Ahhhhh...magnifico...

[agent_kith]

Just sublime...... AK you're the best !  latest Snakeoil is  magic....  I don't know how you do it but every release sounds better and better....!  and has more features...
I am on dishes duty....;-).... with Snakeoil playing Ancient FM (yes, it is a thing) and the Shahinians are cranked up...... oh Heaven ! (except the dishes thing...lol...)

Thanks Bromf. I would like to think because it's due to my knowledge in computer technology and music. But honestly, so far along this journey it does seems like pure dumb luck.

Recently when I plugged my old DAC (TDA1541 chip with a valve output stage fed I2S from a Digital Interface) back into the system, the emotional connection is gone. That is because the later Snakeoil releases (Golden Ears and Blind Testing) are optimised for my current setup while the older 0.1.x is optimised for my old DAC. It's interesting how the OS can be tweaked in such a manner.

This shows how important it is to find that tweak that will really make your own system sing. A big part of this tweak is kernel rolling (not just version changes, but also turning features on/off). This 'big idea' can be simplified into these two slogans:

1. Music, your way.
   
2. Designed by us, defined by you.
   

Hopefully I can set up a system to make it even easier for everybody.

For this to really work, we need to find a group of people who are really good audiophiles. Not the kind of arm chair experts that's a dime a dozen on the Internet, I'm looking for the real deal.

As an audiophile, I only know timbre, micro details, imaging and sound localisation. Snakeoil Golden Ears and before are all designed with those 4 attributes in mind.

Then a friend dropped in and tells me my system's  "sound is too slow". He then went on to describe what he meant, and showed it to me his idea of how music is supposed to be. With that in mind I started experimenting on what needs to be done to get that 'speed'... And found it via CPUset. Finding that speed without compromising the other aspects. At the end of the day, it's really more luck than skill.

A lot of luck to discover the tweak, and a little bit of skill to notice the change.

If you compared Golden Ears vs Blind Testing. The key difference is that speed, the music just feels less lethargic in Blind Testing when compared to Golden Ears.