Hard Hitting Audiophile Tweaks

[Aleg]

At the request of 2ChannelAudio ;-) I start a new thread with all kinds of tweaks that seem to have given an immediate and clearly noticable improvement on sound quality.

A lot of these probably have been mentioned before but have been lost among the postings in other threads.

So the intention is to collect in this thread a kind of resume of best tweaks.

Hardware:
- Giso GB Lan isolator: much lowered noise floor for those connected to network for NAS access etc.

- JCAT USB cable: more detailed presentation and again lower noise floor.

- Stillpoint Ultra SS: used under my Naim DAC. Better control/focus and placement.

- Apogee Wyde Eye spdif cable: greater clarity to sound compared to stock spdif

- BIOS: disable unused devices, disable hyperthreading, disable intel 'improvements' as speedstep (eist), C-states, etc.

- RAM timings: as low as you can get them while maintaining stability and keep them in proper relation

- PSU: linear PSU instead of SMPS, not only on mobo, but also on network switch and USB-cards, SSD etc

Software:
- Operating System: Windows Server 2012R2

- Affinity and Priority: assigning dedicated processor core each to mqnplay and mqncontrol and realtime / high priority for mqnplay.exe (I prefer realtime others prefer high). I use tasker to set these.

- Aligning Timerresolution and driver buffer size: I use Timerresolution of 2ms and driver buffer of 2 ms as well, feels very relaxed and fluid. Avoid the maximum setting of 0.5 ms which causes a noticable strain to the sound.

- Pro Audio Clockrate: using 448 not tried to compare recently. Found it to be better than 23220.

- AudioPhile Optimiser: reduces the number of active processes and changes several registry settings. I did not go further than version 1.24 as later releases did not agree with me.

- Several of JC's registry tweaks: I use a few of the basic early ones 2, 3, 5b, 9, 40

[nige2000]

never found much difference turing hyperthreading off
eist and c-states = evil

what other pro audio settings are you using
latency sensitive etc

did you ever try turn ethernet off in bios and use solid state (understand its not practical just a test)

irq settings for dac?

[2channelaudio]

At the request of 2ChannelAudio ;-) I start a new thread with all kinds of tweaks that seem to have given an immediate and clearly noticable improvement on sound quality.

A lot of these probably have been mentioned before but have been lost among the postings in other threads.

So the intention is to collect in this thread a kind of resume of best tweaks.

Hardware:
- Giso GB Lan isolator: much lowered noise floor for those connected to network for NAS access etc.

- JCAT USB cable: more detailed presentation and again lower noise floor.

- Stillpoint Ultra SS: used under my Naim DAC. Better control/focus and placement.

- Apogee Wyde Eye spdif cable: greater clarity to sound compared to stock spdif

- BIOS: disable unused devices, disable hyperthreading, disable intel 'improvements' as speedstep, etc.

- RAM timings: as low as you can get them while maintaining stability and keep them in proper relation

- PSU: linear PSU instead of SMPS, not only on mobo, but also on network switch and USB-cards, SSD etc

Software:
- Operating System: Windows Server 2012R2

- Affinity and Priority: assigning dedicated processor core each to mqnplay and mqncontrol and realtime / high priority (I prefer realtime others prefer high). I use tasker to set these.

- Aligning Timerresolution and driver buffer size: I use Timerresolution of 2ms and driver buffer of 2 ms as well, feels very relaxed and fluid. Avoid the maximum setting of 0.5 ms which causes a noticable strain to the sound.

- Pro Audio Clockrate: using 448 not tried to compare recently. Found it to be better than 23220.

- AudioPhile Optimiser: reduces the number of active processes and changes several registry settings. I did not go further than version 1.24/1.25 as later releases did not agree with me.

- Several of JC's registry tweaks: I use a few of the basic early ones 2, 3, 5b, 9, 40

Great start....thanks

I am particularly interested in the pro audio tweaks you have listed.

Tasker, affinity, aligning timer resolution, pro audio clock rate....
I will need to google these for a how to, etc. Not across some of these.

I thought MQN automatically assigned mqncontrol/play to discrete cores?

Cheers

[Aleg]

never found much difference turing hyperthreading off
eist and c-states = evil

what other pro audio settings are you using
latency sensitive etc

did you ever try turn ethernet off in bios and use solid state (understand its not practical just a test)

irq settings for dac?

Eist, c-states etc go under the Intel improvements ;-). These are some of several activity creating bios setting that you don't want. CPU should be as stable and unregulated as possible.

