After further listening I have switched back to 3.00.
I still think 3.06 is pretty good. When it is good it is really good. Listening to the excellent XRCD of Horace Parlan’s “On The Spur Of The Moment”, there is a vocal that comes out of nowhere to the right of the soundstage towards the end of the second track - that was so eerily real, I was startled.
But after a while, it was the highs that got to me. Jackie Mclean’s sour tone on “Jackie’s Bag” got too tart and I couldn’t sit through entire songs without wincing. Maybe @lonson can appreciate that.
So I went back to 3.00 which is built more for comfort than for speed. Most material comes through with a great musical flow. Now vocals are fuller and larger than life rather than clear and natural and highs are burnished rather than airy as per 3.06 but I guess I can live with that.
Once I heard the treble “diffusion” of 3.0.0 in comparison to 3.0.6 I haven’t been able to comfortably go back. I may try again one day. Ultimately by changing my HDMI interconnect and with judicious use of my Decware ZROCK2 component even Jackie Mac’s alto tone isn’t too tart or sour for me and all the benefits of 3.0.6 are keeping it in place.
I don’t ever bypass the EQ, I need it, I love it. It’s what makes the system work for me because I’m not in an optimal space nor am I allowed room treatment.
But I would probably still make the same preference. I have enough midrange richness with my tubed system and cabling and though I didn’t quite realize it, as soon as I heard the treble differences between the two OS I knew I had been tuning and tailoring to get past that treble recess since Snowmass first arrived and also remembered how many weeks I worked at it before I felt at home with Snowmass. I would probably choose 3.0.6 even bypassing the ZROCK2. But I don’t do that.
@jazznut: I’m wondering that so many just seem to have experienced “different” sounding cabling within a price range and use it for tone control more or less. Even before I landed where I am now, I was in a price range where it would have been much too expensive to hold similarly good cables in parallel for compensating equipment or firmware differences. Not to speak of my assumption that each different sounding cabling will handle very basic demands (like phase coherence) differently. So we care for the best and most accurate DAC/firmware and then we change something like cabling to alter what we achieved at DAC level just to compensate tonality?
Now, in my setup the difference to everything else I heard rg. cabling is so big and it sounds so much more right in so many ways, that the cabling got as much a core component as the speakers. If I’d switch cabling due to a component or firmware change (even against very expensive alternatives), ambience, soundstage and timing would kind of collapse. At a rather standard level I can easily accept that tone control purpose of cabling, but not in a highly optimized high end system. I admit, my advantage is, that I can compensate tonality changes with turning volume of single chassis up and down on my active speakers.
So no, I definitely don’t compensate tonality changes with switching cabling. And remembering how folks tend to claim certain concepts or equipment represents neutrality, accuracy and truth to the recording (during their whole development phase?), I wonder how changes that need such compensation can happen at all.
@jazznut, I spent a bit of time thinking about your excellent post (which I felt should be quoted in its entirety). My thought on this, ironically, has its basis in some of what you said. My feeling is that, with systems that are so finely tuned and resolving, changing something even as “small” as FW can introduce differences that can perturb what many of us have spent so much time doing - defining a system that produces what we think is the best representation of the recording being played. I look at the complex interactions of a multi-piece connected audio system almost like a living thing. Changing one thing can change how the whole thing behaves. Making adjustments in cases like this is not so much, IMHO, trying to use tone controls. It’s an attempt to keep the sonic train on track, along with the hope to retain any improvements brought by the change.
The alternative, to me (I’m not suggesting this is what you were trying to imply) is that one could have a theoretically perfect system and the expectation is that introducing a further improvement would have absolutely no effect on the system other than to contribute that improvement to the whole. In my own universe of audio experience I haven’t often seen that happen. Maybe I just haven’t had the chance to hear systems that are that good.
Indeed I mainly mentioned tone control usage of cabling because many found noticable tonality differences in those firmwares and because Paul (and Ted) somewhere suggested to use cabling for compensating such findings (while probably no one would suggest to choose/switch a DAC just according to one’s tonality problems or changes with cabling…probably this would only be suggested by cable manufacturers). The problem is, for most, cabling (or any other component) is the only way to fit the system sound to a change (which is mostly tonality related). Bad, that high end manufacturers can’t solve this for the customers in a different, near lossless way other than with active speakers.
