Hello K400lover,
Basically you want to maximise signal-to-noise ratio while avoiding clipping. Load a 1kHz full-scale sine wave file on the X5, adjust the X5 to max volume, connect the X5's headphone out to your computer's line in using a 3.5mm interconnect, open a digital audio editor such as Audacity and press record, and play the sine wave file on the X5. You will see a waveform display onscreen, if the waveform fills the whole channel from top to bottom you're clipping. Adjust the recording level of the line in from the audio editor and retry until the waveform fills most but not all of the vertical space. Listen to the sine wave recorded this way to check if you still hear clipping (in which case you need to lower the volume on the X5 itself and increase the recording volume from the audio editor)
The above allow you to set the optimal volumes for the best recording your sound card allows. Oh, and you want to adjust the line in's device sample rate and bit depth and the audio editor's sample rate and bit depth to match each other at a high quality setting (such as 24bit/96kHz, if available)
Best regards,
Joe
Hello Joe,
thanks for all the effort writing that answer to me, but sorry, I expected something different.
When I talk about musicality (!) getting worse after an update how can a sine wave prove me wrong?
Musicality effects (rhythm, feeling) come imo mainly from jitter. Yes jitter will also affect a sine wave, but high level digital reproduction will only reveal these tiny differences when listening to real music. Another round of recording / playback, which obviously will have another round of jitter problems, so the result (especially on a sine tone) will show something, but not what I was talking about.
To avoid making a fool of me I did another long AB test yesterday night after which I have to admit, that the strong tonal differenzes (clearity, sound stage) are not as big as I experienced in my first test. But the overall result clearly was the same: It is just more fun to listen to FW 2.2.
While I was changing the firmwares several times back and forth I had an idea how I will with 100% certainty find out for myself if I was right or not.
I'm able to do some cool stuff with Excel VBA, so what I will do is to write an Excel macro, that puts a randomly chosen FW out of given set (2.0, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5) on my X5 and while doing that recording, which one it chose but not telling me until I want to know.
So I can listen, guess which FW it was, press a button, write down my guess, listen to another one and so on ... and then check against what the VBA program in reality did.
If in this test-setting I can 100% and blind find out which FW was playing, I have my answer. I guess this is even better than blind tests where another person does the FW changes. He might somehow influence you. A computer has a pretty good poker face
... we'll see and I will honestly share the results here ...
Since I think this is a very cool idea, I will publish the VBA code in case anybody else is interested in this way of testing too (?)
K400Lover