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Topic: "XXHighEnd" - what is this player? (Read 36942 times) previous topic - next topic
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"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

What is this??

Look here: Reasons for developing XXHighEnd

Since I´m interested in software and always search for "bettering" my sonical experience I stumbled upon this little (and ugly) player. According to the above linked website it is supposed to sound better than my beloved foobar2000 - which IMO is a very daring statement. The author of this software claims that every software is flawed more or less. He also says, that XXHighEnd sounds better on Windows Vista than Windows XP. He provides three modes for playback, called "Engines". In my opinion these "Engines" are just some names for WASAPI or Kernel Streaming but I may be wrong. The author is quite expressive about updates - but of course he won´t say how the player really works. On other forums I´ve read by the author himself that he was influenced by "memory players" (caching music in RAM). Apparently his XXHighEnd uses a lot of RAM (at least 2 GB are recommended) for caching music.

He also states he perfected the volume control and that the player doesn´t use any DSP at all. Interestingly, he doesn´t count an upsampler as a DSP  This upsampler can be activated for upsampling 44.1 material to 88.2. But now I´ll come to the main reason why this player is supposed to sound better: jitter. Yes, jitter again.

You know what? I truly belive in jitter, I do. But this goes a bit too far, I think (forgive me to be prejudiced). Here´s another link: Technical workout of XXHighEnd. You even have a slider to control the amount of jitter. How is this possible? To my knowledge jitter only affects the D/A converter - having a slider of some sorts means to me, that this player either induces jitter or removes it. I´ve heard about the method of removing jitter by caching the whole CD in RAM. I admit, this is an intriguing thought.

Guys, I would like to have some opinions on this. I don´t believe the programmer of XXHighEnd one bit. One point of doubt is raised for me by the fact that he wants 70 euros or so for this player. And you´ll get a player that looks ugly and unfinished, does only play a few file formats and is totally horrible to use. Hilarious.

I just did a search and found out that this player was discussed before: Load song into RAM & Improving foobar´s bit-perfect sound reproduction. The discussions were very short, anymore opinions on this?
marlene-d.blogspot.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #1 –
That looks like nonsense.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #2 –
Yes.

I'm quite against brutal statements and namecalling, but sometimes it's just safe and acceptable.

That guy is utterly ignorant and obviously a complete idiot.
It's just one big puke of words and sentences with no actual information that make any sense.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Mike Giacomelli on
That looks like nonsense.



Quote from: David Nordin on
Yes.

I'm quite against brutal statements and namecalling, but sometimes it's just safe and acceptable.

That guy is utterly ignorant and obviously a complete idiot.
It's just one big puke of words and sentences with no actual information that make any sense.
I thought that too. I count myself to be one of those skeptical "subjective" audiophiles but this is way too much - even for me. Utter nonsense IMO.
marlene-d.blogspot.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #4 –
I think the author of this software just found a way to get some money from brainless people believing in things such as this wooden volume knob or something... 
Not really a Signature.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: vitos on
I think the author of this software just found a way to get some money from brainless people believing in things such as this wooden volume knob or something... 
And the wooden knobs doesn´t even look nice... what a joke. But I would still like to know if there is anything at all to the concept of a memory player. CAN there be a difference at all between playing from harddrive or the RAM? shouldn´t it be the same?
marlene-d.blogspot.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #6 –
you can run foobar and buffer from memory. absolutely no difference imho.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #7 –
Foobar2000 has been a favorite in the audiophile set for some time now - look on Audio Asylum/AVSForum about how to get bit perfect playback with it. So given how rabidly anti-tweako HA is, that one of them would eventually write a player that caters to their own interests should not be surprising.

This is really typical of the thinking of many audiophiles: That different audio programs intrinsically sound different. Along with the very similar belief that different audio bitstreams intrinsically sound different - and therefore ReplayGain and any other modern DSP techniques are to be avoided. I'd almost liken it to audio animism.

I suspect that this guy isn't scamming - he seems to be putting way too much effort into this to not believe in what he's doing. But I'd imagine he throwing all kinds of magic incantations at the audio in his code in an attempt to "treat" it. I'd imagine his "jitter control" and his secret techniques are an allusion to that. Caching the entire file in memory would only be one aspect of this.

