Subjective comparison of Software Music Player

[manueljenkin]

I finally got around to trying XXhighend (version 2.1.0) yesterday, and I feel I should have done this months ago - it sounds absolutely phenomenal. It was a messy set up/configuration process, which i'll get to in the later paragraphs, where I'll share all the downsides.

Let me start with the pros.

1. The sound is fantastic, by far the best I've heard so far. There's two aspects to the great sound. First is the reduction of CPU activity and hence the lower noise. 

This player runs on RAM, and has options to reduce background tasks, and also optimized to do minimal data transactions so as to have least noise (I'm simplifying the description of a complex process, which in its entirety is far more content than I could understand in full).

Most players I have tried that didn't do RAM based playback had a layer of digital haze to them, except one case of hysolid, which, without being RAM playback based, was clean but then it also had an artifically dense sound. And when other players were used in customized RAM playback, while the overall noise in most areas
of the spectrum decreases, some residuals pick back up at certain frequencies, especially at 8khz, and some kind of artificial softness at times. So the fix isn't a trivial <just push it to RAM and forget>. I described the RAM player experiments in full (for musicbee, albumplayer, playpcmwin) in a previous comment.

Of the music player softwares I have testsed, this is just the second one that I have come across that had neither an immediately obvious digital haze or a coloration (other one is wtfplay), and just the third I have experienced that didn't have a harsh digital haze (wftplay and hysolid are the other two).

This is not to say that xxhighend and wtfplay sound identical, they certainly have differences in sound, but they both don't seem to have any obvious deviations (or probably equally deviated from realism in either ends). XXHE sounds like a direct upgrade for album player, retaining a lot of the general texture/presentation of album player but with less haze and more detail, while WTFPLAY is a different sound one that I have not found an equivalent for.
Of course this would mean little if your dac had some extremely high end isolation, but I believe for a lot of cases, it would make similar differences as discussed above.

2. The above are comparisons with "arc prediction" turned off. Arc Prediction is a built in feature of XXhighend, and it is a custom interpolation algorithm! It is not a sinc filter, and its not even a general linear filter. The specifics of this is not something that @PeterSt would be likely to share, but it is some kind of polynomial fitting algorithm, along the lines of splines. And turned on, XXHE sounds way better than anything else I have heard reproduced on a digital system, and this alone makes the software worth the price IMO. The best references of an instrument I could relate the real world sound to would be flutes which I am quite familiar with. This is the first time I am hearing the micro textures and tonal gradations, (and the tonguing patterns if any) of the flute being rendered with such realism from a system.
And the same realism extends to anything that has subtle gradients and shifts, the sound of winds, claps, foleys etc sounding far more realistic than I have heard before. The next big improvement is with spatial tracking. Whenever the mix has a panning/rotating object, I feel at much better ease visualizing its entire trajectory without abrupt cuts with this. For anything that is dynamic, and preferrably natural (well mastered synthetic music works great as well), the arc prediction does a wonderful job of filling the points in a way that imo makes best fidelity from a listeners perspective (may not be from the perspective of an APX555).

Yes I have tried Hqplayer, with it's oversampler on my pc. Regarding the digital noise, it sounds as hazy as musicbee or winyl (not surprising as they are based on same library), though I guess you could use a network streamer to mitigate a lot of these noise, so for most people it would be a non issue. However, coming to the oversampling, I even tried some high tap custom oversampled data I got from others using different filters and while it did changes, it never brought anything that would make me use it over the built in OS and Noise shapers in my ESS based dac (Apogee groove, supports upto 192khz 24bit), but arc prediction has done that for me. With any music that has a compressed structure though, I felt I preferred the arc prediction off than ON, as the bass density (or thickness) felt a bit reduced and it sounded bland for lack of a better word. Of course, you don't judge a race car by its ability to run on a bad terrain, but it's quite an easy fix here to just turn off the arc prediction in those scenarios. There is optional choices for custom filter tuning, but I restricted myself to let my dac do its own OS job for that scenario feeding 1:1 data. This is not a knock against hqplayer. I am well aware that it works fantastic on many other systems and for sure would be a better alternative to an oversampling ic on the dac chip for many cases, but there's something quite exciting and realistic about arc prediction that I haven't found  elsewhere. Maybe I should try some NOS too someday.

