HQPlayer's Network Audio Adapter

[SwissBear]

With the DAC8 DSD for anything above DSD128, at the moment you are limited to Windows-based NAA due to driver availability limitation.

 

This is what I personally use for the purpose, with standard out-of-box Win10 Pro:

https://www.logicsupply.com/eu-en/products/industrial-computers/cl100-series/

Without any wireless options, on purpose. But I replaced the PSU because the offered wall-wart is not so great (there are way too many PSUs that make annoying acoustic whining noise).

 

Hi Miska,

 

Is it possible to use a Windows box as you described as a NAA device, and still use a MacOS box as a server to have Roon/HQPlayer ?

 

Thanks.

[shadowlight]

Hi Miska,

 

Is it possible to use a Windows box as you described as a NAA device, and still use a MacOS box as a server to have Roon/HQPlayer ?

 

Thanks.

 

Yep, it's possible and that is what I use for my Amanero based USB card in my dac. HQPlayer running under Linux and NAA on Win10.

[SwissBear]

Yep, it's possible and that is what I use for my Amanero based USB card in my dac. HQPlayer running under Linux and NAA on Win10.

 

Cool. Thanks for answering.

[volpone]

With the DAC8 DSD for anything above DSD128, at the moment you are limited to Windows-based NAA due to driver availability limitation.

 

Hi @Miska,

Is NAA available to run on such a platform:

 

Win IOT for ARM (Pi) !

https://developer.microsoft.com/fr-fr/windows/iot

[Norton]

Just returned to HQP/NAA and it's sounding v.good I must say.

 

Control PC is running Ubuntu studio and NAA windows10.

 

In the past (single PC setup) I found buffer size was critical to good performance. In a 2 PC setup, am I right in thinking that it's the buffer size for the NAA Asio driver that is important and that the HQP buffer on control PC can be safely left at "default". Also can you have too large a buffer? I'm getting lots of drop outs on quad SDM conversion, even though cpu is only at 23% and PC worked fine with SDM*4 in a single pc setup.

 

I have (G)UFW enabled on the control PC, but I can't work out which port to allow for NAA. I've tried setting up rules based on the listening report but without success (NAA works fine if UFW us disabled). Other than not bothering with a firewall, any ideas how to resolve?

 

Thanks

[brother love]

Current set-up: i5 3.4 gHz quad core 8 gb memory PC w/ HQP Ubuntu > Gustard X20u DAC > upsample to DSD256 w/ -xtr-2s/ DSD5v2 256+fs

 

Next step: NAA between PC & DAC utilizing existing mid 2011 Mac Mini (noisy option) or ???

 

To the CuBox owners out there using HQPlayer NAA:

 

I would use the CuBox with Ubuntu, connect to Plasma tv with HDMI & stream Netflix in addition to audio listening: existing music files & Tidal streaming to come from PC upsampled by HQP.

 

Is CuBox-i1 1 core 512 mb memory w/ 32 bit 800 Mbps adequate for use as NAA between server & DAC & Netflix streaming? Or is the 1 gb memory w/ 64 bit 800 Mbps worth the extra $$ ? What improvement did you hear from this quiet small computer ?

 

Any iPad2 remote apps or Win 10 laptop remote apps that you like to use with this type of set-up ?

 

Thanks in advance for any comments.

[ericuco]

Current set-up: i5 3.4 gHz quad core 8 gb memory PC w/ HQP Ubuntu > Gustard X20u DAC > upsample to DSD256 w/ -xtr-2s/ DSD5v2 256+fs

 

Next step: NAA between PC & DAC utilizing existing mid 2011 Mac Mini (noisy option) or ???

To the CuBox owners out there using HQPlayer NAA:

I would use the CuBox with Ubuntu, connect to Plasma tv with HDMI & stream Netflix in addition to audio listening: existing music files & Tidal streaming to come from PC upsampled by HQP.

 

Is CuBox-i1 1 core 512 mb memory w/ 32 bit 800 Mbps adequate for use as NAA between server & DAC & Netflix streaming? Or is the 1 gb memory w/ 64 bit 800 Mbps worth the extra $$ ? What improvement did you hear from this quiet small computer ?

 

Any iPad2 remote apps or Win 10 laptop remote apps that you like to use with this type of set-up ?

 

Thanks in advance for any comments.

 

Based on Miska's recommendation at the time (several years ago), I was using the Cubox-i4Pro unit as a NAA only. Some of reasons to go with something like a Cubox-i are for noise reduction - no fan, no HDD, low power requirement (5V), ethernet connection (isolation from noisy main computer), ability to use LPS - making for a very low noise platform feeding your DAC. Whereas with a Mac Mini, you usually have a fan, HDD and a switching power supply ... there are means around these things but it costs $$$ in addition to the cost of the Mac Mini.

 

Please note that if you decide to go with the Cubox-i, Miska's canned NAA image for Cubox-i does not allow you to modify anything (e.g. install TV apps). In fact, you cannot even log into the Cubox-i at all. So, if you want to add apps, etc., you will mostly like need to install Linux, etc.

