davide256 Posted April 25, 2021 Share Posted April 25, 2021 pm sent. Curious how this will compare to Optane OS drive in NUC vmartell22 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 2, 2021 Share Posted May 2, 2021 10 hours ago, NewOldman said: has anybody test this one yet, and what is the impression Still trying the drive out, just received 2 days ago. Initial impressions are positive, this is easy/pleasant to live with as OS boot drive, unlike the Samsung 970 Evo plus NVME I tried last. Seller recommendation is use for OS, not media storage; I concur. Will take to end of the week as swapping it in place of Optane boot drive caused Euphony hardware signature change so I need to finish listening, then revert back to Optane HW license to complete comparison, share observations. Note that if you have a normal height NUC as I do, you can remove the SATA drive enclosure for the card to fit. External NVME power is a little trickier because of case clearance, I've left the case bottom off for my testing but a right angle DC jack adaptor/extension would be better option for permanent installation. ASRMichael 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
Popular Post davide256 Posted May 9, 2021 Popular Post Share Posted May 9, 2021 FEMTO NVMe Drive review ======================= Drives are an essential part of an audio server. They hold the OS and they are needed for music storage. Ideally they should be transparent, not affect playback of music. But in my experience that ideal is difficult to achieve. Media storage drives in the USB audio out server seem particularly difficult to solve for the DIY builder... I've tried internal NVMe, SSD,HD,SDXC and USB3 attached variations, in the end NAS solution prevailed for cleaner, better sound. But the OS can't be outsourced, has to be physically attached/bootable. OS drives do affect sound, in particular (a) media player speed,(b) transient attack and (c) digital irritants. With Euphony I've traveled the usual path of first using USB3 boot, then SSD, and for some time now Ive used Optane M.2 memory as the best drive option for OS storage. My recent attempt to better Optane using a Samsung 970 Plus NVMe drive didn't pan out for me as (c) got worse with no appreciable benefits vs Optane. Enter the FEMTO NVMe drive as something different to try; I was intrigued as my recent purchase of a Denafrips IRIS DDC with FEMTO clocking had been a success, perhaps FEMTO clocking on board would matter for a drive also? The ability to power the drive externally was also promising given how NUC audio output improved with better main-board power supply. The FEMTO NVMe drive has a nice set of features, feel free to check the features posted earlier and there is anticipated addition of a heat sink option My installation was in an 8i7BEH NUC with 16GB Crucial RAM, powered by an Uptone Audio JS-2. The NVMe board horizontal dimension is standard for M.2 but the DC power jack and added capacitors make it taller. I had to remove the SATA cage to be able to close the case and using the DC in jack on the board required leaving the case bottom off as I had no right angle DC jack adaptors that would allow closing the bottom. Digital out was Lush 2 USB to Denafrips IRIS over AQ Eagle Eye coax to Metrum Octave DAC For some reason this drive changes hardware signature with Euphony, did not experience this with the Samsung drive. So a period of waiting for license transfer before one can transfer OS from boot stick to new NVMe drive. First impressions of sound using main-board power is that this is something different. It's quite soft for sound using the Metrum Octave. Worries start, is this damping transients? A quick swap to a Chord Mojo says no, plenty of transients here and criticism of the Metrum has been its softer transient response Over longer period of time what sinks in is that this is headed in a better direction; the sound I was used to before with Optane was exaggerating transients. But more importantly the digital irritants have been greatly reduced, listening gets closer to the analog experience of even if its wrong, it doesn't irritate. A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive Have always been on the fence about running OS in RAM vs off the Optane drive... RAM was more incisive but Optane was smoother. But neither in my testing is as easy to live with as running the OS on the FEMTO NVMe drive. What surprises me is that 44.1/48k rates in my setup benefit more than 96k and above rates for digital irritant reduction The DC power jack is an interesting feature, sound character seemed more solid when I switched to using an iFi 5V power supply, switching to the second JS-2 output helps further smooth out irritants. But it kept nagging at me that the JS-2 was also driving the NUC so this was less than perfect electrical isolation. The seller has advised that 5v/2.5A is recommended PS but I was able to get this working with an Uptone Audio LPS 1.2's lower amperage with even cleaner sound and better transient attack on a 96/24 recording, probably because native Stylus doesn't demand much. So it looks like the DC jack is helpful/necessary for best sound with a