I am generally averse to playback software costing money, more so considering WTFPLAY actually sounded better than almost all the paid ones I have tried, but this is one time where I would say it is worth it. The interpolation algorithm makes a very meaningful difference, and can actually be considered a significant part of the DAC. This definitely makes its way to the top of my wishlist. Now to the problems.

1. It is likely to screw up with your system. Always try on a spare system first. It has an issue with windows 10 on my system where the player removes the background wallpaper and replaces it with black screen.

2. I actually tried to make it run a few months ago and failed, and its the main reason for the delay in trying this tool. The instructions are mostly unclear and the UI is very unintuitive without a proper guide (even with a guide, I would call it barely passable) hence I felt that I would add a personal guide to using it.

a. It requires dotnet 3.5 installed as a pre requisite. Windows 10 afaik doesn't come with dotnet 3.5 installed as default.

b. Xxhighend doesn't seem to have an installation procedure, coming in a compressed portable package that could be run without installation.

c. On first run of the executable it does certain things, one of which is making your windows background screen black (point a). It doesn't have a progress bar, so it would be necessary to wait for a while.

d. Once it is loaded you are treated with a very scattered UI. I'll try to give an idea of what/where each setting is.

To the left top is the settings for Arc prediction ON/OFF, Custom Filtering ON/OFF, Volume control and Volume Normalization ON/OFF. I haven't played around enough with volume normalization as I haven't tagged my music yet with volume information.

To the middle of the top you have options tagged P, L, S and H. Selecting each toggles the middle window between them. P refers to the playlist, I haven't figured out what L means, and S refers to the settings.

You need to go to settings and configure for your dac in the output for its device buffer size (you can get this from your dac's driver control panel), and DAC settings to choose what sample rate and what word length it supports (mine is 24 bits 192.0 Khz).
At the very bottom of the settings you have options to disable certain additional services if you intend to cut down the noise even more.

Once done with settings go back to playlist to see options at the bottom for play, stop , prev etc. Explore is the command to open file manager to input a music file. Load doesn't open file manager, I don't know it's utility. Clear option clears the current playlist.

3. It is easy to mess up with the settings and get artefacted sound. One area I found it very evident is volume control. XXhighend has a volume control that acts in parallel to your Windows DAC volume control. Simultaneously playing around with both XXHE volume and DAC volume at once (with neither at 100%) is guaranteed to introduce a wierd softness/lack of definition in the sound, as if someone applied a wierd lowpass filter. Voices sound fine but unfocused, while drums and cymbals lack all sorts of shimmer if done this way.
My suggestion would be to set up your dac volume at 100% and use XXHE volume control as it would do volume control + interpolation in one go, which sounds very good without any of the above artefacts.

4. A high bandwidth (high slew rate dac) is recommended as per the Dev, and preferably R2R. Otherwise it is likely to mess up the output of the algorithm. My Apogee groove is actually most likely at the corner of passability (has a little over 100khz bandwidth as per stereophile measuremeasurements) but being a delta Sigma it would in the end doing quite a bit of modulations and I guess I'll not be able to see the full potential until I change my dac.

5. No crossfeed. I would have loved to see a well implemented crossfeed plugin for us headphone users.

6. It costs! I think the price is justified but WTFPLAY and Playpcmwin (or maybe daphile too which I couldnt get to work on my system) would still be what I could comfortably recommend because it is free and sounds great for something that is free.

[acg]

@manueljenkin, that is a decent assessment of XXHE...takes a little more to get it set up but once setup it does pretty much all the PC optimisations automatically for you and sounds better than anything else out there, especially when used with NOS dacs.  2.11 is the current version, so you should also download that one to get the latest improvements.

 

Next step up is to get the RAM-OS where XXHE and W10 is pre-installed on a SSD.  Once the PC has booted, you just pop out the SSD and both the OS and XXHE is running from RAM...so simple and the next level up for sound to have no hard drive in the computer.

