As of July 11, 2020 Fidelizer 8.6 is released.

 

why does network audio sound so bad, noisy, humming, especially considering for audiophilics?
"packet fragmentation between devices in home network has less data integrity issues comparing to global scale"

thats the damn internet crackle! just play a vanilla vinyl, and hear the difference. vinyls got a long unfragmented groove -> therefore no crackle!

but wait, theres hope... they took a bloody cisco "industrial network switch", called the thing "EtherStream" and...
"Components are soldered with high quality solder providing solid bass and dynamics"

i hear you crying snake oil! bion-activated water! mood-enhancing-150$-magnets... calm down boys and girls, it gets even better!

"After project was finalized, we spent 3 whole months testing EtherStream in various scenarios."

ive got a vague idea what their "fidelizer" software is about...

thomas

besides, "boys and girls" means everybody, excluding Area51.

 

It's not about network audio ot internet audio at all. It's about avoiding the noise every PC CPU makes because of multiple and frequent interrupts made by software calls.
From the picture above it is clear what it does and how it works. No sake oil, it just rearranges Win services, core(s) usage (affinities) and program priorities.
The result is a significant improvement of sound quality of music played through a single PC.
For people who play music within analogue chain only it is of no interest, as well as digital music itself.

 

Okay. What is it good for, then?

 

"You may upgrade Fidelizer for better sound quality..." plus version for just $40.

but if youre a pro youll choose the $70 pro version of course, that can "disabling services", "run on startup" among other mindbreaking features! isnt it fantastic?

ah, Smoove Grooves, your question... it will transfer your hard earned money in their pocket. but everything will sound better. dont ask for details, cmon, for $70 is has to be good!

joking aside, at the bottom of their fidelizer page they claim "serving over 4,200 licenses so far". those are stinking 160,000 bucks... not bad for that useless piece of shit, imo!

 

Joking aside, you get audible improvement in audio reproduction quality because of less intermodular distortion caused by a noisy CPU (each CUP is noisy because of OS multitasking jobs and the multiple frequencies of interrupts incurred) and less jitter caused by CPU time-delays.
Even the free version gives you about 75% of the possible total you get with PRO version. (It stops over 20 /for audio unnecessary/ services)
But almost everything included in Pro version you can do manually, simply by tweaking priorities and affinities of the memory content with Win Task Manager.
Instead of analyzing money transfers and purported number of licenses sold one should maybe just try out the software first.

 

????

take a look at https://fidelizer-audio.com/
scroll down to the bottom
what do you see?

try oneself? bold claims need bold proofs! measurements of jitter, "intermodulations", snr, etc. install such a windy program, that will mess around with interrupts??? thank you, no need for me.
what do YOU got of the fidelizer?

is a hardly useful observation, dont you think?

 

Very useful for listener's rears I'm afraid.
Gives back much more listening pleasure than investing several times US$70 into some audio reproduction gear improvement.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 11, 2020

When you want to listen to audio only, with these settings you can almost achieve the quality of PRO version using the free one.
Also, set all of the above programs to 'absolute' priority.
When you close the player, all of the above manual settings will return to default.

 

There's is this Japanese guy who made a similar software that is pretty unknown, with free trial/version. He was raided by the military cus software was too OP. I'll see if I can find a link.

 

Btw if anyone want an old Fidelizer version, PM.

 

Which version is it?

 

If you have a free version and want your manual priority settings saved permanently you may use Prio software:
https://www.prnwatch.com/prio/

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 16, 2020

Legend!

 

If you want the original go digital.

At 11:06

 

Last edited: Aug 16, 2020

A piece of advice that will help your player (foobar is the best, with WASAPI event output) go along with Fidelizer better.
Turn off any visualisations including VU meters, etc. Turn off the seekbar. Turn of all playtime displays.
All of those are non-audio processing features of foobar that degrade the sound, because they interfere with audio processing by their own interrupts - excactly what Fidelizer is trying to minimize with other programs/services.
Also, to avoid unnecessary DSP keep both foobar's and win system volume controls at 100% all the time and regulate volume with knobs on your analogue gear only.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 16, 2020

I'm pretty certain those features don't use interrupts at all, at most they use mutexes for interthread synchronization, which is not really the same thing. If disabling those features actually results in different audio buffer sent to the audio interface I'd be very very surprised. And if it does there's something very wrong with your computer to begin with, something that's not fixable with a simple software.

You know what actually generates a lot of interrupts? Your hardware, starting from your keyboard and ending with your audio interfaces (USB, PCI, FireWire, doesn't matter), and they generate a metric shitton of those.

So if you're after minimizing interrupts start with unplugging all of your devices. Good luck!

 

You should check out Asio player by Rob. Awesome sauce, only plays flac

 

Guise, isn't there an audiphile version of Windows?

 

I did not mean hardware interrupts, but sotfware ones. A software interrupt often occurs when an application software terminates or when it requests the operating system for some service. This is quite unlike a hardware interrupt, which occurs at the hardware level. A software interrupt, also called an exception, is an interrupt that is caused by software, usually by a program in user mode. Examples of events that cause them are requests by an application program for certain services from the operating system or the termination of such programs.
For instance, all DLL calls.
It is not a matter of different audio buffer being sent sent to the audio interface but of jitter and Intermodulation (IM) or intermodulation distortion (IMD) that happen when computer memory is overcrowded with exceptions. Those exceptions happen mostly on a regular basis (have a certain frequency) so they appear to the audio system as noise. It also degrades both the transient and the frequency response.
Just try and listen.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 16, 2020