separate good quality isolated supply. Overall, I'd recommend this to the DIY crowd who use a NUC or PC server capable of M.2 boot if you are struggling with digital artifacts, and edgy sound.YMMV if you lack a good quality power supply. Per Darkforce they are finalizing channel arrangements at this time, including sale w/wo heatsink, small batch availability only at the moment. Expected price somewhere in ~ $700 PM @darkforce if interested in early purchase flkin, Exocer, damian101 and 3 others 2 1 1 2 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 9, 2021 Share Posted May 9, 2021 4 hours ago, badK said: I am intrigued by the sort of lack of specificity as to what characteristics are improved here. I am sure that there must be some measurements that will show improved S/N or reduced jitter, or something, aren't there? I have an external 10 TB MLC-based DAS storage system that is five feet away, housed in a separate cabinet, and is attached via RAIDed, redundant fibre channel cables; only one 8 Gb FC HBA though. This system provides what we call 3-D RAID, one dimension comes from system software, the next from the RAID 5 master controller, and the 3rd from PowerPC microRAID chips on each of the 12 MLC boards contained inside (each such is also independently RAID 5). With Latency in the 80 msec rage, and bandwidth at just 5 GB/s, I have yet to hear much benefit. So - has anybody got real numbers, or are these products looking for something to fix? I don't mean to be a troll, I am just an old man listening to music (truth to tell, I still have a couple of thousand records) BadK I have about 800 albums dating from the 70's when I first started collecting. And remember the time from 1985 -2001 when digital was supposed to be perfect yet no one with a good TT wanted to give up their albums for digital. Measurements for digital are maddeningly ineffective other than for mi-fi qualification. Mostly you have to keep looking and auditioning to find what improves sound then figure out why afterwards to see if its extensible. I do expect to finally start retiring what I consider my ordinary vinyl albums with this latest step. But my original Reiner LP's and Direct to DIscs aren't yet matched by my digital playback as well as other really well mastered vinyl recordings. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 10, 2021 Share Posted May 10, 2021 something else to share on this drive, I can't use Euphony core isolation with it, this is what I get when I try to set gstp 3-5 stylus 6-7 where 1 is xhci interrupt 1023 /usr/bin/udevil : 0-7 1106 gstp : 0-7 306 /usr/bin/lvmetad : 0-7 418 /usr/bin/haveged : 0-7 430 /usr/bin/acpid : 0-7 456 /usr/bin/dhcpcd : 0-7 758 nfm : 0-7 768 stylus : 0-7 842 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-7 856 avahi-daemon: : 0-7 891 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-7 893 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-7 910 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-7 914 /usr/bin/nmbd : 0-7 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 10, 2021 Share Posted May 10, 2021 16 hours ago, kelvinwsy said: 1. Same here as my Clearaudio Avantgarde Magnum T/T setup with my Direct Cut Sheffield Labs and Direct to Discs still sounds better than my Digital setup but only just better in some areas like realistic dynamic range.. but my digital set is totally silent and 10x more user friendly! i still keep my 600 Lps from golden age days😅 No i am not burning in the NAND but the capacitors and power elements on the M.2.. Should be burnt in by tomoro👍 Sheffield's "Growing up in Hollywood Town" is one of my favorites. The CD version is so wimpy in comparison. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 10, 2021 Share Posted May 10, 2021 14 minutes ago, c-w said: If "gstp 3-5 stylus 6-7" is your exact isolation string then you are missing the default isolation that should be in the first place. Correct string would be "0-2 gstp 3-5 stylus 6-7" perfect, I made the wrong assumption a default didn't need to be specified. Now I get 1034 /usr/bin/udevil : 0-2 1108 gstp : 3-5 307 /usr/bin/lvmetad : 0-2 425 /usr/bin/haveged : 0-2 434 /usr/bin/acpid : 0-2 481 /usr/bin/dhcpcd : 0-2 751 nfm : 0-2 761 stylus : 6,7 831 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-2 846 avahi-daemon: : 0-2 886 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-2 887 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-2 904 /usr/bin/smbd : 0-2 909 /usr/bin/nmbd : 0-2 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 14, 2021 Share Posted May 14, 2021 @kelvinwsy do give Euphony a whirl with buffer track to RAM options disabled, cache to drive enabled, paying attention in particular to treble. Was having some resonance like problems with treble on "Ready Player One " 96/24 soundtrack that this helped, will be trying other recordings today with lots of treble energy. