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There is limited support for AVX512 on Windows and Mac. nVidia CUDA support is planned to appear some time soon, I was waiting for some new features to appear in the CUDA SDK before implementing some accelerations. Quadro is likely going to be needed, because nVidia wants to make some features exclusive to the Quadro range.

 

Hello Miska, I am trying to plan a PC upgrade. I hope you can shed more light on how you expect GPU acceleration support in HQ Player to evolve. Do you expect nVidia GPU's only to be supported or is there a plan to also support ATI GPU's and Intel's own GPU's like the ones in Skylake processors? What is the minimum number of single/double precision Gflops in a GPU that would be adequate to run HQ player filters/modulators without limitations, say for converting everything up to 512Fs DSD.

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I have a question, why do I need to select a default filter and dither for pcm when upsampling pcm to dsd? For example when I set pcm defaults to none,none. Sdm defaults to polysinc,dsd7, select a 16/44.1 track and select sdm for upsampling, the track plays at 16/44.1KHz

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I have a question, why do I need to select a default filter and dither for pcm when upsampling pcm to dsd? For example when I set pcm defaults to none,none. Sdm defaults to polysinc,dsd7, select a 16/44.1 track and select sdm for upsampling, the track plays at 16/44.1KHz

 

The defaults are just what is used at start up for either PCM or SDM.

 

What is actually used are on the main panel. So if you select SDM on the main (far right box) then PCM files are converted to SDM using the SDM settings.

 

HQP does show you the format of the source (not output) in the one window.

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I have a question, why do I need to select a default filter and dither for pcm when upsampling pcm to dsd? For example when I set pcm defaults to none,none. Sdm defaults to polysinc,dsd7, select a 16/44.1 track and select sdm for upsampling, the track plays at 16/44.1KHz

 

PCM filter "none" is treated as a special case to allow "follow the source format" functionality. If you set it to anything else and use SDM output mode, it doesn't have any effect.

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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Hello Miska, I am trying to plan a PC upgrade. I hope you can shed more light on how you expect GPU acceleration support in HQ Player to evolve. Do you expect nVidia GPU's only to be supported or is there a plan to also support ATI GPU's and Intel's own GPU's like the ones in Skylake processors? What is the minimum number of single/double precision Gflops in a GPU that would be adequate to run HQ player filters/modulators without limitations, say for converting everything up to 512Fs DSD.

 

Support for ATI is not planned. Intel GPU support is planned, and I have ordered parts for a new Skylake machine. nVidia GPU support is also planned, but will possibly require Maxwell/Pascal generation GPU from Quadro series (I have a Maxwell Quadro now on my Linux workstation).

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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My 1000-base-T network is segmented into 5 802.1Q VLAN's for security and to isolate portions of the LAN that require it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_LAN#IEEE_802.1Q

 

Think of VLAN as a subnetted LAN.

 

The main reasons I'm purchasing HQPlayer are:

  • Multi-channel DSD functionality
  • Sound Quality
  • 64 bit Application

Unfortunately, my home cinema is on a separate VLAN from the laptop where HQPlayer is installed. Therefore my question is, will HQPlayer crossover to the home cinema VLAN?

 

If not, what would I need to do to make it do so for those specific VLAN's only?

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Unfortunately, my home cinema is on a separate VLAN from the laptop where HQPlayer is installed. Therefore my question is, will HQPlayer crossover to the home cinema VLAN?

 

If not, what would I need to do to make it do so for those specific VLAN's only?

 

HQPlayer NAA operates at IP protocol level, so it doesn't know about VLANs.

 

If the VLAN is implemented with per-port using a smart switch, there's no way to cross the boundary. That is by design, so that for security reasons each VLAN is isolated. If you make port a group one / untagged you can check if you can configure more than one VLAN tag to the ethernet driver (depends on the hardware/driver). Some server adapters may allow you to do that.

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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Is Intel Iris Pro Graphics also part of the plan ?

 

This is the board currently part of Apple Mac Book Pro 15".

 

I know you don't like Apple ... ;-)

 

Probably that too, but these won't be available on Mac, initially only on Windows. Except CUDA which should be working on all platforms right from the beginning.

 

Apple has it's own way to deal with such hardware resources (Metal).

