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Gauge
Posting is for Closers
70 Posts |
 Posted - 07/06/2004 : 4:07:35 PM
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I declare this to be the official thread for .oggs and Myfi performance on the Neuros II from now and forevermore. Hear yee.
In summary, I got a Neuros II in the mail today and quickly loaded on the new firmware and 1 album of songs. The album was by Frost, this Norwegian downtempo electronic group with female vocals... the ultimate test for Myfi. On the Neuros 1 Myfi, the quiet parts of the songs were riddled with static and anytime she made an 's' sound, it came out more like a 'sh' sound... well NO MORE!
I went into my car and tried out some new frequencies in the low end of the spectrum. By the way, the Neuros now can transmit from 87.5 to 107.9 MHz. Living in the Washington D.C. area with a cluttered radio spectrum, this feature helps out a TON. I used to listen to on 101.7, but even on that frequency I could faintly pick up another station.
I searched in the low area of the spectrum and found that 87.9 (the lowest my car stereo can tune to) was pure static. I set the transmission to "stereo" (instead of mono), tuned both the Neuros and the stereo to 87.9 and put on a quiet Frost song.... I was amazed. I heard NO/very little CPU noise in the transmission. Just to further test things out, I set both the Neuros and my stereo to 101.7 MHz. Even on that frequency that I'd been using for almost a year, there was much improvement in the form of less static and noise in the quiet parts of songs. 87.9 MHz was still much better though.
And all of this was before I plugged in my really cheap external antenna to the RF port. I don't know the exact measurements, but it's basically a male-to-female adapter I plug into the RF port and it allows me to plug the Neuros headphones into the other side. So I use the Neuros headphones as an antenna. After hooking this in, the sound opened up.... that is, I realized it sounded a bit muffled before. This is good news for those of you out there who did the RF port and antenna mods to your Neuros; you'll see an even greater improvement.
As for whether or not the .ogg files still skip, only time will tell. I did notice that there is a slight skip at the beginning of some tracks when I was hitting the FF button to get to the next song, but I'm sure it's a minor problem and will be fixed in an upcoming firmware. If anybody else would like to post their findings on .ogg file performance over Myfi, please do so here. Right now, it looks like I finally got the player that I was hoping for when I ordered the first Neuros last year!
Gauge
EDIT: One thing I forgot to elaborate on: The problem with the harsh 's' sounds. It was initially still there when I tried out the Neuros II, so I turned down the Myfi gain all the way. Now that the CPU noise/intereference is no longer as prominent as it was with the Neuros 1, the harsh 's' sounds are gone AND the signal is clean! |
Edited by - Gauge on 07/06/2004 5:56:31 PM
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8thNote
Posting Mania
258 Posts |
Posted - 07/06/2004 : 6:37:30 PM
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*drool*
I want one of those!
So is the RF port now internally connected in the Neuros II? Did you modify the Neuros II in any way other than just plugging in your antenna?
What quality Oggs did you test?
Daniel J. Lewis |
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Gauge
Posting is for Closers
70 Posts |
Posted - 07/06/2004 : 7:29:55 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by 8thNote
*drool*
I want one of those!
So is the RF port now internally connected in the Neuros II? Did you modify the Neuros II in any way other than just plugging in your antenna?
What quality Oggs did you test?
Daniel J. Lewis
I'm not sure if the RF port is internally connected or not. For now, I'm just going to assume that it's not connected, since I used to do this same RF port trick on my Neuros 1 and I had never modded that in any way. An improvement in signal strength/quality was observed back then as well. And I haven't done any mods to the Neuros II... I'm too chicken to attempt them at the moment. :)
Just about all of my .oggs are q6. Most of them are using the 1.0 encoder and more recently I encode with GT3b2. I'll let you know in the coming days/weeks what I observe with them. I know there was one particular album I have of an electronic music band where the bitrate, even on q6, jumps up near 400 kbps. The Neuros 1 couldn't handle it, but maybe this one can.
Gauge |
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BBV
Likes to Post
21 Posts |
Posted - 07/07/2004 : 10:47:16 AM
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please do keep us posted, if performance is better then I will very much consider replacing the Neuros I for the II.
I had very few skips or artifacts when I used firmware 2.17 with ogg and myfi, and I use the AoTuVb2 encoder at q7. However with the beta firmware I find that there are more skips and artifacts, but on the other hand I have noticed that myfi works much much better, less static and less interference.
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BBV
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21 Posts |
Posted - 07/08/2004 : 10:04:56 AM
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| Also does tranmitting at a lower frequencies, or certain frequecies tax the Neuros less? When I transmitted at 101.3 and compare that to 104.9 I get less artifacts and skips. I am gonna double check and try to do a controlled experiment. But if people know then please do post. |
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Cool4u2view
Neuros Audio Team
Posting Mania
3397 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2004 : 05:27:09 AM
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MyFi is always tuned and optimized toward a set a frequencies. Artifacts will come and go depending on location, but for the Neuros II you are better transmitting in the lower region and for the Neuros I you are better in the higher frequencies.
