Foobar playback and VAD show (BD-Design)

by GC , Monday, October 24, 2005, 22:01 (6751 days ago) @ GC

Hello Bert,

I did already see the pages that you refer too. After again changing settings for more than an hour I suddenly got a normal sounding Bjork out of my headphone. So after one minute I started Foobar and I also obtained Bjork. Already on the first seconds my mouth almost fell open from amazement. The difference was much larger than I expected: the sound is now crystal clear and much more detail is revealed in high and low frequencies.

So yesterday evening I took a deep breath and connected the Acer to the Twindac. The new hardware was immediately recognised and I made the USB device the default player and set all parameters according to your manuals. When I started Foobar no sound came out of the speakers. Three hours later, already after midnight, suddenly the sound appeared. So, again I listened to a CD by Bjork and noticed the same difference. The notebook is indeed considerably better than my Theta CD transport (a new one nowadays costs at least $5000!).

The problem remains that I do not understand what I am doing. Marian, my wife, is much more experienced in playing around with computers so she helped me a bit in trying to systematically scan possible settings. But I do not even know what Direct Sound means or Kernel Streaming or .... On the other hand I saw an interesting development on the VAD show I mentioned earlier: hard disk recorders specifically for audio. These were very userfriendly but are of course much less versatile than a notebook and, much more important, they did not have audio outout through USB. (I also did not hear a bass speaker that comes even close to the speed and the naturalness of the BD-15).

So I will definitely stay with the notebook playback and try to find good information on computer audio. The highest priority, however, is now back with the hum problem that is still not completely resolved. In spite of that I do enjoy listening to music almost every evening.

Yours,
Eddie

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