No I never tried to turn off ethernet as that won't be an option for me as I have literally all my music on NAS.

My Pro Audio settings

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks\Pro Audio]
"Scheduling Category"="High"
"GPU Priority"=dword:00000008
"Affinity"=dword:00000002
"Clock Rate"=dword:000001c0
"SFIO Priority"="Normal"
"Priority"=dword:00000001
"Background Only"="True"
"BackgroundPriority"=dword:00000008
"Low Latency"="True"
"Latency Sensitive"="True"

I cannot touch the IRQ for my DDC as it doesn't show as a separate entry.
I followed the instructions of AudioPhil but could not find my DDC among the IRQs.

@2CA
In the MQn thread there is all the information about affinity, priority, clockrate and timerresolution. But it is not easy to find.
Maybe if you search on one of these words combined with my username that you might find only a few posts.

No mqncontrol doesn't assign affinity.

[sbgk]

No mqncontrol doesn't assign affinity.

it's supposed to put mqnplay on core 1 and the rest on 0,2,3

[nige2000]

My Pro Audio settings

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks\Pro Audio]
"Scheduling Category"="High"
"GPU Priority"=dword:00000008
"Affinity"=dword:00000002
"Clock Rate"=dword:000001c0
"SFIO Priority"="Normal"
"Priority"=dword:00000001
"Background Only"="True"
"BackgroundPriority"=dword:00000008
"Low Latency"="True"
"Latency Sensitive"="True"

yes im still using the same
what about the visual studio 2012 runtime libraries still using them?

I cannot touch the IRQ for my DDC as it doesn't show as a separate entry.
I followed the instructions of AudioPhil but could not find my DDC among the IRQs.

yes i was using it and thought it was a benefit
finding it was easy enough as by onboard audio been off in the bios left it the only audio controller
im just about to do a new install and revist the tweaks

@2CA
In the MQn thread there is all the information about affinity, priority, clockrate and timerresolution. But it is not easy to find.
Maybe if you search on one of these words combined with my username that you might find only a few posts.

No mqncontrol doesn't assign affinity.

i find it very difficult to find old posts usually having to resort to google :(

[nige2000]

usb cable
what ever you do don't use a printer cable, electrical wire with plugs on it is better than most ;)
not difficult to make your own or use an usb a-b adapter

[Aleg]

My Pro Audio settings

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks\Pro Audio]
"Scheduling Category"="High"
"GPU Priority"=dword:00000008
"Affinity"=dword:00000002
"Clock Rate"=dword:000001c0
"SFIO Priority"="Normal"
"Priority"=dword:00000001
"Background Only"="True"
"BackgroundPriority"=dword:00000008
"Low Latency"="True"
"Latency Sensitive"="True"

yes im still using the same
what about the visual studio 2012 runtime libraries still using them?

Yes, but I believe they were from visual studio 2013. VS2013C++

I cannot touch the IRQ for my DDC as it doesn't show as a separate entry.
I followed the instructions of AudioPhil but could not find my DDC among the IRQs.

yes i was using it and thought it was a benefit
finding it was easy enough as by onboard audio been off in the bios left it the only audio controller
im just about to do a new install and revist the tweaks

I might give it another try this way.

@2CA
In the MQn thread there is all the information about affinity, priority, clockrate and timerresolution. But it is not easy to find.
Maybe if you search on one of these words combined with my username that you might find only a few posts.

No mqncontrol doesn't assign affinity.

i find it very difficult to find old posts usually having to resort to google :(

That's also how I do it or with search option bottom left of page when in a thread but with large threads that is often still a lot of results.

[Aleg]

I cannot touch the IRQ for my DDC as it doesn't show as a separate entry.
I followed the instructions of AudioPhil but could not find my DDC among the IRQs.

yes i was using it and thought it was a benefit
finding it was easy enough as by onboard audio been off in the bios left it the only audio controller
im just about to do a new install and revist the tweaks

I might give it another try this way.

Nige

I cannot find my DDC.

My DDC is connected to a Renesas based PCIe USB3-card.
In device manager I can see the PCIe-card connected to the system PCI-manager. This PCIe-manager has a shared IRQ of 16.

The Renesas USB-card has itself 8 virtual IRQs right at the bottom of the IRQ list.

The DDC connected to that Renesas USB-card isn't shown, so I don't know which of the 8 virtual IRQs to prioritize.

So I don't think it is possible for me.

Cheers

Aleg

[nige2000]

Not sure
What I'd do
Maybe experiment
I've to do mine as well for my test mobo
So likely be a different irq