New 1212m owner!

[MikoLayer]

i am getting conflicting suggestions on dithering. this probably is yet another subjective realm of preference... is anyone willing to share his experience on this?

[fewtch]

Originally Posted by Jasper994

Fewtch,

You gotta get one of these man!!! They smoke the Audiophile!!!

You guys just don't give up! Nope, I'm not giving up on a bunch of software (and even a couple pieces of hardware) I could no longer use if I switched exclusively to Win2k. And it seems crazy to me to reboot just to listen to music, while using Win98SE more often. So no, I'm not getting one anytime in the near future... at least not until the next MB/CPU upgrade.

P.S. smoke or not, the Audiophile sounds very good to my ears (particularly with upsampling). If I was dissatisfied with it I'd make the necessary sacrifices, but I'm not.

[kalzone]

MikeLayer,

If you're using a soundcard that supports 24bit or better bitdepth than you want to turn off dithering. only use dithering when you're going to be playing back in 16bit mode.
i believe that dithering reduces artifacting when downsampling to 16bits.

[MikoLayer]

Originally Posted by kalzone

MikeLayer,

If you're using a soundcard that supports 24bit or better bitdepth than you want to turn off dithering. only use dithering when you're going to be playing back in 16bit mode.
i believe that dithering reduces artifacting when downsampling to 16bits.

makes sense, and that agrees with what foobar documentation says. yet people on head-fi seem to have different opinions... let me try no dithering and see which one i like better

[shuurajou]

Originally Posted by MikoLayer

makes sense, and that agrees with what foobar documentation says. yet people on head-fi seem to have different opinions... let me try no dithering and see which one i like better

I'd be interested in what you find yourself. I was using it as I had an Audigy 2 prior to the E-MU 1212m (just got the baby today). I found that the dithering made the highs incredibly harsh on my ears, put a very razor sharp painful edge on them to me.

Wonder if you find similar results?

Currently I have Fubar set to...

Output data format: 24bit fixed-point padded32-bit
Dithering: off (was set to strong ath noise shaping)
Resampling: To 192000hz
Outpus: ASIO

I've noticed some Clipping occuring with the default 0.0 sound lvl in the patchmix. I've adjusted this to -0.2 which has seemed to stop this. Is this the correct thing to do/best way to do this?

[kalzone]

generally, you always want to reduce clipping at the source instead of just adjusting the volume on the soundcard/mixer. so either add the advanced limiter or the soft clipping limiter in foobar2k (both should be listed in the dsp manager).

[Scrith]

A little over three weeks have passed since I got the 1212M and I am still very happy with it. I recently tried another sound source (the VIA Envy built-in sound chip on my motherboard) and immediately noticed that music sounded much less refined and detailed.

I'm playing FLAC files using Foobar2000. My only DSP option is crossfeed. My ouput is 24 bits (padded to 32) using ASIO. I tried resampling to 192000 for a few days but I honestly I couldn't hear any improvement, so I'm back to no resampling.

I'm still waiting for my next major system tune-up...A Singlepower PPX3-6SN7 amp!

[adhoc]

is the latest ASIO plugin ver 0.37? that's all i could find..

[Asmo]

I've never used (by choice) dithering on any of my 24 bit soundcards, audigy2, m-audio, and I won't on my upcoming emu1212m, dithering should only be used on 16 bit.

[kalzone]

technically, there *might* be some benefit in using dithering since you are downsampling from 64bit (foobar computes at this bit depth internally) to either 24bit or 32bit.
still, i don't think one would hear a difference and it'd just be a waste a cpu power.