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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There is limited support for AVX512 on Windows and Mac. nVidia CUDA support is planned to appear some time soon, I was waiting for some new features to appear in the CUDA SDK before implementing some accelerations. Quadro is likely going to be needed, because nVidia wants to make some features exclusive to the Quadro range.

Can you give an example of a Quadro-exclusive feature that you plan to exploit? I also like gaming, and Quadro cost/performance is much higher than Nvidia's GeForce cards which are optimized for gaming. I'd like to understand this before I buy a new graphics card. How much of the benefit of your GPU code would I miss with Geforce vs Quadro?

I asked earlier whether the integrated FPGA of Skylake Purley will be of use to you in HQPlayer. Is it too early for you to say?

Pareto Audio AMD 7700 Server --> Berkeley Alpha USB --> Jeff Rowland Aeris --> Jeff Rowland 625 S2 --> Focal Utopia 3 Diablos with 2 x Focal Electra SW 1000 BE subs

 

i7-6700K/Windows 10  --> EVGA Nu Audio Card --> Focal CMS50's 

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Can you give an example of a Quadro-exclusive feature that you plan to exploit?

 

At least previously nVidia was limiting double precision floating point functionality on GeForce series. This is primarily used for other things than gaming... There are also differences in the drivers, because Quadro is more geared towards CAD and GPGPU and GeForce is optimized mostly for gaming. Quadro cards tend to have more RAM available.

 

How much of the benefit of your GPU code would I miss with Geforce vs Quadro?

 

Not sure, probably at this point it makes sense to choose GPU based on different factors than HQPlayer. You probably don't need anything massive anyway, because the offload will be only partial and there are limits how much it can be parallelized. The matrix processing is probably best future target because that usually means high number of channels and massive amounts of data.

 

But you may want to make sure it is at least Kepler generation with CUDA compute capability 3.5 so that it has unified memory and dynamic parallelism support.

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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But you may want to make sure it is at least Kepler generation with CUDA compute capability 3.5 so that it has unified memory and dynamic parallelism support.

Thanks, Miska that puts things in perspective. My current GTX 660 Ti only has CUDA compute capability 3.0, but I'm hoping to replace it with a Pascal card about a year from now. A lot of things need to go right for Nvidia to make that schedule, I'm certainly not considering a flagship Pascal card.

Pareto Audio AMD 7700 Server --> Berkeley Alpha USB --> Jeff Rowland Aeris --> Jeff Rowland 625 S2 --> Focal Utopia 3 Diablos with 2 x Focal Electra SW 1000 BE subs

 

i7-6700K/Windows 10  --> EVGA Nu Audio Card --> Focal CMS50's 

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Hello HQPlayer Audiophiles,

 

I have just installed HQPlayer on my computer and have connected it to my DSD DAC (amanero combo384 USB to I2S & custom DSD DAC conversion), however, have an issue that I hope one of you can help with ...

 

What happens is that when I click a track in the playlist section of the HQPlayer, the playback button is pressed and the CPU usage goes to a 100% in about 10-120 seconds whereafter it drops to about 0% ... Yet no playback and the track time doesn't count. This happens with several tracks when trying to playback using PCM->DSD conversion. Ticking the "AltDSD" box in the settings makes no difference nor changing the various modulator types or sampling rates.

 

With "pure" PCM playback it seems there are no issues - time counts and it looks as if things are as they should be (haven't yet tested if there's a sound, though).

 

So, I wonder what may be happening here - if there could be something that is not correctly setup in HQPlayer or in my computer?

 

If one of you have experience with this I'd appreciate your feedback ... FYI I have attached a screendump of what HQPlayer looks like as well as my HQPlayer settings.

 

Additionally, I can say that my computer is a core I3 (2.1 GHz) with 8 GB RAM & an SSD HDD. Due to the relatively low speed of the CPU I don't expect it to work flawlessly with PCM->DSD conversion, but since the CPU usage drops to 0% I reckon this is not the current issue (And I would prefer to test HQPlayer before committing to a potential purchase).

