HQPlayer's Network Audio Adapter

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Miska:

 

Recently I read this quote and it reminded me that I would like to learn more about your embedded solution(s) and how it might be implemented. Instead of asking you directly via email, I thought I'd help bring this feature to the public eye at the same time. It would seem with the increased popularity of appliance based servers, others might be interested in learning as well. Please feel free to expound upon your ideas beyond my specific questions.

 

Do I understand it correctly that this is akin to mpd, but on steroids- pre processing the FLAC and upsampling and then via ethernet sending those files to an NAA?

 

Do you make such an NAA, or is it simply a Linux Ubuntu ALIX appliance or something that one builds themselves?

 

In purchasing a license for "embedded" does it include the rights to your Network Audio Daemon and the Desktop server, or does one need to purchase two licenses?

 

Does the Network Audio Daemon do multi channel too?

 

How do you suggest to go from ethernet>i2s?

 

From the Emm Labs DAC2x thread:

"I'm running multi-room system isolating the DSP processing and playback from the actual audio playback over ethernet and it works great for me. So an "ethernet DAC" solution, but still without even necessarily requiring a new DAC (something I call "NAA" for short). Alternatives vary from Ethernet in -> USB out to Ethernet in -> I2S out. And it is practically configuration-free. And works with DSD too. WLAN has been also working great. Good side is that this is in many cases still a separate box from a DAC and can run battery powered (for example 4x AA batteries).

 

Biggest problem I see with traditional network player (UPnP streamer) way is that the playback device is still dealing with all kind of complex things like decoding file formats and dealing with player functionality in general. Not just functioning as a DAC - doing much more than plain DAC would. If the device needs to deal with things like decoding a FLAC it is already doing too much."

 

Signalyst

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Thank you Miska!

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Miska:

 

At the risk of seeming silly, but can you make some specific device suggestions. The ARM device in the photo for starters, and maybe some bare bone computers. You mentioned a raspberry pi, and I assume a beagle board would work as well, but I do not know enough about any of them to dare just start. I think that I (and others) might be interested in some more turn key sort of options doable by novices such as myself. Maybe device suggestions and online compiled code (if required) for them. It would seem as if your approach may be the most stripped down low power solution out there presently that is capable of upsampling, DSP and multichannel. I think it would behoove you to help us exploit this capability more readily. Your IT prowess is evident, but I am an old audiophile that stumbled out of a vinyl cave only recently. I am willing and capable of small steps, but using Linux alone seems daunting in and of itself. Now that there are drivers for my M2Tech Evo, my interest is rekindled in this type of approach.

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4est,

I posted elsewhere about how wonderful the Auraliti PK90USB was as an HQplayer NAA (default settings already onboard, etc). I will be selling mine, so if interested lemme know via PM.

 

Thanks for the offer, I must have missed that posting Ted. Regardless, I had a PK90 here and was not as impressed as others. Due to lack of Evo drivers, I had to use a different USB>i2s device that sounded inferior to my hopped up Evo. I thought my Mini running XXHighend sounded comparable to it at the time. I might have hung in there longer sonically, but after 6 weeks of frustration and help from Demian and Raymond, I still could not get it to read my drive properly. I was missing half of my music files in an odd sort of way- <track 9 or >track 9 would not appear on a regular basis or even consistently. To add to that, I could still readily discern the difference between an AIFF and a WAV file and that was the clincher for me. I returned it and reluctantly swallowed the 15% restock fee. To this day, that same drive functions flawlessly in Mac and Windows with every player I know of.

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1audio:

 

No worries Demian, a roll of the dice! You especially were helpful at the time, but alas...

 

It has been about a year, and so I may be a bit foggy. As I recall, I put files on the USB stick I returned the device with a hard copy screen shot of the files on that stick. You had remote log in access at the time. I still have the hard drive unchanged and use it daily on Win7, but it started its life on Mac. The vast majority of the files were iTunes ALAC rips transcoded to AIFF by XLD with some WAVs that I didn't suspect would be read correctly.

 

I cannot even fault the Aurality directly as it seemed to vary with the client. The bare bones recommended one sort of worked on my iPod, but I have too much music to use that as my sole interface. Theremin and others exhibited the issues more.

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Thank you Miska!

 

I think in part, my (our) confusions come from not fully understanding the entire chain of control and processing and that gets further obfuscated by the amount of options in implementations. I hate to say this, but there may even be a market for something simple like a raspberry pi with a plastic case that outputs USB. The Squeezebox is phasing out, and there is a market for a networked USB. I noticed that Sonore has created an ethernet>SPDIF unit. Heck, make it work on 5v or 12v and there are plenty of LPSs and more to come.

 

I am sure that I am missing something, or just do not get the picture well enough to be of much help, and yet this very stripped down "digital buffer" sort of approach seems like the end goal of the CAPS or typical appliances one sees.

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The Pi seems like a sweet little deal, a $75USD ethernet device that outputs USB, HDMI & can use your old Squeezebox power supply or batteries.

 

I am very curious about this and how it might sound- assuming that I can get my M2Tech drivers loaded on it.

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I2S- really? Is that on the pin headers, or do you tag it off the board? If there is a way to back clock it from the DAC (or an external clock), then sign me up!

 

Sheesh, where have I been! This seems like a great little project, even if it ends up as a secondary source for my family room or maybe even a HT streaming Netflix. IIRC, there are some neat little I2S DAC boards around...

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OK, that does it. I'll get on the list for a Pi. I've got a TP Buffalo III board that has just been sitting around, and an old Tera Dak 5v supply somewheres. Use a digital switch for i2s and I can put it side by side Lucien's WaveIO on the same bread board.