 

When it comes to paying for playback software I am firmly of the opinion that the authors considerable development time should be reimbursed, but for what it is the price for XXHE is peanuts.

 

Enjoy.

[manueljenkin]

Yes I definitely agree that the price is fully justified! I would actually say bargain. I need to build a spare pc before I can get to use this though. I have a single pc for all my tasks at the moment.

[acg]

Ah, yes, XXHE will mess with the OS so a dedicated audio PC is the best solution, or at least a dedicated SSD to put in your PC just for when you want to use XXHE (use a hotswap bay).  Of course there is the PC that @PeterStputs together which fits hand-in-glove with XXHE.  I used to build my own PC's for audio but lately I just bought the ready-made turnkey unit from Peter...so much easier and you get the most from the software without having to install anything.

[manisandher]

Thanks for the writeup @manueljenkin. I agree with @acg that you've been very fair.

 

I feel for anyone coming into the XXHighEnd universe totally cold (Anthony and I have been hanging around it for a long time). There's a lot to get your head around. But as Antony says, it's worth it if your goal is the absolute best sound quality.

 

Anthony already mentioned loading everything (OS and XXHighEnd) into RAM. This gives you the very, very best SQ. You'll need order a 'RAM-OS' disk from @PeterSt to do this.

 

If you're not quite ready to commit to a RAM-OS disk, make sure you try the 'Minimize OS' function in XXHighEnd, which strips the OS processing right down. And then try playing back from 'Unattended', which kills much of the remaining processing (file transfer, GUI, etc.) just before playback starts.

 

As for DACs, yes XXHighEnd works very well with NOS DACs. But... they need to be able to accept high bit/sample rates for XXHighEnd to be able to do its stuff. Not many such DACs exist. Peter's own NOS1 DAC (that both Anthony, I and many XXHighEnd users use) is based on the PCM1704U-K chip (8 or them!) and accepts up to 32/768. It's a wonderful combination with XXHighEnd. However, XXHighEnd works very nicely with my RME ADI-2 Pro FS R too (which I'm listening to right now in fact 🙂).

 

It's always amazed me that XXHighEnd has never gotten the sort of attention it deserves. It was a game-changer 13 years ago, and continues to be so... IMESHO.

 

[I have zero affiliation to Phasure, but have been a very happy customer for many years.]

 

Mani.

[manueljenkin]

Xxhe sure is massively under appreciated. I hope to try/buy his dac some day but for now my current interest is to build something like a transformer coupled 4 deck dddac1794 and pair it up with xxhe/xxhe os in somewhat nuc like pc (I'm trying to do something interesting, will let you know if it works). I'll look into further upgrades later from there. Any idea of similar inexpensive diy dacs + amps with good bandwidth and high sample rate support? I would prefer to avoid delta Sigma.

[manisandher]

6 hours ago, manueljenkin said:

I would prefer to avoid delta Sigma.

 

I've been a strong advocate of R2R DACs for a long time, but wouldn't worry too much about this nowadays. My RME uses an AKM delta-sigma DAC chip and sounds really, really good. And in any event, >99.99% of the music we all listen to has been recorded using ADCs with delta-sigma chips 🙂.

 

Regarding amps, I love the sound of my F5 monos - they are simply the cleanest amps I've ever owned/heard. The circuit boards are easily obtained and I think they're pretty popular with DIYers. If class A isn't your thing, I'd look into the class A/B offerings from Neurochrome. I'd personally steer well clear of any class D amps, but that's very much a personal choice based on bad past experiences.

 

Mani.

[manueljenkin]

12 hours ago, manisandher said:

 

I've been a strong advocate of R2R DACs for a long time, but wouldn't worry too much about this nowadays. My RME uses an AKM delta-sigma DAC chip and sounds really, really good. And in any event, >99.99% of the music we all listen to has been recorded using ADCs with delta-sigma chips 🙂.

