Olive Empithrie

I'm sure Barry would correct me if this is wrong, but I always thought he did all the original transfers apart from the untitled 4th album. A lot of people think these original transfers are the best to date and I agree. However (according to something I read many years back, from Robert Plant I think?) the original master tapes were not used at the time. The original tapes were first used in the 'Jimmy Page' re-masters (c. 1991) but the processes used resulted in a sound that Jimmy Page liked but others (well, me anyway) found brittle and overemphasized especially in the treble. So to date I don't think there has ever been an "ideal" digital transfer of any of the Led Zeppelin albums in 16/44.1 let alone any higher, which is sad considering how powerful and emotive they sound on vinyl (before Houses of the Holy when things did begin to decline). I love the way you describe Physical Graffiti. I have always thought it sounded "Brown" as well.

The clicks you describe are very brief audio dropouts and likely you did something in the past to your machine (whether intentional or not) that improved your audio playback latency, which has now been undone by the re-installation of Windows. The first thing I would try is increasing the buffer interval in your player. This might fix the problem straight away. The second thing I would try, as it's quick do do, is try using another USB port for playback. The third thing I would try is use DCP Latency checker. What is the average reading? What is the maximum reading? Are there spikes? At what intervals? One by one, disable devices in Device Manager, beginning with Wifi network adapter, then battery monitor. Recheck DCP Latency after each change. You already know your machine is capable of audio playback so if you're patient I'm sure you will locate the device that's causing this.

Okay, you've tried increasing your buffer settings already so try running DPC Latency checker to confirm what you are hearing (an occasional spike corresponding with the clicks you hear). What is the maximum latency? You will be able to fix it if you're patient, by methodically disabling devices until you determine what is causing the glitch (i.e., DPC Latency runs with no spikes). One machine I worked on that was causing a very brief 'tick' every 5 minutes or so turned out in the end to be the battery monitor... a very mundane thing.

Nice collection jivers, what's your favorite? I've read great things about your Audeze and those Denons as well. I have Sennheiser HD800, HD650 (damaged), HD270 (damaged, anyone notice a pattern here?), Sony MDR-CD570, B&W P5. The HD270 seem to be universally hated but at the time 10 years ago they were for me the best sounding cans in the shop (in Akihabara) at any price. Bass is too muddy now, not sure whether they have changed or I have. The HD650 are the best vfm for me, polite cans and more forgiving of worse recordings than the HD800 (with stock cable) which can be a bit clinical. The HD800 benefits (a lot) from a good aftermarket cable but that pushes these already expensive cans up to a near-silly price. Still the sound after all that is worth it and a good investment as long as the dog doesn't eat them. They are insanely comfortable which is very important to me. The B&W P5 is for traveling. Good passive noise reduction, in built microphone which is handy for VoIP, well made but the on-ear design is a bit uncomfortable for me over an extended period.

There's always a silver lining with these things; Stax Omegas. Yes, I really want to listen to these, I'll have to find a way...

I keep mine in the coffin box at all times when I'm not using them. That way they gather no dust. Also, by being out of sight they are firmly out of (my daughter's) mind. She (whom I love dearly it goes without saying) when a bit younger bent back the headband on my HD650s snapping them into two pieces.

Not positive but think it might be this: http://www.usb-audio.com/download.html

In Windows you can do it without buying software using the free xcopy command. Open notepad and type the following two lines: xcopy d:musicalbums m:musicalbums /E /D pause then save as a batch file (*.bat). When you want to copy music across run the batch file from explorer or create a shortcut to it from your desktop. In the above case "d:music albums" is the source directory and "m:musicalbums" is the destination. Amend as necessary. /E Copies directories and subdirectories, including empty ones. /D:m-d-y Copies files changed on or after the specified date. If no date is given, copies only those files whose source time is newer than the destination time. for a full listing of xcopy command options, type xcopy /? at the command line. I use a script variation of the above to copy my music off my machine to my two backup drives, one which I leave here at home, the other in my office at work. When I add music I take the drive at home to the office and take the office drive back home so I always have two up-to-date backup copies, one of which is offsite. The backup drives are encrypted using BitLocker so if I get mugged en route to work or robbed at the office at least I won't be giving anyone a free copy of my music collection ;-)

Nice to see you posting here again Matt, I had kinda feared the worst OE

There was a thread on this a while back... http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/How-I-Learned-Stop-Worrying

In case you weren't aware and before migrating over to foobar, it might be worth mentioning that cPlay (recently) supports VST plugins, so you might be able to get convolver working with cPlay (there's a tutorial on using VST with cPlay on AA). e.g.: http://sourceforge.net/projects/convolver/ Alternatively, to proceed with foobar and CMP you need to revert to the pth file you already had which pointed at foobar The error message you're getting with foobar is a playback configuration matter: run foobar on its own and within playback preferences select your juli@ card directly if not ASIO4ALL (which should automatically output to your juli@ card as it's already configured that way for cPlay). Regarding my earlier comment, the spinning drive in addition to being noisy increases your machine's CPU activity, which you've already gone to great lengths to reduce by implementing numerous CMP2 tweaks. On playback, your drive will be correcting any errors on the fly, compared with having a ripped error-free file playing back smoothly from RAM via your hard disk. Whether this really matters could be debated perhaps but the showstopper as far as CMP goes is that technically it won't work because CMP uses cue files, which in turn reference the named music files stored on your hard disk. In other words, you can't use CMP to play a redbook CD via foobar -- you would need to ditch CMP and operate from within foobar directly. (BTW, I notice in your diagnostic above that you have RAM load set to ON within your CMP options. You should change this to OFF when using cPlay as cPlay already loads the music tracks into RAM -- what you'll be hearing now is music files being loaded into RAM twice).

Yes, you're on the right track. You need to edit cicsMemoryPlayer.pth to point to cPlay instead of foobar. cicsMemoryPlayer.pth is in the CMP directory. There should also be a backup copy in the cPlay directory. Check whether the backup copy points to cPlay (it should) in which case you can use the backup to replace the file in the CMP directory. Alternatively edit the file manually (I'm overseas now without CMP machine so can't confirm the exact path); or, uninstall and reinstall cMP so that the default cicsMemoryPlayer.pth file gets recreated.

Can you post the full diagnostics report here? You could try uninstalling and reinstalling both cmp and cplay. It's a worthwhile improvement if you can get cmp to work considering its cost (nothing) but if you can't, to be honest, I wouldn't worry too much. In absolute terms I think it's a nice but small improvement over running directly from cplay. It would be better to rip those unripped disks or continue with your CD player rather than attempt to reconnect your CD drive, especially after having gone to the trouble of stripping back your machine already.

Have you checked that cPlay is installed in the default folder (c:program filescics play)? There's a configuration file called cicsMemoryPlayer.pth, which you can open in notepad to check where CMP is expecting cPlay to be...

When I click on the LIO thread it takes me straight to the newest post OE