-Jeff |
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Gauge
Posting is for Closers
70 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2004 : 11:20:44 AM
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I visited some friends yesterday and so got to test out the .ogg playback on the Neuros II over Myfi more extensively. There are indeed less skips... actually they might be gone altogether (except for one special case, I'll get to that later). I noticed a couple times where the audio cut out for a split-second, but the music didn't skip a beat or lose time at all. So it could have been a skip, or just a slight interruption in the radio signal. Either way, it didn't happen very often and I couldn't tell the difference, whereas on the Neuros 1 when it skipped, it was much more noticeable because the music would lose time or skip a beat.
Now with that said, I did encounter one .ogg file that skipped, although I fixed the problem. It was quite strange.... it skipped at the same place everytime on Myfi or headphones. I even connected the Neuros to the computer and listened to the copy on the Neuros HD using Winamp, but it didn't skip! So I deleted it in NDBM, synced, added it again, synced, and listened on headphones and Myfi. This time, the skip was gone....
My conclusion about that was maybe it didn't copy over to the HD correctly the first time in such a way that playback on the Neuros was flawed but playback in Winamp wasn't. How exactly this could have happened, I have no idea.
More .ogg, Myfi and Neuros II related observations to come. So far, I'm very, very pleased with it.
Gauge |
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Cool4u2view
Neuros Audio Team
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3397 Posts |
Posted - 07/09/2004 : 9:20:16 PM
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Certain media players will do sort of auto correction in case they encounter errors other will not.
-Jeff |
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webkid
Posting Mania
1590 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2004 : 01:14:13 AM
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| And your computer is incredibly powerful compared to the Neuros, so it has some extra cycles to "smooth out" messed up bits. I believe Ogg Vorbis is very specifically written to be resilient to errors. Then again, I don't know how to spell that word. |
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Zithromax
Posting Mania
348 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2004 : 6:33:03 PM
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| I notice that when a file skips it will continue to skip until it is reloaded to the RAM. If the file you played was still in RAM, that was probably the cause of the repeated skipping unless the file itself was damaged. |
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8thNote
Posting Mania
258 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2004 : 6:36:55 PM
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Hmm. I just had a thought. Do the "bundle" players skip at all? If I got just an HD and its control unit, is there any memory to prevent skipping by chaching the track?
Daniel J. Lewis |
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kronin
Posting Mania
1144 Posts |
Posted - 07/10/2004 : 8:51:31 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by 8thNote
Hmm. I just had a thought. Do the "bundle" players skip at all? If I got just an HD and its control unit, is there any memory to prevent skipping by chaching the track?
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah, the hard-drive units have 64 MB of flash in the main unit with the LCD. The Neuros uses this 64 MB to cache songs off the hard disk for playing, so that the hard disk doesn't have to constantly be reading. |
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Gauge
Posting is for Closers
70 Posts |
Posted - 07/12/2004 : 12:10:08 AM
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So far, the major skips that I've encountered with .oggs on the Neuros II are like the one I described above. That is, they are repeatable on Myfi AND headphones, and occur even after detaching the backpack from the "brain" (to delete the song from the cache). The way to fix it is to copy the song from my computer to the Neuros II all over again, which brings me to this question:
Can NeurosDBM be made to do a filecheck or CRC check after it copies a song over to the Neuros? Because as it stands now, I'll have to manually listen to about 15 GB of music on the Neuros to determine which ones didn't transfer correctly, copy them over (usually individually), and then check them again. Or does anyone have any idea why they didn't copy correctly in the first place?
Thanks in advance,
Gauge |
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Chameleon
Posting Mania
1396 Posts |
Posted - 07/12/2004 : 01:28:30 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by Gauge
Can NeurosDBM be made to do a filecheck or CRC check after it copies a song over to the Neuros?
That's a good idea. Could you submit it as a feature request on the NeurosDBM site?
-- 'I switched to Vorbis and saved a bunch on my hard-disk space!' |
Edited by - Chameleon on 07/12/2004 01:29:23 AM |
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Gauge
Posting is for Closers
70 Posts |
Posted - 07/12/2004 : 02:40:49 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by Chameleon
quote:
Originally posted by Gauge
Can NeurosDBM be made to do a filecheck or CRC check after it copies a song over to the Neuros?
That's a good idea. Could you submit it as a feature request on the NeurosDBM site?
-- 'I switched to Vorbis and saved a bunch on my hard-disk space!'
Since I seem to be an insomniac tonight, sure! I'll do it right now.
And....done! :)
Gauge |
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Neuros II, Myfi, and .ogg files
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