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 14, 2021 Share Posted May 14, 2021 1 hour ago, kelvinwsy said: abWas Euphony the same software Everyone was playing with 2 years ago - it cost about 29 Euros then. Pierre?? I think was the founder of the SW. Tell me more about your perceived benefits of Euphony over other OS's. If I download the trial SW, I may have to prepare one of my many drives as a double boot device. Say my Optane or my Samsung 970 or even this Femto M.2. What do you think is the best way to try this out. Thks Euphonys claim to fame is midrange timbre integrity. Cost now for license is ~$300 USD so its not cheap. Features include run OS in RAM and buffer queue to RAM options that I'm beginning to find aren't as good as sourcing OS/caching song queue to NVMe disk. Have ordered some Apacer RAM to see if RAM choice is a factor. Not sure that it would be helpful in your testing as you have to live long enough with something to build a baseline of experience for reference. Hopefully a next tester will have Euphony to see if they have same/different experience. Euphony requires license to transfer system from USB boot drive to system drive. But I think you can get around this for a trial if you have an empty M.2 slot in your desktop PC so that you can flash image to an m.2 drive directly, I recall doing this with a SATA SSD drive. You would have to redo from a USB boot drive later to complete licensed installation to a system drive. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 16, 2021 Share Posted May 16, 2021 2 hours ago, Lukasluis said: I too have a Euphony license but I find Windows to be more musical and involving. Euphony sounds euphonic but muffled (low fidelity) and very hard to understand music lyrics. It seems to me that notes are truncated (decays are shorter). The music is so vidid and intonation and singer inflection is easily rendered with Window. I use the same hardware (swapping same capacity Optane drive to do the comparison.) What OS/player are you using now? With 300gb on boot drive I can entertain revisiting Server 20xx although the license cost after trial is pretty steep. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 24, 2021 Share Posted May 24, 2021 1 hour ago, Smaragdhk said: I’m trying out Euphony on a 10i7 NUC powered by a 19V 8A LPS… got an internal Samsung EVO 970 plus M.2 SSD and was considering to order an Optane 32GB ( or the apparently better sounding 16GB version?) to replace the 970 plus but after reading this I wonder if I should hold off and try the 970 plus first… got about 20 days of trial left… any else can comment on the 970 plus sound quality? Mine has been relegated to WIN10 OS drive in desktop... Optane was better, fewer digital irritants. Speed is not necessarily your friend in an audio USB out machine, stable and electrically quiet is. The FEMTO drive builds on that and is superior to running using Optane drive or OS loaded to RAM thuandb 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 24, 2021 Share Posted May 24, 2021 6 minutes ago, Smaragdhk said: Thanks @davide256, can you share where one might find these FEMTO drives? Check with @darkforce the author of the thread... new product in beta test, I bought mine after trial because the thought of going back to Optane wasn't palatable. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted May 28, 2021 Share Posted May 28, 2021 FWIW am playing around now with PGGB where an expanded CD rate album can mushroom from 500 mb to 32 GB. Handy to have a large enough drive to cache albums, Optane memory HD or RAM would not be practical as a cache mechanism for PGGB converted albums Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted June 16, 2021 Share Posted June 16, 2021 4 hours ago, Exocer said: Did you mean buffering? If so, yes. When buffering, the files are run from RAM as opposed to OS disk. Caching to OS disk sounds better than Buffering for playback. Either way, I have still decided to ramroot the OS to keep some separation between OS and music files. I will be sticking with Ramroot enabled and caching of files before playback. Running OS in RAM helps reduce I/O bottleneck if you do DSD512 upsampling, I was getting pauses with OS on disk Exocer 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted July 23, 2021 Share Posted July 23, 2021 Moving the FEMTO NVMe to a PC I built in December (i5 9600K-Coffee Lake/MSI PRO Z390-A) as I've learned through comparison the i7 NUC was causing distortion in choral music. Will be trying out a PCIE x4 to M.2 adaptor as I want to be able to switch boot between WIn10 on the EVO 970 + and Euphony on the FEMTO drive, While the MOBO has 2 M.2 slots, the second is for boards shorter than 2080. Would have preferred an extension cable or elbow adaptor option for the second M.2 slot but what I could found looked sketchy for quality. