Fidelizer - better sound from your computer music system

PolarityMan

Rocker said:

Thanks guys for your clarifications. However Fidelizer, whatever way it does what it does, works and cleans up the sound to a very significant degree. And anyone can download the program and try it out for themselves. You @digitalscream could run the program on your computer and then look at the OS and see what has been changed.

I can sell you something that will have exactly the same effect on all your computers without even modifying them or even having to be in the same room. Even better it's a physical object so if you're travelling you can take it with you and improve the sound on any system installed wherever you visit.

http://assets.jewson.co.uk/category-images/8188/Main/8188.jpg

I think £349.99 is a fair price. So you interested?

Heartfeltdawn

digitalscream said:

Indeed - I'll have to trust you on that score, but what I will say is that it might well work along the same lines as landr.com does for mastering; they've got what they call an AI system which works out the most appropriate optimisations for mastering your raw mixes, but I strongly suspect it's really just a kind of lookup with a load of profiles of different types of music and it just selects a differential which gets it into the right kind of ballpark. Still clever shiznit, but probably not actually artificial intelligence.

However...like you say - who cares? It works!

In the same way that the Harmonic Converger worked so well (simple principle cranked up with bullshit wording). 

Heartfeltdawn

PolarityMan said:

I can sell you something that will have exactly the same effect on all your computers without even modifying them or even having to be in the same room. Even better it's a physical object so if you're travelling you can take it with you and improve the sound on any system installed wherever you visit.

http://assets.jewson.co.uk/category-images/8188/Main/8188.jpg

I think £349.99 is a fair price. So you interested?

One of these under each speaker might help with imaging... 

ICBM

Heartfeltdawn said:

One of these under each speaker might help with imaging... 

I think they would give more weight to the bottom end and lift the soundstage sightly.

Rocker

Is there any software engineer here that would look at what Fidelizer actually does to the Windows OS?  I am in the process of setting up a Daphile computer for my music system and am curious as to how Fidelizer works.  There is no doubt about it that music is cleaner sounding when Fidelizer is loaded.  Having heard how good Daphlie is, there is no contest from Windows & Fidelizer.

But I would like someone who really knows the ins and outs of Windows OS to look and see what is changed.

digitalscream

Rocker said:

Is there any software engineer here that would look at what Fidelizer actually does to the Windows OS?  I am in the process of setting up a Daphile computer for my music system and am curious as to how Fidelizer works.  There is no doubt about it that music is cleaner sounding when Fidelizer is loaded.  Having heard how good Daphlie is, there is no contest from Windows & Fidelizer.

But I would like someone who really knows the ins and outs of Windows OS to look and see what is changed.

I know enough about computers - and the way they work - to know that the only way a piece of software can make any difference to what you hear out of the speakers (independently of the hardware and the software you're using to play it) is to change the data that's sent to the sound card. It's altering the music itself; if you're genuinely hearing something different, then what your hearing is not an accurate representation of what's on the disk. That's because the sound hardware only reproduces what it's given, regardless of how much load the machine is under.

If it was what they're claiming - that it's making the computer more efficient, so the computer is producing a different result from the arithmetic it's performing based on the data it's given - then as I said before...literally no computer in the world would function, and we wouldn't be having this discussion on the Internet (because it wouldn't exist).

Essentially, what they're claiming is equivalent to saying a computer will tell you 1+1=2 when it's idle, but 1+1=3 when it's quite busy doing other things. Anybody who knows anything about the way computers work will tell you that's utter bollocks.

So...we're left with two possibilities:

1 - Your ears are deceiving you.

2 - Your ears are not deceiving you, but they're lying about what their software is doing.

Grumpyrocker

Software like this is such horseshit.

If you've got a laptop with a rubbish headphone out then get an inexpensive headphone amp or USB DAC. There's some great inexpensive stuff coming out of China now.

I recently bought an SMSL M2 - it's a USB DAC (so the PC does none of the sound playback, merely is storage) with a headphone out and a proper 2v line-out that's unaffected by the volume. I run it into an SMSL SA50 amplifier which powers two Warfedale Diamond speakers. 

The SMSL M2 is here on Amazon for £45. I paid £30 for mine taking a gamble on a seller from China. It's the size of a credit card and will give any of your PC devices a great quality audio output for headphones or speakers without any snake oil nonsense. The M2 is well reviewed among some of the more sensible in the hifi realm online (don't want to say audiophile!) as is the excellent little amp I use.

Rocker

Thanks @digitalscream but to my thinking a computer is simply a machine. Run Daphile as the OS and the sound is simply stunning. Run the same computer on Windows 7 and the sound from the same music file is a lot 'less good'. Then run Fidelizer and the sound improves but not to the level of the same computer running Daphile. I am simply wondering why this is so. DSP might be happening on the Fidelized run but....... Thanks too @grumpyrocker but I am using my main hi-fi system and can clearly hear the differences [B&W 803D, Classe CA M350 monobloks, Resolution Audio Opus 21 CDP, Sonos or Squeezebox sources with digital out into the Opus 21]. Music files are all FLAC.

digitalscream

A computer is simply a machine - that's why what I said is true. There's no magic there - if one operating system genuinely sounds different to another (and, to be clear, I'm not doubting your ears here - more than anything, I'm doubting Fidelizer's claims), it's because at least one of them is actively doing something different with the audio. Given identical hardware, the only way to have audio sound different across different operating systems or other software is for one (or both) of them to be processing the sound in some way and not giving a faithful representation of the original recording. 

That's a cold, hard fact...so wonder no longer

The end result may well be better or clearer, but that's the whole point of things like mixing and mastering...which vary wildly between recordings and are all based on altering the original sound in some way (be it through analogue or digital means). Though many purists would disagree, I've never seen an argument which will convince me that all audio processing is detrimental to audio quality. Some is good, some is bad...and it almost always depends on how it's used rather than the algorithm itself.

ICBM

To be completely cynical (again ), could it be as simple as a very slight volume increase? (Possibly coupled with some sort of software limiting to prevent any clipping.)

It's a very well-known psycho-acoustic effect that a small increase in volume causes an apparent improvement in sound quality before it becomes obvious as a volume change.

imalone

One thing that can actually be different is the interpolation method used to match sample rates. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff537758(v=vs.85).aspx supposedly recent versions of Windows use a multi-point interpolation (haven't checked what exactly, spline is the obvious thing to use), older versions (up to 2000) defaulted to linear (not good). This only matters if:
1. Your hardware only does a fixed sample rate, this is the case for some cheap audio hardware, I think it's the AC97 codec that was specced to be 48kHz, which means all CD audio has to be resampled.
2. Your system is playing back multiple sound sources at once or making a poor choice about the playback sample rate which means streams need to be resampled.
FWIW pulseaudio in linux does a sophisticated resample, I can imagine Mac does too.