The next DirectStream update?

In Ted we trust. Amen.

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My 10th grade math teacher was the king of puns, but I think that with this one, you outdid him. Keep it up! I’d better leave that one alone.

My late father-in-law also suffered from kidney stones. One of the worse pains imaginable. Glad to hear that your I’ve the worst part Ted.

……." but I’m trying to work on the things with the mostly likely changes in sound quality first (tho that’s very subjective.)"

You are too modest, Ted. Nothing subjective with what you do - ‘always sounds real to me…then again that’s subjective’ !

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Thanx Ted…

Questions: When you do your “sound analysis”, are you working at home or at PS Audio? What is your reference system, and does the sound of your system differ from PS Audio’s reference system? Any issues reconciling the two?

Peace
Bruce in Philly

I do almost everything at home. My system isn’t bad (and I have a backup headphone system): http://cgi.audioasylum.com/systems/3367.html Also a brief description about my room treatments: https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/hirez/224992/howdy-an-update

My wife and daughter have great ears (and enjoy music) which is nice for making sure I’m not overlooking anything.

Then I send the code off to PS Audio where they listen and give me their impressions. Paul and I listen for different things and that’s a good thing: we cover a broader range of customer preferences. I don’t think we’ve had a case where there was something they heard that I can’t reproduce or that I disagreed with. We don’t fight over things like frequency balance, sound staging (where our two systems differ greatly), or a lot of other things that people might tweak. At times, they do say things like “the bass seems a little sloppy” and I can usually find some technical thing to address address their issues. Paul is always pushing for things like “lower noise floor”, “more bass extension”, and I’m happy to try to find something that I can make objectively better that ameliorates those concerns as well as the concerns expressed here on the boards. Also I like to think that if I didn’t like their choice of which one out of the twenty that we could either get some more versions to choose from or that I could make a change that addresses the perceived weakness of a set of twenty. It hasn’t been a problem so far.

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Am I the only one that mostly reads these threads for those moments when Ted chimes in and brings order to the world?

I’m as obsessed about this weird stuff as anyone, but have observed that my system sounds better when I exercise and eat well. The room isn’t the last variable.

Ted, thanks for being so open about your work and process (and, unfortunately, health issues when they occur).

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You are not the only one. How you feel makes a big difference in how you perceive the world and how the system sounds. We’re not mechanical machines that respond the same way each day.

I too love reading Ted’s words. He’s a brilliant designer and human being. We’re lucky to have him here.

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Amen to that.

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That’s good!
Especially in case one is checking with short snippets of spectacular recordings and test tracks for singular aspects, another one is important who regularly listens to music for longer periods and for musical aspects/prat/tonality.

Equipment which is developed/optimized by only one of the two can fail a lot on the blind spot imo.

But I know you’re convinced that if something’s done the right way technically, it’s good throughout except of final voicing aspects …and probably that’s true.

Great stuff, Ted

The treatment of your ceiling bulkheads is wicked clever. My room looks much like yours in terms of the ceiling bulkheads containing HVAC ducting, beams, etc. I can see a project in my future. Thanks for sharing.

The coving worked much better than I expected. Just walking under the outside edges registers as an acoustically deader space, vaguely like an invisible anechoic chamber wall. We’re used to it but I often see people glance around the first few times they cross it. My ceiling is too low and I sure as heck didn’t want “trapping” of 1kHz (and up) just above the listening position. It was fun doing the ad hoc room treatments, the contractor was doing time and materials and we just brainstormed about how to do random things as we went.

I’m also cursed with low ceilings (7.5’) and the bass trapping to control the big room nodes has the room at a point where too much more absorption would make the room too dead. That said, the room still needs some acoustic work, and this looks like a good solution. I may try burying some Sonotube Helmholtz bass traps in the coving to deal with a broad peak around 23 Hz I still have . . . A good place to hide long resonators.

Mail](https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986) for Windows 10

Super impressive room, and of course system. About your ceiling height, would it have been possible to lower, dig down, your floor maybe a foot? Low ceiling is my problem too.

Probably not, we’re one of the few houses in the neighborhood without springs or running groundwater in their basements. (We didn’t know about their issues when we bought the house, but we were lucky on that account. In any case we put French drains around the perimeter of the house which all drain into a 55 gallon sump at the bottom of our lot which then pumps any ground water, gutter water, runoff, etc. into the sewer in the front.)

On the other hand the thought of lowering the floor to effect a raising of the ceiling didn’t cross our minds.

We have a water problem too.

That’s funny :slight_smile:

Ted - and the other stones sufferers here will, I’m sure, be thrilled to learn that, under a microscope, they’re beautiful…

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So Ted,

Just curious (darn these forums! No peace!)…

As you work on the software for the next update… or you new DAC, what is it that you are targeting? Bug fixes? Known issues? Experimentation only? Known sound deficiencies?

I used to write software and I know I always had dead bodies stinking up pieces of buried code.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

Yes :slight_smile:

For the DS software update I’m trying to rewrite the PCM upsampler (I mentioned that above somewhere). That should both help PCM and lower FPGA generated jitter/noise overall which should help the sound quality of everything. Like always, there may be a gotcha that stalls out that new feature. The code for 44.1k is limping, but that means almost everything is working: the new data flow control is working, the new upsampler is close. But there’s still significant work to do to modify a few things to deal with the new data: fit in the new filter coefficients for 88.1/96k and 176.4/192k, correct the deemphasis filter, test, test, test… Since this is new code I’ll probably not be doing much archeological cleanup on other code, but:

Tho I don’t know if I can make a difference I’ll revisit the pops going from PCM to DSD and vice versa. The new upsampler will have different timings for that transition so revising the code that tracks the PCM/DSD boundaries needs to be done. This won’t (directly) address the pops that some players add in DSD to DSD seeking or that they add on PCM/DSD transitions or sample rate changes, tho I’ll be looking over the auto-mute-on-transitions-code.

If all goes to plan the PCM sound stage may deepen a little and transient timing may improve a little. There shouldn’t be any apparent change in frequency response, but PCM should be a little more cohesive. In so far as I lower FPGA noise, you’ll get the expected blacker background and it’s effects (but there probably won’t be a measurable level change in the noise floor.)

Obviously the fix for blurbles in loud/dynamic music that Redcloud introduced will be included. I’m (once again) hoping to get a UI for setting the I2S signal polarities for each input.

At a slower rate I’m working on using the newer tools for the new DAC’s newer FPGA.

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