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted August 5, 2021 Share Posted August 5, 2021 FWIW I'm now using the Femto drive in my i5 machine, booting back and forth between M.2 drives, Samsung Evo for WIndows and the Femto drive for Euphony. Since the MOBO has only one M.2 drive slot I purchased a PCIE 4x adaptor card to allow use of both. I discovered that the power jack of the FEMTO card has a pin projection on the back that prevents the Femto drive from mounting flush to the adaptor card, had to swap the WIN OS drive to the adaptor, put the Femto drive in the MOBO slot which had more clearance. All working well now using Stylus or Roon with HQPlayer output and using JS-2 to power the Femto NVMe card. kelvinwsy 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted August 6, 2021 Share Posted August 6, 2021 35 minutes ago, MarcelNL said: I'm waiting for the connectors so I can use the LPS, but so far it sounds better than Optane that outperformed SSD on an LPS, and the NVME Evo plus . Still breaking in but I love it!, More organic, more depth and texture, less noise. Straight connector works fine if you have the space MarcelNL 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted August 25, 2021 Share Posted August 25, 2021 On 8/21/2021 at 3:50 AM, Smaragdhk said: Any suggestions on which LPS that matches the FEMTO drive best? Its recommended power is 5V 2.5A … Alas the PS I had which sounded best with the drive, an LPS 1.2 had too low an amperage to be reliable, DAC synch loss happened annoyingly often. The JS-2 was overkill. I suspect the best match is something like a Superfarad3 LPS @ 5V or if it exists a capacitive power supply like the LPS 1.2 with the requisite 2.5A Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted August 30, 2021 Share Posted August 30, 2021 9 hours ago, Dev said: Is anyone using this with M.2 to PCIe adapter ? The Z490 motherboards doesn't have a direct to CPU M.2 slot. Hence, currently I use an adapter for my Optane OS drive. I haven't tried different ones and compared to see if there are any SQ differences. Wondering if anyone has experience with a good one and find a difference with this NVME audiophile SSD from @darkforce ? You are unlikely to be able to use the FEMTO drive on a PCIE adaptor because there is a pin projecting out the back from the DC jack, the two adaptors I have did not have adequate clearance to allow torquing the hold screw down. Haven't measured but it looks the clearance on the cards at the connector end is 1/8" vs 1/4" inch on a Z390 motherboard. Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted September 4, 2021 Share Posted September 4, 2021 On 8/30/2021 at 3:15 PM, Exocer said: I used the Rivo M2 to PCIE adapter. Zero issues: Avoid this SIIG PCIE x4 adaptor, not enough clearance https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KWGZKW6/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 picture of pin projecting from back of NVME card Exocer 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
davide256 Posted September 5, 2021 Share Posted September 5, 2021 6 hours ago, Smaragdhk said: I have buffer track to RAM disabled but how does one enable cache to drive? its a disk attribute, look under settings> library > miscellaneous. If you are using PGGB this is really helpful because a single CD at 768/24 is ~10GB and with the FEMTO drive its large enough that favorites are often already cached. Smaragdhk 1 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
Popular Post davide256 Posted January 8, 2022 Popular Post Share Posted January 8, 2022 17 hours ago, damian101 said: It does not matter at all how dirty the power coming to the SSD is, as long as it is within specs, so the SSD can work reliably. Choice of drive has generally no impact on sound, as long as it can deliver audio before the decoding buffer runs empty, and does not alter the files (drive failures, dead sectors, bit flips). The entire digital audio chain up to the DAC is completely deterministic, as it should be; the hardware used does not matter, as long as it works reliably. This drive will make zero difference to the raw digital audio sent to your DAC, bit-identical. Now, what about the analog audio signal created by the DAC, can that be influenced by choice of SSD? If DAC and SSD share the same power source, theoretically yes. If not, no. Also, dirty power can be cleaned, that's what those big capacitors on expensive amps and sound cards are for. And direct acoustic noise? I have never heard the noise of an SSD, but that might be because I haven't yet put my ears inches away from a working SSD. The vast majority of SSDs are probably quieter than other parts of your computer, and probably below the noise floor of your room and your own ears anyway, at a normal distance. My conclusion: Unless your previous drive was particularly noisy, any perceived auditory differences between this SSD and your previous drive are completely imaginary. That is especially true for switching between MB power and dedicated power supply for this SSD, which, in case of using a dedicated DAC with dedicated power supply, can not even make a difference in theory. You and many others in this thread have fallen victim to the placebo effect. Its been the same since the 70's... arm chair generals quoting pundits from the mass market manufacturers, never stirring from their chair to actually observe or testing solely with instruments vs evaluation with actual listening. The difference between a consumer and an audiophile is that we test the limits vs trust pundits. People listen to music, not machines. Smaragdhk, Patatorz, IsThisForReal and 5 others 1 3 1 3 Regards, Dave Audio system Link to comment
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