This might be slightly dangerous, in that more people may start believing that there really is some important quality gap between xx/cmp and foobar/winamp, and promptly start shooting themselves in the foot to spite their ears. Otherwise, good riddance! The fewer tweakos on the fb2k forums the better.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: ASmith on
you can run foobar and buffer from memory. absolutely no difference imho.
As if buffering in memory did anything to begin with... The ignorance shown by the author of this player made me physically nauseous, and the more I read, the worse it gets. I'm out.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #9 –
Buffering the file in memory is all very well until the operating system decides that it needs some of the RAM and swaps out "buffered" audio to the pagefile....
lossyWAV -q X -a 4 -s h -A --feedback 2 --limit 15848 --scale 0.5 | FLAC -5 -e -p -b 512 -P=4096 -S- (having set foobar to output 24-bit PCM; scaling by 0.5 gives the ANS headroom to work)

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #10 –
Thanks for all the answers, they support my beliefs. I can´t hear any difference between foobar2000 and Winamp at all while using the same output method (e.g. Kernel Streaming or ASIO) and with all DSP deactivated. I already have bit-perfect output so I won´t require any tweaking at all. IMO this guy is nuts... but hey, he has a group of followers.

But I won´t pollute my RAM with a "memory player".
marlene-d.blogspot.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #12 –
Is anyone going to join the forum and ask him to kindly explain how it's possible to get any better than bit-perfect? I'd love to see his answer.

Cheers, Slipstreem. 

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #13 –
Quote from: Axon on
... and if you liked XXHighEnd, you'll love the Memory Player.

http://www.novaphysicsgroup.com/BrochurePage2.html
Yes, I´ve read about this a few years back and I always was wondering how this is different from secure grabbing CDs with EAC. A lot of words for secure ripping. However, knowing that the Reed-Solomon-Code and CRC codes are far from perfect (and very, very old coming from the 60s) I wonder how this machine will actually KNOW what it rips. It just can´t be different to other techniques.
marlene-d.blogspot.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #14 –
XXHigend and other memory players are indeed about jitter.
The claim is that by loading a song in memory before playing it, you minimize disk access during play back. By doing so you minimize system activity a little (no head movement)
Claims like these are often made, in essence the claim is that sound quality varies with system load. I’m inclined to say that if  system load has an audible impact on sound quality, you have a lousy sound card.

Don’t be rude, if his claim is true, SSD will force him out of business!

A jitter slider sounds plausible to me.
As you can do sample rate conversion in software, you can write a sample rate converter with a fluctuating sample rate. It won’t remove jitter (sample rate fluctuations) but it can induce it.

Anyway, if you want to give it a try, there is an application taking this to its logical consequence, it has no interface at all! (If a HD induces jitter, screen activity induces jitter too, brrrrrrrrr). And it is free: http://andy-audioplayer.blogspot.com/
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #15 –
Reed-Solomon codes should hardly be considered antiquated. They are a way of including redundant information to help fix errors. I'm willing to bet money that the Memory Player will not provide any improvement in audio quality. I see no way to improve over current ripping techniques, and playback of lossless audio should circumvent any possible problems with CDs.

Roseval, do you have any evidence to back up your claims regarding the audibility of jitter, in accordance with TOS8? I've yet to see any proof that claims regarding jitter in modern audio are anything more than audiofool hogwash.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #16 –
In my post you can find a couple of claims which are made pretty often.
You can't find anything in my post that I back up these claims.

But maybe I should have used a couple of words like 'physically nauseous' or 'complete idiot' etc to be more clear and still perfectly in line with TOS 2.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #17 –
Quote
The quality somehow varied per (ripped) CD and per day...


This. Right there. This is in my opinion source AND proof in the same time of many audiophile's issues (or whatever you call it)...
Those sorry bastards (so called audiophiles) are unable to face the truth that THEY THEMSELVES are the variable. That THEIR mood, level of fatique, sensiblity is the issue (not jitter or all the other very minor technical aspects).