In fact I heard an instant improvement in all the major updates that was so strong in comparison, that it clearly overruled slight tonality changes. I think if a setup is well balanced, transparent, clean and natural sounding, not on an edge (bright or dull) and without room resonances stimulated with only slight deviations of bass level or phase, all those tonality effects are neglectable more or less as the other effects and improvements are much stronger and more fascinating. However I admit that for the firmware before Snowmass I had to rise bass level a little bit. This firmware was more controlled in bass than the one before and with the adjusted bass level it turned out to be a great improvement…without the adjustment it would have been a two sided thing. Similar in the opposite direction with Snowmass (more resonant, colorful bass).
So at the end my main concern with the use of cabling as compensation was, that in a very good system the selection or fitting of cabling is either absulutely essential or at least gives the last bit of finish. Changing this (not to mention the cost of a change) due to firmware differences without major disadvantages imo means that the previous matching was not of the effect or quality and synergy it could have been.
Another excellent observation, @jazznut. I think we generally agree, and in point of fact in my own experience with these various Snowmass versions I too have found no reason to “tweak” anything. And now that I think about it, the amount of alterations I’ve experimented with with the DS is nothing compared to my experience with the PWD! Maybe my system is getting better!
I had switched back to 305 and was quite enjoying it. Then my new speakers arrived and I switched back to 306. Any hint of high end stridency is gone. It just sounds wonderful. With my old speakers it was a razors edge, with the new speaks it’s wonderful. I suppose I need to try 300 and 305 again but not soon.
Now that you mention it, the strengths and weaknesses of 3.0.6 and the preferred 3.0 have got me thinking about changing dacs, e.g., Ayon Stealth or Stratos, or giving in and putting a preamp between the DS and ATC actives. No hurry, as dealing with room acoustics and hooking up a pair of JL Audio subs will come first, but as I say this episode has got me to thinking…But not about changing cables at all.
I have my display off/don’t use vol. function during playback so I reverted back to V3.0. Ted mentioned that FPGA does “Upsampling to 28.224MHz or 56.448MHz (and then back to 5.6448MHz or11.2896MHz) depending on the software release”. With the recent release, the upsampling is already at 56.448MHz. When can we expect 11.2896MHz output to Analogue? This will enable playback of 11.2MHz files, correct?
I finally decided to try 3.06 from 3.00 (I didn’t care for 3.05). I know I’m late to the game, but my impressions mirror @Gary_M and @lonson - and @yacheah at his initial liking of 3.06. What was weird for me, though, were logistical things. When I went first directly from 3.00 to 3.06, the volume stayed where it had been with 3.00, but the USB input went out. I had to power cycle the DS again and USB came back (and stayed). I thought that was odd. Why would a subsequent boot enable something? That’s something that’s always bothered me about the DS - this seeming unpredictability as to whether the full FW capability will work as intended with a simple power enable. Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. If @tedsmith could venture a guess as to why this is I’d appreciate it.
So after listening to 3.06 for a while and deciding I’ll stick with it for a longer term listening experience, I decided to do the “alternate mountain” burn sequence. I went back to Redcloud, then to Snowmass 3.06. After each burn I cycled power a second time. So with the 3.06 install now, the volume did not retain its previous setting but was set to 25 (not even 50). Why? What makes stuff like this happen? Is it predictable? Anyway, I set the volume to where is should be and will keep 3.06 in place, but it really make a body wonder if what I’m (or anyone is) hearing is in part “accidental”.
Unfortunately it’s not very predictable. The coder for the PWD and the display/control processor in the DS, DS Jr, early DMP’s, etc. had a few blind spots. Tho it’s a vast oversimplification, you can think of a lot of the control processor’s problems as unintended use of uninitialized variables. In particular on upgrades there’s a new area in flash ram for the user’s settings, but depending on which release you are coming from and the particular settings you had previously, the initialization of the new settings could be pretty random. Also the first boot of the new software was different because it didn’t initialize all of memory either and various variables had values based on the last software load/running memory image. PS Audio engineering is aware of these problems and I expect that these kind of things will be much better in the products designed after said software engineer left PS Audio.