 

Regarding amps, I love the sound of my F5 monos - they are simply the cleanest amps I've ever owned/heard. The circuit boards are easily obtained and I think they're pretty popular with DIYers. If class A isn't your thing, I'd look into the class A/B offerings from Neurochrome. I'd personally steer well clear of any class D amps, but that's very much a personal choice based on bad past experiences.

 

Mani.

Delta Sigma adc and dac aren't quite the same thing so the extrapolation (pun intended) doesn't hold (again). I don't have major issues with delta sigma, all my present 3 dacs are ds, but I would want to try r2r when I'm moving up, mainly because of noise shaping/response changes (audible or not, I just want to try r2r lol). Of course r2r today doesn't quite directly relate to just stacking resistors one on top of another, the same way delta sigma doesn't directly relate to a primitive pwm dac. Also note the pcm1794 I mentioned above is not really an r2r. It's some sort of hybrid that I haven't got to understand properly yet 

 

I have looked into first watt amps as refernece to learn from when I was learning analog design. I'm looking for headphone amps though currently, something like Amb beta 22. (I was looking into Amb gamma 3 dac too, for its Wolfson 8741 based design)

[robocop]

No contest Xxhighend is the best followed by Wtfplay. I came to this some years ago.

A NOS Dac is the best to follow this playback software. I'm not in this camp yet but the Holo May Dac looks very good from what I'm reading.

Do all the processing in Xxhighend and pass it through a NOS dac no filters.

 

Mind you Xxhighend does need to be working from the best dedicated Audio PC one can afford to allow it to perform its best. The source quality is critical. Using the Xx volume is the best.

 

Robert

[manueljenkin]

1 hour ago, robocop said:

No contest Xxhighend is the best followed by Wtfplay. I came to this some years ago.

A NOS Dac is the best to follow this playback software. I'm not in this camp yet but the Holo May Dac looks very good from what I'm reading.

Do all the processing in Xxhighend and pass it through a NOS dac no filters.

 

Mind you Xxhighend does need to be working from the best dedicated Audio PC one can afford to allow it to perform its best. The source quality is critical. Using the Xx volume is the best.

 

Robert

The analog bandwidth of holo spring and may is considerably less (about 50khz, as compared to a similar priced yggy or other dac that is easily above 100khz). Of course the overall sound is a combination of many parameters, but considering that Peter emphasises on high slew rate (which means high bandwidth in general), I think that might be somewhat of a limiting factor when it comes to pairing xxhe and holo spring.

[acg]

Holo May may in fact have better bandwidth than the Spring...not sure.  There are measurements about in a couple of places.

[acg]

2 hours ago, robocop said:

...the Holo May Dac looks very good from what I'm reading.

Do all the processing in Xxhighend and pass it through a NOS dac no filters.

 

 

I came 'this' close to buying a May dac for streaming and other non-critical duties but baulked in the end because I could not get a demo.  Who knows, I may yet get one but would be surprised if it ran with the NOS1a...I do love surprises though.

[PeterSt]

On 3/21/2021 at 4:08 AM, manueljenkin said:

c. On first run of the executable it does certain things, one of which is making your windows background screen black (point a). It doesn't have a progress bar, so it would be necessary to wait for a while.

 

Hi Manuel - what a great effort you did there - again !

 

What will be happening is that you run XXHighEnd on to a random W10 version, while only certain versions are "certified" (by me). For example, the latest normal Desktop version is 14393.0 and nothing newer. This all relates to which services can be shut off while the OS keeps on running stable. This includes the normal UI - just saying. And the first thing which will o wrong at newer versions, is indeed that UI (like the screen staying black forever).

 

Also notice that nothing within XXHighEnd is made for "Attended" playback really. So all you'd see from that is emulation (the UI emulates what the Sound Engine is doing). So others said it as well: all is about UNattended playback, which kills the UI and about everything from Windows (desktop UI). Next its own OSD "interface" remains.