And if one is able to confess, that he is able to hear diffrences on the very same setup and very same source daily basis, it is already half the victory...

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #18 –
Quote
This. Right there. This is in my opinion source AND proof in the same time of many audiophile's issues (or whatever you call it)...
Those sorry bastards (so called audiophiles) are unable to face the truth that THEY THEMSELVES are the variable. That THEIR mood, level of fatique, sensiblity is the issue (not jitter or all the other very minor technical aspects).


that's quite true.. and usually overlooked.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #19 –
This talk about "memory player" and jitter is nonsense. Hard drive reads are buffered to memory anyway. Some software players have an additional software buffering, however buffered reads are the norm for most operating systems and programming languages anyway!

In any case it's irrelevant to playing compressed audio which obviously has to go via memory first. Compressed audio just cannot be played straight from the harddrive to the sound card anyway - it's read in blocks to memory where it's decompressed to memory before finally being sent to the soundcard.

As for the XXhighend player, hmmm just the name itself sets off my bullshit detector straight away. He wants 79 euro to activate it so that's plenty of motivation for him to exaggerate (read lie about) it's merits. Sorry but perfect is bit perfect, so just stick to foobar with kernel streaming and save your 79 Euro.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #20 –
I just would like to get one point right - without violating any TOS rules: A bit-perfect-output theoretically can contain much or not so much jitter and will still be bit-perfect since timing-based jitter just moves the order of these bits a bit (pun intended) without changing the bits itself. I say theoretically and only to a certain point.

In reality Jitter poses a problem for the designers of a computer. I´ve read somewhere that the industry is fully aware of problems of jitter. For example, IDE interfaces can produce up to 1000 ps of jitter whereas SATA interfaces only produce up to 200. This jitter of course only affects the error correction, making these interfaces slower (information must be re-read). I will search for this article and post the link here.

If jitter exists, then it will be only a subtle change in audio quality and not something to go crazy about.
marlene-d.blogspot.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #21 –
Actually one can make a RAM disk out of, let's say, 1Gb of RAM, copy some files there and play them in foobar2000. Easily made 'memory player'!    No paging out to swap file as a bonus 

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #22 –
Quote from: uart on
...
In any case it's irrelevant to playing compressed audio which obviously has to go via memory first. Compressed audio just cannot be played straight from the harddrive to the sound card anyway - it's read in blocks to memory where it's decompressed to memory before finally being sent to the soundcard.
...

Not that it is relevant to SQ in any way, but are there cases where uncompressed audio goes directly from HDD to sound card without passing through memory? (DMA or whatever, my days of working down at the hardware are a couple of decades behind me)

If so, are there soundcards with firmware codecs that might also do this with compressed audio, similar to the GPU for graphics?

Just curious.

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #23 –
Quote from: Cavaille on
I just would like to get one point right - without violating any TOS rules: A bit-perfect-output theoretically can contain much or not so much jitter and will still be bit-perfect since timing-based jitter just moves the order of these bits a bit (pun intended) without changing the bits itself. I say theoretically and only to a certain point.


All electrical signals are analogue.
A bit stream has 2 components, the value (the bits) and the rate, the time.
The bit is detected using the rise and fall of the electrical signal, a robust process.
The speed of a bit stream is controlled by a clock, modern clocks can obtain extreme high precisions but as it is analogue by design, never 100% perfect.
A bit stream will always have some jitter.
What you stated is not theoretical, it's the way nature works.

In computer design, jitter is very important.
When the jitter becomes to high, bit flipping will occur so the computer is no longer bit perfect.

If your audio stream is bit perfect, you are listening to bit perfect jitter by design.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

"XXHighEnd" - what is this player?

Reply #24 –
To the best of my understanding, the audio data will be buffered on the sound card and fed to the DAC using circuitry on the sound card itself. This would make jitter completely independent of whatever software is feeding the audio data to the sound card. There, if jitter has an effect, which is a claim I still see no substantial evidence for, it simply becomes a distortion inherent to the card itself, and not something controllable from the operating system.

Am I wrong?