[Embz72]

Hi, I'm trying to get NAA running on a Cubox-i 

 

I'm using the Ambian Xenial 4.9.7 image and NAA stretch image networkaudiod_3.5.0-34_armf.deb

 

NAA install fine but does not show up in HQP.  I get the following:

 

● networkaudiod.service - Network Audio Adapter daemon

   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/networkaudiod.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

   Active: active (running) since Sun 2017-03-26 23:28:18 UTC; 41s ago

 Main PID: 1811 (networkaudiod)

   CGroup: /system.slice/networkaudiod.service

           └─1811 /usr/sbin/networkaudiod

 

Mar 26 23:28:50 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:51 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:52 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:53 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:54 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:55 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:56 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:57 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:58 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

Mar 26 23:28:59 cubox-i networkaudiod[1811]: [/usr/sbin/networkaudiod] (1811): clSocket::SetOption(): setsockopt(): No buffer space available

 

Any ideas?  BTW, I've also installed Jessie and upgraded to Stretch and have the same problem,

 

thanks

[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. 

[Embz72]

19 minutes ago, arglebargle said:

@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. 

 

Thanks for the reply, yes, I've been using the Cubox image since it came out.  My only issue is that I have a headphone amp/dac that is portable, so it does not have a standby mode.  Every time I turn it off, the connection is lost and I have to reboot the Cubox.  So I just want more control to restart the networkaudio daemon.

 

The Jessie to Stretch upgrade was another Armbian image.

 

Thanks for the tip on the Arch Linux Arm, I'll take a look at it

[Embz72]

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

[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.

[Miska]

43 minutes ago, arglebargle said:

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.

 

You can fix it by manually editing HQPlayer configuration file to point to the device name instead of number. For example "hw:CARD=Audio,DEV=0" for iFi devices.

 

You can see the names with "aplay -l" on the NAA device. It is the first string after the "Card x:" heading and before the long name that is in square brackets.

 

I'll probably change this in some upcoming version. Alternatively you can create persistent audio device rule for udev (commonly used for ethernet devices).

 

P.S. If you have for example two iFi DACs connected, there is no solution, and Mac will have the same problem in such cases too. There has been quite a bit of crying about this on the net...

[pkane2001]

New user here, please be gentle 

 

I'm trying to play DSD256 in my music room (basement) from another computer with attached RAID storage over Wi-Fi (in my office upstairs).

 

I have a MacBook Pro attached to the DAC over USB. HQPlayer runs on the MacBook Pro.  If I play content from MacBook hard disk converted to DSD256 (DoP), there are no problems -- plays well, no drop-outs, stuttering or any other ill effects. 

 

If the file is being served by the computer in the office with attached RAID and over WiFi, I get occasional drop-outs when outputting DSD256. I can understand that WiFi can be bandwidth or latency limited. Except that when I play the same files but output them to the DAC as PCM 384KHz, from the same remote storage, over the same WiFi, I get no drop-outs at all...?

 

This is the part that confuses me, as I would expect that the bits read from RAID and transferred over WiFi would be the same, regardless of how I output them to the DAC. Is this not so? MacBook is not CPU limited -- all cores are at about 50% or less when outputting DSD256.

 

WiFi connection is over 250Mb/s from basement to office, but latency might be an issue. So, I tried to set up NAA on the same MacBook Pro that runs HQPlayer, and used this to increase buffering to 250ms... This helped a bit (the drop outs are not as frequent) but still not perfect.

 

Any ideas, suggestions, things to test? I'm almost ready to pull CAT5 through the walls, but not quite there yet  

 

   -Paul

 

[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.

[Embz72]

1 hour ago, arglebargle said:

@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.

Cool, I'll give it a try

[pkane2001]

2 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

If the file is being served by the computer in the office with attached RAID and over WiFi, I get occasional drop-outs when outputting DSD256. I can understand that WiFi can be bandwidth or latency limited. Except that when I play the same files but output them to the DAC as PCM 384KHz, from the same remote storage, over the same WiFi, I get no drop-outs at all...?

One more data point: if I send DSD128 to the DAC, there are also no drop-outs. The problem appears only during DSD256 playback. Somehow it's more sensitive to my network (or RAID) limitations than DSD128 or PCM384k, even though the same music file is being transferred in all three cases. Why?

[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! 

[pkane2001]

6 hours ago, arglebargle said:

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

 

Well... it was the same Macbook laptop that HQPlayer was running on that was also connected to the DAC. My thinking was that NAA would allow me to turn on some level of buffering, while the Mac audio driver does not. It really seemed to improve things. Stuttering/drop outs went from being every few seconds to being every few minutes. Maybe larger buffer would help, but HQPlayer has a 250ms limit. 

 

I also tried to use another Mac laptop to run HQPlayer and keep NAA on the first one, connected to the DAC. This also seemed to work, but the result wasn't as good as running both on the same laptop. In this case, both Macs were using WiFi, and I assume the path from RAID storage to the DAC was a lot more tortured, resulting in two trips over WiFi compared to only one in the first scenario.

