Help with fatiguing sound in my PC system

Realremo - be careful not to overdo the absorptive materials. If you already have carpeting, then you are already close. Too much will kill the liveness.

Just deal with the side-wall echoes by using a small mirror to determine the best points of attachment. If you see the tweeter in the mirror from the listening position, that is where you put them. Never put absorbing material behind the speakers. Use scattering devices instead.

And BTW, this will not fix the harshness. This is due to jitter mostly IME.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I am running a Asus notebook running Windows 7 64bit and J Rivers 17. The usb output from the notebook goes to a Musical Fidelity V-Link via a Wireworld Starlight usb cable and a Wireworld Starlight coax cable from the V-Link to a Wyred Dac 1. The sound is extremely detailed, NON FATIGUEING, and musical. All my hi-rez files sound incredible. All my files are ripped into flac and output the player in waspapi mode.

First thing I would do is ditch iTunes and try the J Rivers 17 Media Player. You can use it free for 30 days and then decide if you like it. It blows away iTunes by a wide margin.

Here's a summary of my experience:

- A system with a murky source may not exhibit fatigue, but once you give it a very revealing, resolving signal, it may become quite fatiguing.
- Improving the quality of the source, like what the Off Ramp 5 is able to do, makes a difference. But to me, it makes things sound better rather thank make things bearable. As always, your mileage may vary.
- It's not just speakers, it's also the amplifier and how the speakers and the amplifiers work together.
- Synergy is important. And certain components will bring a certain character to your system. For example, a Leben sounds warm, lush and beautiful. Never heard anyone describe a Leben or a Shindo as fatiguing.
- If you're going to buy a USB SPDIF converter, the Off Ramp is markedly better than the Audiophilleo.
- The hobby gets more expensive when you want ultra resolving, natural, musical, non-fatiguing, full of body, and transparent all rolled into one.

stereo 5, agree that iTunes is terrible by itself. This is why I purchased Jplay, tried it with both Jriver and Foobar, and could not hear a difference compared to iTunes with Jplay, so I stuck with iTunes as my software of choice. I have been managing an iTunes library since the iPod 5th gen came out, so I'm used to and like the interface. Jplay gives bit perfect output using kernel streaming and loads the tracks into RAM, the HD is never touched for playback, and it sounds really good.
First reflection points and maybe a bit of dampening overhead would be the only places I'd put absorption. Thanks for the mirror trick, Steve. I have a window on one side with a double cell fabric blind, might add drapes there.
And yeah, the off ramp is better than the audiophilleo, I'm sure, But it's also got a much higher entry level price point ($1200?).. I don't want to totally out pace the rest of my system, once the interface is upgraded, I'll have some more work to do to bring the rest of the system up. I never really thought i would take the Pc audio plunge, but the convenience and fun of the iPad interface made it irresistible, and there really hasn't been that much tinkering.

I'll be honest. There is no single magic bullet in my experience for listening fatigue. I have found all of these to matter for digital music

1. use PC source with asynch USB (check, you are doing that)
2. use a quality DAC (check, you are doing that)
3. use quality interconnects (check you are doing that)
4. use a quality PC media player (no, you are not doing that... consider JRiver or Foobar2000. At lower processor speeds Foobar is better but with the latest generation of CPU's JRiver is as good or better and much more user friendly. Itunes is pleasant but shallow in musical detail)

At this point your PC audio out shouldn't be the source of fatigue. Look to the rest of the system. Consider a Rogue Cronus or a Prima Luna integrated tube amp as a safe choice to bypass solid state issues that commonly cause listening fatigue. Leave speakers for last.. buying better speakers at this point will likely expose more to hate.