD-ROM, and internally a NVidia GeForce 8500GT video card (to de-stress the motherboard when playing HD video) and a Compro Videomate TV card removed from the previous HTPC. Finally there is a 64GB SSD, which just carries the OS, programs and any caching required. All content is held on the NAS. I never managed to implement the remote control option. So unless the optical drive is running, there are no moving parts and it is indeed absolutely silent. That in itself was a fantastic improvement on attempts to get silent fan cooling – an exercise in futility if there ever was. I will give the detailed configuration of the PC later, but it is an integral part of the A/V and Hi-Fi set up. Its duties are to deliver an audio stream to the DAC in the Hi-Fi, controlled by Media Monkey, play Blu-Ray disks on its BD-ROM drive, play video, mainly DVD, streamed from the NAS, handle free-to-air TV reception using the TV card, allow web surfing using a wireless keyboard with integrated trackball, and deliver video to the LCD panel for all of the above from the video card. When delivering music playback, the only function running apart from Media Monkey may be Internet Explorer, so I can listen while surfing forums such as this one. Necessarily for its usage it has an antivirus program running at all times (ESET NOD32). On the other side of the PC I have an all Cyrus stereo hi-fi, a pair of big Dynaudio speakers, high quality cables and a 46” LCD screen. My primary interest is audio, but it is convenient to integrate TV and disk playback with the audio system. It sounds a lot better too! More than 99% of music listening is from the PC. I hardly ever play cds. I think it is reasonable to say that the stream of content from the NAS up to the ethernet cable socket on the PC is fine, and that from the coaxial spdif feed into the Cyrus DAC XP, the audio reproduction is fine too. My concern is about what is happening between the ethernet port into the PC and the coax spdif port out of it. Almost all of the time the music sounds very good indeed, as it should. However, there are occasional popping sounds, normally not very loud, which I imagine are what I have read about being called ‘artefacts’. These do not necessarily occur at high output points in the music, and are relatively infrequent. Even in quiet sections they sound a little like very brief clipping. They are however frequent enough for me to find myself listening out for them instead of just listening to the music. For reasons I cannot fathom they seem to occur rather more in classical music than in jazz or rock. All the music is album replay gain adjusted by Media Monkey. No normalising is used. The pops seem to occur in consistent positions. I have frequently opened the FLAC files in Audacity but apart from a few exceptions, there is absolutely no perturbation in the wave form where these pops occur. I therefore conclude that they are being generated during processing within the PC. The exceptions were far louder and nastier pops than the others, and were very obviously present in the waveform. I am confident that they were caused by faults on the original cd and/or interference from other processing going on when they were being ripped, and are a completely unrelated phenomenon. I now only rip (on a different PC) when there are no other processes running, since when this minor problem has virtually disappeared. These faults were also easily fixed in Audacity. Apart from this issue of perceived artefacts, there is a second, more objective and describable problem. The Cyrus DAC XP can handle up to 192 kHz streams, and has a display which will show the actual frequency of the stream being played. That works fine, as evidenced by it showing the correct frequencies when playing back a cd or a dvd from a separate dvd player. However, all audio streams from the PC display on the DAC as 96 kHz. This means that the PC is upsampling the stream, because almost all my music comes from cds so it should show 44.1 kHz. Since I want of course a bit perfect delivery to the DAC, this is really unsatisfactory. I think it is clear that this is due to a setting in Vista’s audio configuration, and it is rather obvious which setting that is, but I am still not sure why Vista does it, or how to overcome it. So after that very long introduction, let me give a detailed description of the software configuration. Windows audio settings Digital Audio Device (SPDIF) selected in Sound menu in Settings. No system sound scheme, of course. No other devices connected. In Properties of Digital Audio Device, controller is High Definition Audio Device (Microsoft). The driver is 6.0.6000.16386. Realtek is not installed. Under 'Supported Formats' DTS Audio and Dolby Digital are unchecked, but Microsoft WMA Pro Audio is checked. All the possible sample rates are checked. Volume is set to maximum and all enhancements are disabled. Under the advanced tab the default format is set to 24 bit 96kHz, and both "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device" and "Give exclusive mode applications priority" are checked. I'm sure this is why Vista is upsampling, but I do not understand why it needs to default to 96kHz when only a 44.1kHz stream is being outputted. That seems to be all the Vista settings. In Media Monkey, I am using the wave Out dll. The volume control is disabled. Buffer length is set to 2000ms, which seems to give effective gapless playback. There is no WASAPI plug-in yet for Media Monkey, which is really frustrating, because a true exclusive mode implementation in Vista ought to be the answer to my prayers. There is one being developed for Winamp, which means it will probably work for MM too, but judging from the thread in the Winamp site under the developer forum, it is still barely at beta stage. Media Monkey developers say this is not high on their priority list as it would only apply to users running Vista. I tried the ASIO and similar plug-ins in the past when running XP and they always crashed MM. I have no confidence at all that they will function at all under Vista, and indeed as Vista has a new architecture, they should be irrelevant to Vista. Comments from other computer audiophiles on all these issues, but especially how to make Vista work well for us, will all be very welcome. Some questions and thoughts I do have are below: Would taking a USB stream from the PC actually bypass this oversampling? Should I use a USB to spdif converter between PC and DAC? On the other hand, could it pass any frequency above 48 kHz? Should I give up and switch to a Transporter, thus bypassing the PC? But in that case what about the interface for selecting music? Presumably that would make it impossible to use the excellent and very flexible Media Monkey interface? Do I have no choice but to use an external sound card? If so which one, as a Lynx attached to a squid-like break out cable does not appeal at all? Questions questions questions ……