 

Thank you for you comment, @arglebargle! I'll look into a WiFi amplifier/repeater or even an external antenna to see if this will improve things. Although I would think that a repeater might add more latency of the system.

 

 

 

[volpone]

Hi,

I’ve installed HQP on WIN10 and successfully fed directly my T+A DAC8 DSD from Roon via T+A (Amanero) ASIO driver … Perfect, no issue !
 

I would like to test NAA on Windows too and because no other networked Win box available i’ve tried to run NAA on the same box (just for test purpose obviously).
 

No Joy  … (attached full networkaudiod output)

 

Anybody succeed running concurrently HQP and NAA on same WIN10 computer ?

Thank you ?

C:\Users\Bruno\Downloads\networkaudiod-350\x64>networkaudiod.exe
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): networkaudiod Copyright (C) 2011-2017 Jussi Laako / Signalyst. All rights reserved.
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO Technology by Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): discovery from [::ffff:192.168.0.204]:53483
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): discovery from [::ffff:192.168.0.204]:53483
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): connection from [::ffff:192.168.0.204]:57568
…..
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): Found ASIO driver: 'PDP3000HV ASIO 1.03' (0)
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): Loaded ASIO driver: PDP3000HV ASIO 1.03
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO device supports DSD
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO device supports PCM
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO default format is PCM
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): Rate available: 32000
.........
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO buffer sizes: 1024/1024/1024 granularity: 0
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): Using ASIO default buffer size
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): Using ASIO buffer size: 1024
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO: unknown selector: 588323169
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO: unknown selector: 588323203
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): ASIO: unknown selector: 588324868
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): Latencies: 1024/0
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): Using ASIO output ready notifications
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): start failure: clASIOMiniEngine::StartAudioClient(): ASIOStart()
[networkaudiod.exe] (2488): enter streaming mode
......

 

Networkaudiod-output-win10.txt

[pkane2001]

On 3/30/2017 at 7:37 AM, pkane2001 said:

Thank you for you comment, @arglebargle! I'll look into a WiFi amplifier/repeater or even an external antenna to see if this will improve things. Although I would think that a repeater might add more latency of the system.

 

So I did try a WiFi repeater. Flashed my old router with DD-WRT and set it up as a bridge with ethernet output to the laptop feeding the DAC. Much improved performance, but still, I observed the following:

 

1. All files up to (but not including) 192/24bit FLAC appear to play with no issues over the WiFi link

2. 192/24 files use up about 6-7Mb/s bandwidth with occasional jumps to 10, while 44/16 stays under 1Mb/s

3. 192/24 files still experience occasional drop-outs, although these are now much more rare, every 5-10 minutes

 

At this point, I have to assume that this has to do with latency, since I have plenty of bandwidth between file server and the playback laptop.

 

@Miska: Is there any way to try to add caching or additional buffering to HQPlayer/NAA beyond the maximum 250ms setting? I'd be willing to wait for a few seconds for the playback to start, if it takes that long to fill up the cache...

[tboooe]

@pkane2001 you mentioned that the CPU is at around 50% or less?  When converting PCM to DSD256 (not DoP) my CPU is around 25-30%.  I notice when I convert from higher DSD rates to DSD256 my CPU goes to 70-80% and I get occasional bits of static unless I enable Multicore DSP in settings.  Have you tried enabling Multicore DSP in settings?

[pkane2001]

44 minutes ago, tboooe said:

@pkane2001 you mentioned that the CPU is at around 50% or less?  ...  Have you tried enabling Multicore DSP in settings?

 

@tboooe, thank you for your response! I do have Multicore DSP enabled. When I mentioned 50% or less, it was usually quite a bit less. 50% being the peak CPU utilization. My laptop has a 2.6ghz, quad-core I7 processor with hyperthreading.

 

All 4 physical cores don't appear to be overloaded, which is what I was trying to convey. There appears to be enough CPU power to do the work.  I am also running a couple more things over what you are describing: I'm running NAA on the same laptop, and I am converting to DoP since that's the only way my DAC understands DSD. So I would expect the CPU utilization to be a bit higher in my case.

[tboooe]

9 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

@tboooe, thank you for your response! I do have Multicore DSP enabled. When I mentioned 50% or less, it was usually quite a bit less. 50% being the peak CPU utilization. My laptop has a 2.6ghz, quad-core I7 processor with hyperthreading.

 

All 4 physical cores don't appear to be overloaded, which is what I was trying to convey. There appears to be enough CPU power to do the work.  I am also running a couple more things over what you are describing: I'm running NAA on the same laptop, and I am converting to DoP since that's the only way my DAC understands DSD. So I would expect the CPU utilization to be a bit higher in my case.

Did you set the option to the checkmark or the filled in box?  I ask because when I set Multicore DSP to the filled in box (auto mode) I would get some static when converting DSD128 to DSD256.  When I set it to the check mark (force on all the time), the static went away.

 

Be careful about just looking at the physical cores loading.  In my experience, even though it seems the cores are not being maxed out, performance with HQP does get impacted when the CPU load reaches a certain point that is far from 100%.