austinpop

One of my all-time favorite albums. Hadn't heard it in a few months, after which there have been significant improvements in my system. Wow! Even after over 15 years of ownership, this album still takes my breath away. By far the best interpretation of Mahler's 2nd of all time. IMHO, of course. The Redbook version is here: https://open.qobuz.com/album/0002894743802 and has excellent SQ. If you can get your hands on the DSD version, it's even better.

Thanks for your responses, @Kal Rubinson and @MikeyFresh . Yes, this is a tough issue that we've all been dealing with for many years. As Kal said, the pops/ticks aren't loud, but especially on headphones, extremely audible. I've verified it on Euphony/Stylus (my primary player), and also Roon. As I said, I'm fine with my interim solution of one gigantic dsf file for movements 2-5 for this particular disc. The one thing I would like to explore is to move the track boundaries to the logical silences between tracks to see: whether this eliminates to pops, or at least moves it to an inter-movement silence, where it's harmless. Just from listening, I've identified the ideal time stamps of 11:05, 22:01, and 27:30 as the perfect break points. What I'd like to do is break this ISO up into 4 parts - movements 2, 3, 4, and 5. To do this, I would need to: rip the ISO into a single DFF using the DSDIFF edit master flag. DONE. The resulting CUE file is attached. Latonia Moore, soprano - Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 2 Resurrection . Version from.cue modify this file into a custom CUE file to define 4 tracks with the above track boundaries. I don't know how to do this, but hoping someone here can help me. run a tool to take the original DFF from step 1, and splits it into 4 using the custom CUE file. This is the biggie. Does such a tool exist? I don't think the free tools embedded in iso_2_dsd, SACDExtractGUI, and ISO2DSF have this capability, but maybe I'm wrong? Final step is trivial - convert resulting dff's to dsf using the dff2dsf tool.

Yes Ted, I've tried that long ago. It didn't solve the problem. I've been struggling with this issue for years. The sacd_extract fix from v0.3.8 did help, but there is still an issue. The issue appears to be related to track boundaries when the logical "level" is not zero, because it's in the middle of a piece. It could also be my DAC dropping DoP lock momentarily.

I've now tried v0.3.9 as well as the pre-release v0.3.9.3 from Eugen above, but neither solve the pops. I now remember what I had done. I had extracted each ISO (disc 1 = movement 1, disc 2 = movements 2-5) as a single DFF file (using the option "Philips DSDIFF (Edit Master) file"), and then just converted to DSF using dff2dsf.exe. I think I'll just live with this approach.

Hi folks, I haven't been active in this thread for a couple of years, but have watched with admiration as some of you have really taken this topic forward - both in terms of discovering players that can rip SACDs and in terms of software, like the new SACDExtractGUI. One area that is still a problem for me is the issue of pops/crackles on track boundaries. Usually this is not much of an issue, but it seems to really become problematic when track boundaries are in the middle of a piece. Right now, I'm grappling with this album: This symphony has 5 movements, but is sliced into 42 tracks. Indeed - movement 1 alone has 14 tracks. When I first ripped this album back when @ted_b started this topic, I struggled with pops/crackles, and eventually found the only solution was to rip each entire ISO as a single track, which is how I've been listening. I have 2 questions to pose to the group experts: has there been any progress on this pop/crackle issue in later releases of sacd_extract? I know there was a bug before v0.3.8 that put a non-zero offset at a track boundary, which was fixed. However, that didn't completely solve the issue. I suspect there hasn't been, as I just reripped the DSF files from the ISOs with the latest version of the tools, and the pops are still there. Can anyone give me a brief primer on how to set my own track boundaries? Currently, the 2nd ISO contains movements 2-5, and I have it ripped as a single large DSF file. I'd like to create a custom file (CUE?) where I can tell sacd_extract to create a separate DSF file for each movement. As I understand it, the pop/crackle happens when the track boundary occurs at a point where the audio signal is not silent. I'm thinking if I can hand-pick points track boundaries during a silence, I may be able to eliminate (or greatly minimize) the pops. Thanks in advance for any advice.

A new Mahler release by MTT/SFS is very exciting. This is excellent!

Expanding my listening to another composer with whose music I'm not familiar...

I’m just starting to get to know the Bruckner symphonies, but this album is just incredible.

I have an i7-8700T, so 6 cores/12 threads. I settled on this a while back: 0-3 RoonServer 4-7 stylus 4-7 gstp 8-11 RoonServer and gstp are used when using Roon+StylusEP. Stylus and gstp are used when using Stylus. I will try giving gstp even more resources and see if that helps.

You might be surprised. Exactly. Listen for yourself, and see which you prefer. This is why measuring the power of your particular use case is so useful.

As I’ve reported before, a lower-capacity PSU may “work,” but a higher-capacity PSU can sound much better.

While your meter cannot give you microbursts as @Nenon says, you can still get useful info. Since I don’t know what AC voltage your location has, these current values are hard to interpret. Try setting the meter to display watts, rather than current. Look at watts during - power on - system idle - music playback Assuming you’re in a 220v country, your data already shows something interesting: - EPS and ATX draw about equal amounts of power: 220x0.14 = 31W approx, and 220x0.17 = 37W approx. Validate this by remeasuring watts on your meter. Assuming these power measures are correct, I bet you would benefit from a much heftier PSU - of equal or better quality - to power both ATX and EPS: 6a, 10a or even higher. Remember - amps on your meter are AC amps at 220v, while the PSU current we’re talking about are DC at 19v or 12v.

This stems from an optimization that has been around for some time now, where powering EPS via a separate 12V PSU, or at least a separate 12V rail, yielded dramatic SQ improvement.