 

Cheap entertainment, thanks Miska!

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I am confused Miska. Are you saying it does not support i2s? I'll cancel my order, and try one you suggest if that is the case. It did seem too good to be true.

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Obviously I am a bit confused, but in either event it is only $45 including shipping.

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You have a point, although it would be a fair amount of work for Miska to port distros for all of the various hardwares. I bought a RaspberryPi a year ago, and just got it working due to the Raspyfi distro. I have been waiting for a BBB version, but love the NAA concept. It seems to be the best of all worlds- dependent upon the algorithms of course.

Not exactly.

You can simply sell the image of "NAA for Cubox, NAA for Beaglebone"...We just copy the image to a sd micro card and it's working!!

would make life easier...

 

Your great concept can reach much more people if you take a "apples" approach to usability...

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AFAIK, it can. There is a Debian Wheezy image for i386 on their web site.

whilst we are waiting for Linux driver for the Exasound E20, can we get a Win 8 desktop installation of HQP to function as a NAA ?

 

We can then use a noisy powerful server with another desktop install of HQP to do the heavy computing and stream the results to the other PC.

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Oops- I didn't understand the issue properly.

Unfortunately my Exasound E20 needs a compatible driver for Linux to receive data from a NAA runing on Linux.

 

Exasound Linux drivers are coming and have top priority with the team at Exasound, but I want to try out the HQP Desktop - NAA network architecture soonest

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You are not the only one. My SOtM sMS100 needs to be directly connected as well.

Thanks Miska. Should we expect any SQ difference with the new NAA build?

 

And any chance you have made the bot a bit more patient in waiting for a IP from my slow (DSL router/modem) DHCP server?

[As you may recall, connection to my Cisco switch slows down the IP assignment long enough that your Linux gives up; NAA works for me only when wired directly to the DSL modem. Same for both CuBox-i and Mac NAA images from you, whereas all other Linux I have booted from work fine through the switch. Has nobody else reported this sort of thing to you?]

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The processing PC should be the powerful one. The NAA can (and should?) be a simpler/lower powered device.

Should I be using the better computer as NAA or the processing PC?

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This would be a question for SOtM or Jesus of Sonore more than one for Miska. With that said, I have used mine with several USB>i2s devices which are essentially the same thing.

Just curious whether I can use a USB->SPDIF converter with an SOtM SMS100 as the NAA. Jesus wasn't sure if this would work with HQPlayer.

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The two clocks are for the two clock frequencies, not the two channels. 44.1k/88k/176k and 48k/96k/192k require separate clocks or a PLL to make both.

What I find strange, is if you want the two DAC's "perfectly" synchronized would it not make more sense to run them from the same master clock ? Why use two clocks, which almost certainly will be slightly different ?

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For me cpu load goes from 13% to 18%.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]16527[/ATTACH]I asked you who knows more about the SQ impact of pipelining for I can't hear any difference that wouldn't be inside the boundaries of the variability of my perception...

 

As of the load (here while processing 44 to 2xdsd) can't see much difference either

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Nice! I'd love to hear that Sokris board. If I might say, you would be well served rotating both boards shortening the i2s lines dramatically. They are much more sensitive than the analog lines. Twisting all of the leads would be a good idea as well.

Hey everyone

What's the status on NAA running on BBB now?

I'm having problems install jessie dist NAA due to architecture and dependency problems.

I'm in progress of making my renderrer with NAA+BBB+sokris r2r.

I'm running r2r in NOS mode, and using hqplayer to do all filtering works.

Thanks

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There is this:networkaudiod_3.0.0-24_armel.deb arm build on Jesse. I do not know how to install it. A complete image for RasPi and BBB would be helpful.

have someone running NAA on RPi2 ? I haven't found NAA to install on RPi on the site.

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That is good news to hear. I have wanted to build 2+2 channel DAC and wish I had purchased a u21 years ago.

I talked to the DIYINHK guy about building a 8 channel USB interface based on that chip with good clocks, isolation etc. Sounds like he's going to do it.

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Gosh, thank you. I know that I am on you ignore list for some reason, but it doesn't stop me from appreciating this statement. I simply do not possess the skills, and after reading this, feel less foolish for effing up all up every time I have tried.

Have you done a Google search about it?

 

In Unix, everything is like a filesystem item, so technically it should be accessible from a directory tree once mounted (requires fdisk to find the actual name of the USB device and then something like sudo mount).

 

It would probably all have been much easier had you used a GUI initially to do all the installation and then disable/uninstall the GUI.

 

This said, if I remember correctly, when I did that last year, something was botched with my installation.

 

So all in all, it does take some effort as first dive into Linux-land.

 

It was a bit head-scratching for even a veteran like me who spent years helping others getting their Linux done well on a LUG to have a tremendous amount of difficulty getting Linux distros installed on my old MBP.

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Where does one name these? Sorry, posted too quickly Miska.

They are not under 'default' names - otherwise nor me could recognize them. Btw I also tried and couldn't rename them too (say Room1, 2 etc.) - they remain the same 'driver names'.

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The server is what you would run the HQP program on. In this case, it is your MBP. The NAA can be run on Win/OSX/Linux, but deemed best with a low power Linux "appliance". Typically you can drag/drop onto the transport window. I do not use OSX, but likely iTunes would work.

Thanks.

 

What do you mean by HQPlayer on my server?

I am currently storing the files in an ethernet WD MyBook which is directly connected to the MBP.

 

Would it still be possible to use iTunes for browsing, then drop the files on HQPlayer in one of the Macs?

 

There's no Linux driver for my D/AC but I can get a new one.

 

R