HQPlayer's Network Audio Adapter

[arglebargle]

Are the cubox specific NAA images still available? Ordered an i4Pro a few days ago and would be grateful for a link. The old links I followed in some writeups don't seem to be active.

 

Otherwise I'll do a minimal install of Debian Stretch, which is what I've been using on an old laptop to test this type of setup. Sounds great so far.

[arglebargle]

@Embz72 Have you tried Miska's Cubox image as a baseline, just to verify things working as they should otherwise? Given an ethernet connection, zero configuration should be required. https://www.signalyst.eu/bins/naa/images/

 

Was the Jessie install + upgrade to Stretch a vanilla situation or another Armbian image? Just my opinion but the Armbian images have far more installed than necessary for NAA. 

 

If for some reason you need a more current kernel etc than included in the signalyst image, I had great luck with Arch Linux Arm.

 

Will leave comment on the particular error for those who might be able to decipher it. No help there. 

[arglebargle]

5 minutes ago, Embz72 said:

@arglebargle I got the NAA running on Arch, it was a bit of a learning curve, but it works,  thanks for the idea,

 

Right on. I moved away from Arch for my desktop machine because it moves too fast but I figure in this case ... it works pretty much out of the box and I won't bother updating unless there is some compelling reason. Easy enough to switch later, if say a Cubox NAA image for 3.5 appears.  And I do find the ssh access useful from time to time.

[arglebargle]

The one inconvenience I've noted is my Arch NAA tends to rearrange the audio device numbers if it's restarted, so sometimes my dac is hw 1;0, sometimes hw 2;0 etc. I'm sure that could be fixed with a bit of tinkering but I don't turn it off very often anyway.

[arglebargle]

@Embz72 This might be old news but I just installed the cpupower package on my Arch Linux NAA and am hearing a nice bump in sound quality (noise floor related?) with the "conservative" governor. At the very least it's gonna keep things cooler. Previously the CPU had been running close to its max on all 4 cores—with conservative it doesn't budge from the lowest step of 396 MHz, even when playing back DSD256x48.

[arglebargle]

@pkane2001 You say you tried switching the NAA to your mac laptop, can you clarify what the other NAA device is?

 

Do 384k PCM and DSD256 require precisely the same transfer rate? I'm not sure. Maybe they are both right on the opposite edges of some bottleneck in the network.         

 

For example, I had similar behaviour with wifi on a Cubox NAA. It was mostly good for 352.8 PCM but started hiccuping with 384 or DSD256. My quick and cheap solution was a TP-Link extender with wired Ethernet port. 

 

The following quote from @Miska on the Roon forums may be of interest:

 

Quote

NAA doesn't try to to optimize network bandwidth, but instead tries to optimize CPU load. So the NAA device is supposed to have a proper ethernet interface, preferably with hardware offload for TCP/IP checksums and zero-copy DMA, etc.

 

This comment is from over a year ago, so not sure if this holds true with current versions. Certainly was true for me in the case of the Cubox and its sad little wifi antenna. Hope this helps in some way! 

[arglebargle]

Greetings. Complete newbie question about linear power supplies and my CuBox i4pro NAA. I bought one of these 5V Breeze Audio "el cheapo" power supplies on eBay. After 12 hrs use I noticed the readout has drifted from 5.5v to 5.9 and then even 6.0v. Verified these numbers with a multimeter so it's not an inaccurate display.  Is this normal / safe?  I'm guessing not! and thinking I should be initiating a return. Or does the CuBox only draw what is needed? In the meantime I've switched to the stock adapter (which on the same outlet measured 5.25v)  Thanks for any info.

[arglebargle]

1 minute ago, wwaldmanfan said:

 

Have you tried manually adjusting the output voltage?

 

This (ebay link) is the unit in question, if I crack it open is there some kind of trim pot? Nothing to lose at this point, I guess I'm going to find out!

[arglebargle]

15 minutes ago, wwaldmanfan said:

 

Have you tried manually adjusting the output voltage?

 

Found it, thanks! I had seen mention of a trimpot but wrongly assumed it referred to a different model. So I dropped it down to 5V and will watch what happens over the next 12 hours.  I happen to have a second beat up CuBox I don't mind experimenting with.

 

Any suggestion on whether to set it to 5v or 5.25 which is what the stock adapter measures at?

[arglebargle]

48 minutes ago, wwaldmanfan said:

It shouldn't fluctuate more than 1/10 volt up or down, although, as has been pointed out, it doesn't matter with the connected device.

 

 

Over the course of a single album it crept from 5.00 to 5.12. Will keep an eye on it but this doesn't instill confidence! Thanks for the tips.

[arglebargle]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

At least my unit tends to increase in voltage as it warms up before reaching equilibrium, so when setting the trimpot I back it off.

 

After dialling it back to 5.0 this is exactly what mine did, and it didn't budge from 5.15v over night so I guess it's settling in. Maybe my terrible, dirty rural Canadian power is partly to blame. 

 

My system is modest but this made enough difference in sound, next time I think I'll double my outlay for something slightly more robust.

 

Thanks all 

[arglebargle]

7 hours ago, Jud said:

After some false starts with another Linux, I decided to just go with Ubuntu Xenial Server.  After installing the dependencies (libasound2 and build-essentials are the package names in Ubuntu; you need ALSA as well, package name alsa-base), I downloaded and installed the latest Xenial deb for network audio daemon.  It Just Works, yay!  And upmpdcli the same - Just Works!

 

I've been too busy to actually play any music yet (  ), but the DAC is seen by HQPlayer through the NAA, so looking good.

 

Nice Jud, glad to hear it. I use Arch for my NAA but switched to Debian for my server for much the same reason. So little maintenance required, it's liberating When you were asking me about the NAA setup that was the first time in ages I I had to pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.  Thanks for the update and writeup, enjoy the tunes! 

[arglebargle]

Happy to see the Cubox image return! It's been ages since I bought my i4pro, way back when switching formats would still pop on my iFi dac. My solution at the time was Arch Linux ARM with a custom kernel (which I didn't update for years, ha) but this simplifies things so much. Five minute setup and back to the music. Cheers.