 

I can provide the 14393,0 version, if you want. You will see that all is the most normal and outside of playback the OS is normally usable (even in MinOS (= audio) mode). During playaback (Unattendedly) it is an audio PC only and lame for anything else. But now watch the SQ ... :-)

 

For your special interest: When you apply all correctly, the OS becomes something like 10000 times more lean. The most crucial in that, is the Windows UI (already known from people with Server OSes without GUI). Regarding this latter, it won't matter whether using such a Server OS or just the Desktop OS because XXHE turns both into the same anyway. Server OS is supported up to WS2019.

 

 

[manueljenkin]

8 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

Hi Manuel - what a great effort you did there - again !

 

What will be happening is that you run XXHighEnd on to a random W10 version, while only certain versions are "certified" (by me). For example, the latest normal Desktop version is 14393.0 and nothing newer. This all relates to which services can be shut off while the OS keeps on running stable. This includes the normal UI - just saying. And the first thing which will o wrong at newer versions, is indeed that UI (like the screen staying black forever).

 

Also notice that nothing within XXHighEnd is made for "Attended" playback really. So all you'd see from that is emulation (the UI emulates what the Sound Engine is doing). So others said it as well: all is about UNattended playback, which kills the UI and about everything from Windows (desktop UI). Next its own OSD "interface" remains.

 

I can provide the 14393,0 version, if you want. You will see that all is the most normal and outside of playback the OS is normally usable (even in MinOS (= audio) mode). During playaback (Unattendedly) it is an audio PC only and lame for anything else. But now watch the SQ ... :-)

 

For your special interest: When you apply all correctly, the OS becomes something like 10000 times more lean. The most crucial in that, is the Windows UI (already known from people with Server OSes without GUI). Regarding this latter, it won't matter whether using such a Server OS or just the Desktop OS because XXHE turns both into the same anyway. Server OS is supported up to WS2019.

 

 

Hi Peter. Thank you very much. I have currently reset my pc as I have to work on another project, so I can't try the new version at present.

 

I would like to know if it would be possible to pair up xxhe with a headless single board x86 computer (after undervolting)? I found quite a few atom and amd g series based sbc (some of them for industrial use case) online. Fairly decent amount of cpu cache and RAM too.

[PeterSt]

And @manueljenkin, You mentioned the playing from RAM, which is very true in itself (in the beginning advertised as a first "Memory Player" (although something with a same name existed at the same time with hardware around it) ...

... As mentioned by others without much notice, the RAM-OS is the things where *all* runs from RAM. So if not clear already, that also boots the OS from RAM and leaves totally nothing in the PC (no SSD or whatever). Of course you must first have a PC like that; The less you have in there, the better the sound (trust me). So only a CPU and a network connection is what you'd need. The network connection is used to load the albums from another PC (/NAS) into RAM.

 

Again watch the SQ ... (haha).

[PeterSt]

3 minutes ago, manueljenkin said:

I would like to know if it would be possible to pair up xxhe with a headless single board x86 computer (after undervolting)?

 

It will work as long as it runs Windows 10 (from X86). But all "undervolting" will sound as bad as can be.

Please keep in mind that I work the other wat around: The Ferrari which drives 80Km/h and wants to accelerate to 120Km/h (high transient etc.) which we do with over-power and not with underpowered 2CVs (which won't even reach 120 as they do 110 only).

[manueljenkin]

4 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

It will work as long as it runs Windows 10 (from X86). But all "undervolting" will sound as bad as can be.

Please keep in mind that I work the other wat around: The Ferrari which drives 80Km/h and wants to accelerate to 120Km/h (high transient etc.) which we do with over-power and not with underpowered 2CVs (which won't even reach 120 as they do 110 only).

Ok so lowering the clock speeds is the better approach.

[manueljenkin]

I am looking to see if I can take any existing x86 SoC boards with a pcie slot and add up a low noise pcie to usb card in it, and run xxhe on that device. Probably also tweak it with a slightly better power supply. It will have its own hard drive/storage with music collection (which shall be pushed to Ram when playing back), and only the control being done through LAN.

[PeterSt]

8 minutes ago, manueljenkin said:

I am looking to see if I can take any existing x86 SoC boards

 

Same thing; you can do that but the SQ will be lousy. You will find that this sounds worse than what you had running.

