Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

In article , Vir Campestris
wrote:
On 03/05/2018 14:22, Jim Lesurf wrote:
I can't comment on Windows or Macs as I've not used them (thankfully)
for over a decade.

I've never used Mac, but I used to have a high quality DAC in a Windows
machine. Windows 7 came out, and it decided the right thing to do was to
re-sample all my CDs to 48kHz on the fly during playback.

It was noticeably worse. I had to give up that DAC.

What DAC was it?

To clarify just in case:

Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems unlikely
the *DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have thought it would
have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at least find a way to tell
it to stop messing things up.

This does seem a general problems with OS's, though. The people who release
an OS tend to take blythly for granted that the default must be to run all
audio though a 'mixer'... which duly them minces all audio to a pre-fixed
rate. Usually 48k.

The wonderful advantage of this is the user can hear a sound telling them
when, say, email arrives, even when they are playing music. sigh But
messes up the audio more generally.

To make things worse, sometimes a user may reset the output rate by a
method which means the output *still* gets minced. i.e. 44.1k material is
converted to 48k assuming it will go to a mixer, but is then converted bck
to 44.1k again to output because "that's what the user wants". So the
output is at the same rate as the source, but has been boogered up along
the way. aargh

Sadly, this often catches out people you'd think would be aware of the
problem. e.g. some people at the BBC I was talking to the iplayer about a
year of few ago about iplayer quality tests.

The lesson is, sadly, that you may need to be able to test your computer
setup to find out what may be going wrong, and then fiddle about to fix the
problems. Some OSs make this easier than others, but they all tend to make
assumptions about what the user 'wants' (without saying so) that may simply
be wrong.

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
biog http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/history/ups_and_downs.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems unlikely
the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have thought it would
have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at least find a way to tell
it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do that
for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a work machine.

15 years later I don't recall the model of DAC... hang on. It must have
been XP, not 7. In most ways XP was a great improvement on 2000, and an
enormous improvement on the DOS-based 9x series.

Andy

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

On Fri, 04 May 2018 22:56:05 +0100, Vir Campestris wrote:

On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems
unlikely the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have
thought it would have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at least
find a way to tell it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do that
for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a work
machine.

15 years later I don't recall the model of DAC... hang on. It must have
been XP, not 7. In most ways XP was a great improvement on 2000,

And yet, in ever so many more ways, it was not. It might have had some
improved features but these were entirely negated by needless bling and a
lobotomised Explorer interface. IMHO, compared to win2k, winXP was a
festering PoS.

--
Johnny B Good

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

In article , Vir Campestris
wrote:
On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems
unlikely the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have
thought it would have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at
least find a way to tell it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do that
for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a work
machine.

Ah, that old friend the 'driver', etc. Classic way MS tie down users.

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
biog http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/history/ups_and_downs.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

In article , Johnny B Good johnny-b-
scribeth thus
On Fri, 04 May 2018 22:56:05 +0100, Vir Campestris wrote:

On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems
unlikely the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have
thought it would have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at least
find a way to tell it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do that
for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a work
machine.

15 years later I don't recall the model of DAC... hang on. It must have
been XP, not 7. In most ways XP was a great improvement on 2000,

And yet, in ever so many more ways, it was not. It might have had some
improved features but these were entirely negated by needless bling and a
lobotomised Explorer interface. IMHO, compared to win2k, winXP was a
festering PoS.


Yes went from WIN2K pro here to WIN 7 seems I missed out on a LOT of
grief then;)...
--
Tony Sayer

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

On 05/05/2018 10:13, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , Vir Campestris
wrote:
On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems
unlikely the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have
thought it would have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at
least find a way to tell it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do that
for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a work
machine.

Ah, that old friend the 'driver', etc. Classic way MS tie down users.

Jim

I don't remember having any difficulty with operating in 44.1 kHz,
16-bit under Windows 7.

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

On Sat, 05 May 2018 11:17:46 +0100, tony sayer wrote:

In article , Johnny B Good johnny-b-
scribeth thus
On Fri, 04 May 2018 22:56:05 +0100, Vir Campestris wrote:

On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems
unlikely the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have
thought it would have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at
least find a way to tell it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do that
for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a work
machine.

15 years later I don't recall the model of DAC... hang on. It must
have been XP, not 7. In most ways XP was a great improvement on 2000,

And yet, in ever so many more ways, it was not. It might have had some
improved features but these were entirely negated by needless bling and
a lobotomised Explorer interface. IMHO, compared to win2k, winXP was a
festering PoS.


Yes went from WIN2K pro here to WIN 7 seems I missed out on a LOT of
grief then;)...

I guess you did but, imo, you could have saved yourself even more grief
(or not) if you'd done what I did which was to go straight from win2k to
Linux Mint 17.1, bypassing the grief of win8.x and win10 altogether. :-)

--
Johnny B Good

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

In article , JNugent
wrote:
On 05/05/2018 10:13, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , Vir Campestris
wrote:
On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems
unlikely the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have
thought it would have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at
least find a way to tell it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do
that for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a
work machine.

Ah, that old friend the 'driver', etc. Classic way MS tie down users.

Jim

I don't remember having any difficulty with operating in 44.1 kHz,
16-bit under Windows 7.

Did you use the same 'driver' and DAC as Vic?

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa...o/electron.htm
biog http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/history/ups_and_downs.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

On 05/05/2018 16:36, JNugent wrote:
I don't remember having any difficulty with operating in 44.1 kHz,
16-bit under Windows 7.

I said I abandoned the DAC. The motherboard's own sound chip ran fine at
44.1

Andy

Can I, aged 69, really assess hi-fi speakers?
 

On 06/05/2018 09:09, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , JNugent
wrote:
On 05/05/2018 10:13, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , Vir Campestris
wrote:
On 04/05/2018 09:30, Jim Lesurf wrote:
Most high quality DACs will accept various input rates. It seems
unlikely the*DAC* was unable to accept 44.1k/16bit. So I'd have
thought it would have been more appropriate to give up W7 - or at
least find a way to tell it to stop messing things up.

The Windows 7 driver wouldn't do 44.1 - or I'd have told it to do
that for everything. And the choice of OS wasn't mine. This was a
work machine.

Ah, that old friend the 'driver', etc. Classic way MS tie down users.

Jim

I don't remember having any difficulty with operating in 44.1 kHz,
16-bit under Windows 7.

Did you use the same 'driver' and DAC as Vic?

Only the soundcrad driver(s) that came installed with Windows. I did
attach a Toshiba External card for a while and had no difficulty with that.