So @tedsmith, given that a new burn from different starting points can initialize variables in different ways, once a FW load is burned - and once the potential couple or so of power restarts have occurred such that all sub functions are expected to run, is there ever any expectation that that FW burn itself could somehow be “different”? Or that (once the DS has settled itself back out), that that FW load could somehow sound different (inherently from the DS) than anyone else’s FW burn of the same version? I suspect I’m not the only one curious about this.
As many here know, your settings can affect the sound quality, e.g. screen brightness, as well as the obvious FPGA settings. In Pike’s Peak one could get in a mode where things sounded like they were playing in a long concrete tunnel. A reboot would fix that. Some earlier releases could swap channels now and then. With more current software these kind of things should be rare or absent. But a power brown out of the right level can cause the control processor to act funny. And using an I2S source that supplies 5V can cause weirdness depending on its exact voltage, current draw and current sourcing capabilities. The reason I bring this up is that such an I2S connection can keep the system from rebooting correctly even when using the switch on the back.
But basically if you get past the uninitialized memory issues things should be stable. At times people have had to go back a release, forward, back and forward to get there.
To this point @tedsmith, what could the off-nominal behaviors be that would cause the need to have to do this - assuming no power irregularities or anything like that? And why would these possible off-nominal conditions cause the sound to be different (as many seem to have experienced)?
I listed the ones I know about - basically the UI code is a more fragile than it should be, I’d say especially when the Bridge is involved. There’s a whole lot less hardware with state in the DS than in the DMP where his coding was a much more serious problem.
If the control processor code gets stuck in any loop, hard spin, recurring interrupt, etc. the memory pattern becomes much more regular and hence any generated noise gets more colored and perhaps goes from unnoticeable whitish noise to a low level colored tone. The same can happen if anything affects the configuration of the screen hardware. But these kind of things usually have visible or very audible symptoms which would cause most people to do a hardware reboot. If you are running with the screen off, the FPGA will still make music just fine without the control processor and the first time you notice something wrong would be when the remote doesn’t work anymore. The Jr has the auto input select option so some people use the remote less often than on the DS Sr and it may not be as obvious that something is wrong on the Jr as soon as on the Sr.
It is the case that I’ve had my system on for months and then something gets weird in the sound. But when I think back there are usually signs of a power glitch somewhere else in the house (a blinking clock, etc.) I suspect the majority of the cases where the DS suddenly changes when it was working fine for a while before are caused by power glitches - there’s always a weak spot in any product for power glitches and the in the DS that’s the control processor: basically because there’s much more power supply filtering for the digital and analog boards. The LED for the analog board power supply can last for many seconds after power is lost, but the control processor is watching for power dropping and mutes the analog card so nothing bad happens to the sound as the power bleeds off.
PS Audio have released version 3.0.6 (Snr) for Snowmass OS, the changes in the update are for the PIC code only, so in theory there should be no effect on SQ.
I was on version 3.0.0, I didn’t update to 3.0.5 when released, in my system there is a considerable difference between 3.0.0 and 3.0.6.
The later has crisper highs and slightly more pronounced mids, making it a bit bright first up, the bass seems to be better defined, but have less impact, its more in the background, soundstage is slightly improved. After a couple of hours listening last night I think I prefer 3.0.0, I will give it some more time to get use to the change before reverting back to 3.0.0 for a final comparison.
I know it sounds crazy, but these firmware updates seem to take time to settle in. I was on the fence as to whether or not I liked 3.06 over 3.0 3.06 definitely sounded better in the bass, and had more detail on the top end, but the mid-range seemed to be lacking compared to 3.0.
So I let things run in for over a week, and 3.06 definitely improved in the mid-range, which is why I’ve stuck with it.
Just recently after acquiring and breaking in a new BHK preamp, I compared the two firmwares again, and I still prefer 3.06. Better bass definition, cleaner mids, more extended on the too end, and better imaging.