 

You put so much effort in this all ... why not have a simple separate HDD (or SSD) with the OS and all for XXHighEnd ? All you further need is replace that with the OS(-disk) you normally have. And have it more or less removable. Or put both the disks in there (and change boot by means of boot menu). Or make a dual boot OS.

 

12 minutes ago, manueljenkin said:

It will have its own hard drive/storage with music collection

 

Remember, it is again not the way to do it. Have a network connection to your "main" PC and connect the music (by USB or whatever) to that PC.

 

But otherwise, just go ahead as you deem is fine. It will work all right. :-)

Btw, Ferrari's don't do too well these days anyway. Or maybe next Sunday ?

 

[manueljenkin]

11 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

 

Same thing; you can do that but the SQ will be lousy. You will find that this sounds worse than what you had running.

 

You put so much effort in this all ... why not have a simple separate HDD (or SSD) with the OS and all for XXHighEnd ? All you further need is replace that with the OS(-disk) you normally have. And have it more or less removable. Or put both the disks in there (and change boot by means of boot menu). Or make a dual boot OS.

 

 

Remember, it is again not the way to do it. Have a network connection to your "main" PC and connect the music (by USB or whatever) to that PC.

 

But otherwise, just go ahead as you deem is fine. It will work all right. :-)

Btw, Ferrari's don't do too well these days anyway. Or maybe next Sunday ?

 

Got it. My current machine is an ultrabook (surface book), so no chance of having the hard drives added/removed. I definitely enjoyed the sound of xxhe even on this setup (and pretty sure it'll be much better on a desktop).

[manueljenkin]

@PeterSt off topic to players (on topic to interpolation). Any books/resources you could recommend me on general interpolation, wavelet theory etc?

[manueljenkin]

Just finished watching this lecture. He's a wonderful teacher: 

 

[Rexp]

 

[lotusaurus]

On 3/22/2021 at 5:45 PM, PeterSt said:

And @manueljenkin, You mentioned the playing from RAM, which is very true in itself (in the beginning advertised as a first "Memory Player" (although something with a same name existed at the same time with hardware around it) ...

... As mentioned by others without much notice, the RAM-OS is the things where *all* runs from RAM. So if not clear already, that also boots the OS from RAM and leaves totally nothing in the PC (no SSD or whatever). Of course you must first have a PC like that; The less you have in there, the better the sound (trust me). So only a CPU and a network connection is what you'd need. The network connection is used to load the albums from another PC (/NAS) into RAM.

 

Again watch the SQ ... (haha).

 

I'm keen to try out XXHE, but the documentation is ... challenging. I've been trying to work my way through that, but the first major obstacle is trying to understand what sort of PC I need. While I see that I need only a CPU and a network connection, what sort of CPU do I need? The more powerful the better? Choose speed over cores or vice versa?

[PeterSt]

1 minute ago, lotusaurus said:

While I see that I need only a CPU and a network connection, what sort of CPU do I need? The more powerful the better? Choose speed over cores or vice versa?

 

Nah, I don't know where you read those "requirements", but you seem to have found the specs of the Mach III Audio PC.

Any normal desktop Windows PC will do the job, BUT there are requirements on the Windows version; this should be W10-14393.0 and when needed I can provide it.

What you should not do is use a low-power processor as found in laptops (that simply won't sound good). Otherwise it would be true that the beefier the processor the better the sound (and still, any normal modern Desktop will do). The more cores the better, with the notice that XXHighEnd will rev the processor down to 500-750 MHz anyway (this is a setting). Think of a Ferrari with over-power.

 

In the more extreme setup indeed a processor with network connection, plus a 2nd PC which provides the music files. is "best"/ But since that requires inordinate configuration because the OS boots from RAM (in the Audio PC) we provide the OS RAM Disk/SSD. All is on that, including (several) configured OSes and XXHighEnd activation. Of course this will cost you (like 360 euros) but all you need to do further is move it in a removable drive bay, boot the system and remove it after booting. And make some network mappings a first time. This is really not hard and everybody can press Play etc. after that. You can't even destroy things because the OS runs in volatile memory.

 

Peter