Jump to content
IGNORED

NVMe SSD designed for audiophiles


Recommended Posts

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.

 

Regards,

Dave

 

Audio system

Link to comment
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

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
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
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
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

 

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
  • 2 weeks later...
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

Regards,

Dave

 

Audio system

Link to comment
  • 3 weeks later...
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

Regards,

Dave

 

Audio system

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

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
  • 2 weeks later...

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.

Regards,

Dave

 

Audio system

Link to comment
  • 3 weeks later...
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
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
  • 4 months later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



×
×
  • Create New...