Even here ABX testing helps, because it can help you establish what descriptions are real and which are not with carefully chosen music. No, it can't. This is one of the points I've been trying to get across. ABX can't identify "real" differences — there's no such thing. Perception varies from pe...

Yes, but no-one would question that. People do question if you can hear the difference between cables, between 32KHz and 48KHz and between downsampled TrueHD and pure TrueHD. Don't they teach the scientific method at school any more? Hmm, I think the problem is that I have misjudged my example. I h...

I don't need an ABX to tell that there is a real, audible difference between 32 kHz and 48 kHz audio Yes you do. The whole point about ABX is not to prove differences where the differences are very small and you are not sure if you are hearing them, but to disprove differences when you think you ca...

I agree on all accounts. This sums up the discussion very well. OJG Finally got around to updating the article with the correct line levels. For the most part, the article didn't need much ... most of what I changed was to tone down the language in view of the fact that the levels are really only 4...

In the end either you can't hear a difference, which I doubt, or you can hear the difference in sound and have a new hobby. ... Pink Floyd note: Dark Side ot the Moon was originally mixed for quadraphonic playback hence the well defined insturment and special effect sounds. The part where the guy i...

The point of an ABX test is so you know that the difference you're hearing is real. I've browsed audiophile forums, and posters will swear that they hear a difference between FLAC and CD audio, that they really need $1000 speaker cables, that putting a little chip on top of their CD player improves...

Did I understand correctly that in the subjective evaluation, you compared the Xonar's analog signal to the HDMI/optical/coaxial while the source was the same and let the Yamaha do the digital to analogue conversion? It would've been nice if some note was made about the Dolby TrueHD etc. HDMI-audio...

12 dB is a fairly commonly used rule of thumb for average crest factor in music and speech (I dispute your 16 dB number). This crest factor varies a lot between different types of music. Classical and metal being on opposite sides of the spectrum. Agreed. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise, though ...

PS Go to a high end A/V store and get a benchmark for your eyes and ears. What do you suggest? I must admit I am hesitant to get involved on an audiophile level because I truly believe what I said when I suggested skipping the test results. Even if it is possible to qualify or quantify differences ...

Then you are reviewing wrong. At risk of feeding the troll, I will respond to this. Sorry, there is no way you can defend this statement. I am the reviewer, ergo, I get to decide what goes in the review. You are welcome to tell me whether or not you find it useful, but I suggest you do so in less i...

I looked at the full RMAA results and discovered an anomaly: the frequency-response curves extend past Nyquist! Any ideas about what's really happening here? No, sorry. I would speculate that it's possible to make Nyquist calculations outside of the domain that Nyquist is valid (i.e. 1/2 sample rat...

Even if I know the answer, why just why didn't you test bit-perfect S/PDIF playback? I didn't see any testing of Dolby Digital or Dolby ProLogic either! For HTPC users it is important to know this stuff. I know of some sound cards which have problems passing through Dolby Digital audio or can not h...

I think there is a mistake in the review. It states that the Xonar is the only way to get protected high resolution audio formats over HDMI on a PC, but the Radeon 48x0 cards can do it as well. As such, no sound card is required at all and the 48x0 cards also do full hardware decoding of the video,...

Maybe you have confused nominal levels with maximum levels? The difference between these two levels is called the headroom. It allows for handling signals with a high crest factor (peak to rms ratio) such as music. The nominal consumer output level is -10dBV. Thus the CD-player format allows for 16...

Right ... I missed that detail. Give me a day or two, I'll update it. That said ... I still think the evidence that this is a real, genuine problem for most users is very sketchy. This feature has been around in notebook drives for ages, with little impact on reliability that I'm aware of. It would ...

eSATA should be 100% transparent; it's basically an internal SATA connection with a different cable.

I've been running OS X off an external eSATA drive for about a year without problems. The system has no idea the drive is external.

Some thoughts... I've been running a 1TB GreenPower in my HTPC for over a year now. I've clocked ~60K cycles, at a rate of roughly one every 30 seconds (my power-on hours are about 2K). Maybe I'm not a typical power user, but, even though my cycles are higher than they could be, I'm still not going ...

WD has officially responded to this issue, acknowledging that the 8 second unload timer can conflict with certain software, causing these unduly high spin-up counts. They recommend taking care of it on the software end (i.e. using and OS and applications that don't hit the hard drive every 10 second...

SPCR shows up in the press from time to time because, even after we've been existence for five years or more, the idea that computers should be quiet still provokes a "why didn't I think of that" moment in a lot of people. Today, SPCR was featured in the Online TV show Tekzilla. See what they said h...

Note, you're not shorting +5V to ground, you're loading +5VSB (separate from regular +5V) with a resistor. Shorting any line to ground will kill the PSU or at a minimum activate the over current protection. Most likely, your +5VSB line has a capacity between 2~3A, and you should only need a couple w...

I'd suspect the power supply. I've encountered a number of power supplies that produce the noise you describe at extremely low load ... which is why we started doing low-load testing in our reviews. The problem can sometimes be solved by loading up the +5VSB line (perhaps with USB peripherals), or b...

That's pretty poor surround support if true ... did Intel really build a Dolby Pro II encoder into their sound card? Your S/PDIF connection should be able to output 5.1 Dolby Digital and or DTS with the appropriate software configuration ... but that requires an external receiver/decoder. If you're ...

Hi Doax ... just wanted to say

Welcome to SPCR!

In fact, I would suggest that having a silent HTPC is more important than having any other PC that is silent. I agree ... but it seems I'm a dissenting opinion at SPCR. I've also tried using my HTPC for gaming, and it was not a particularly good experience because my TV overscans the edges of the s...

Congratulations, you've got beats ... or multiple hard drives whose rotation speeds are moving in and out of phase with each other. The solution is to soft-mount the drives so that the vibrations are no longer transmitted to the structure of the case, and therefore no longer resonate. There are plen...

Glad to hear you solved the issue ... and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that one of the wires came loose, especially if the display has been jogged. This does happen in shipping sometimes ... I've seen a few HTPC cases which were unplugged out of the box. For repositioning the LCD, I would imagine...