 

Thanks for any help & cheers ;-)

 

Jesper

CA_HQP_lock1.jpg

CA_HQP_lock2.jpg

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What happens is that when I click a track in the playlist section of the HQPlayer, the playback button is pressed and the CPU usage goes to a 100% in about 10-120 seconds whereafter it drops to about 0% ... Yet no playback and the track time doesn't count. This happens with several tracks when trying to playback using PCM->DSD conversion. Ticking the "AltDSD" box in the settings makes no difference nor changing the various modulator types or sampling rates.

 

AltDSD shouldn't be set unless specifically needed by the hardware (Playback Designs or Merging), otherwise it will just very likely cause crash.

 

With Amanero and ASIO "SDM Pack" should be set to "none". Now the selected settings won't work.

 

Additionally, I can say that my computer is a core I3 (2.1 GHz) with 8 GB RAM & an SSD HDD. Due to the relatively low speed of the CPU I don't expect it to work flawlessly with PCM->DSD conversion, but since the CPU usage drops to 0% I reckon this is not the current issue (And I would prefer to test HQPlayer before committing to a potential purchase).

 

With your CPU I'd recommend starting with something modest. Like selecting one of the -2s oversampling filters and output rate 5.6 or 6.1 MHz. You can then try with 11.3 and 12.3 MHz output rates. Upsampling to DSD512 at 22.6/24.6 MHz won't work...

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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My 1000-base-T network is segmented into 5 802.1Q VLAN's for security and to isolate portions of the LAN that require it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_LAN#IEEE_802.1Q

 

Think of VLAN as a subnetted LAN.

 

The main reasons I'm purchasing HQPlayer are:

  • Multi-channel DSD functionality
  • Sound Quality
  • 64 bit Application

Unfortunately, my home cinema is on a separate VLAN from the laptop where HQPlayer is installed. Therefore my question is, will HQPlayer crossover to the home cinema VLAN?

 

If not, what would I need to do to make it do so for those specific VLAN's only?

 

HQPlayer NAA operates at IP protocol level, so it doesn't know about VLANs.

 

If the VLAN is implemented with per-port using a smart switch, there's no way to cross the boundary. That is by design, so that for security reasons each VLAN is isolated. If you make port a group one / untagged you can check if you can configure more than one VLAN tag to the ethernet driver (depends on the hardware/driver). Some server adapters may allow you to do that.

Thanks for the information.

 

NAA might work, as HQPlayer could then search LAN via my layer 3 managed switch for the IP address it needs. LAN doesn't use layer 2 MAC addresses.

 

BTW, how do you install NAA?

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AltDSD shouldn't be set unless specifically needed by the hardware (Playback Designs or Merging), otherwise it will just very likely cause crash.

 

With Amanero and ASIO "SDM Pack" should be set to "none". Now the selected settings won't work.

 

 

 

With your CPU I'd recommend starting with something modest. Like selecting one of the -2s oversampling filters and output rate 5.6 or 6.1 MHz. You can then try with 11.3 and 12.3 MHz output rates. Upsampling to DSD512 at 22.6/24.6 MHz won't work...

 

Hi Jussi,

 

Thanks a lot for your prompt reply! I tried what you suggested and it looks as if the system now works - playback starts & the time counts ... As it is I am not able to listen to the DSD DAC this evening but hopefully tomorrow. However, as you write, given the slow progression of the time counter at 11.3 & 12.3 MHz I reckon it plays back too slowly already at this sample rate ... So ... any chance you can say if upgrading the CPU to something like this:

 

Intel® Core

 

will be sufficient to make it play back at DSD512? More RAM is also an option.

 

Cheers,

 

Jesper

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Just using trial version of HQplayer.Trying the converting PCM to DSD.Can get get it to work at DSD 128 but not able to get to work at DSD 256.Is there limitations on the he trial software or am I missing something in the set up to convert to DSD256 ?

 

What is your DAC? This depends largely on implementation details of the DAC in question.

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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Intel® Core

 

will be sufficient to make it play back at DSD512? More RAM is also an option.

 

That's quite old CPU, 2nd generation i7, likely won't do it. But probably it will manage DSD256 (my both i5 Macs can do DSD256).

 

It is hard to estimate what is enough, because the overall performance depends on many factors. Minimum for DSD512 is roughly 4th gen quad-core i7 with minimum 3.4 GHz base clock frequency.

 

Let's see how much I will manage to offload with GPU...

 

Cache size and memory speed matter more than size of the RAM.

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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