HQ Player

[juanitox]

local production sounds good too.. ?

[kelvinwsy]

Hi Mark yes it auto bridges.. it is an old model .. grab this from ebay while it is in stock

 

[simonklp]

8 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

Using fiber still has issues. The fiber Ethernet media converters need power. How do you know that the power supply is not adding electrical noise to the copper connection to Kelvin's SoTM Ultra? What he is doing using a NetGear GS105 with the 12v negative line grounded is likely just as good as using the fiber Ethernet media converter. I use a NetGear GS108 and ground the 12v negative line.

 

I have zero desire to add the cost or complexity of fiber to my setup. I too will look at the UpTone Audio switch when it is released. But I am not sure that is even necessary. I'll wait to see what test results they post first.

 

I was recommending to use NICs (Network Interface Cards), not fibre media converter. The NIC on the NAA is powered motherboard which, in turn, is supplied by the LPSU. If you worry about the noise, you could use whatever best quality of LPSU that you're satisfied. This has the advantage of sharing the quality of LPSU for the NAA.

 

In addition, it is possible to avoid using the network switch by direct connection of the NICs by using network bridge. By using this direct connection of fibre network, the SQ is even better.

[diecaster]

25 minutes ago, simonklp said:

 

I was recommending to use NICs (Network Interface Cards), not fibre media converter. The NIC on the NAA is powered motherboard which, in turn, is supplied by the LPSU. If you worry about the noise, you could use whatever best quality of LPSU that you're satisfied. This has the advantage of sharing the quality of LPSU for the NAA.

 

In addition, it is possible to avoid using the network switch by direct connection of the NICs by using network bridge. By using this direct connection of fibre network, the SQ is even better.

 

There is no fiber NIC for his NAA. So all that you wrote is moot as the NAA end is the most critical by far. 

[simonklp]

10 hours ago, diecaster said:

 

There is no fiber NIC for his NAA. So all that you wrote is moot as the NAA end is the most critical by far. 

 

Sorry for overlooking Kelvin's usage of SOTM Ultra Neo instead of PC as NAA. Then, in this case, the forthcoming Uptone Audio switch or similar may be really more suitable.

[eternaloptimist]

On 10/14/2018 at 4:21 AM, Miska said:

 

Oh yes, if you have 6700K then that is certainly a good option! It is not so different from the 7700K I have. And with the combination of 7700K and RTX2080 I can upsample RedBook to DSD512 using poly-sinc-xtr.

 

And as news, I just tried and first time I can run poly-sinc-xtr from 48k source to 44.1k x512 DSD, so single stage xtr with conversion between rate families! This is notable because number of DACs don't support 48k-base DSD rates.

 

 

Well, the ASUS DUAL RTX 2080 arrived in the post today and is now installed. Wow, this card is a beast!

I can upsample to DSD512 (to T+A DAC 8 DSD via NAA) with poly-sinc-xtr, poly-sinc-xtr-mp without a problem.  The CUDA offload is impressive. Task manager tells me the CPU (i6700K) is sitting stable at around 35%, the graphics card at 60 - 70%. With less intensive filter, the GPU usage sits at around 5 - 7%.

Am having a lot of fun experimenting! The poly-sinc-xtr-mp is remarkable - very dynamic!

 

[elan120]

2 hours ago, eternaloptimist said:

Well, the ASUS DUAL RTX 2080 arrived in the post today and is now installed. Wow, this card is a beast!

I can upsample to DSD512 (to T+A DAC 8 DSD via NAA) with poly-sinc-xtr, poly-sinc-xtr-mp without a problem.  The CUDA offload is impressive. Task manager tells me the CPU (i6700K) is sitting stable at around 35%, the graphics card at 60 - 70%. With less intensive filter, the GPU usage sits at around 5 - 7%.

Am having a lot of fun experimenting! The poly-sinc-xtr-mp is remarkable - very dynamic!

 

Very good to know this GPU can elevate performance this much.  Could you try "Closed-form-16M" at 512?  This seems to be the real stress test of all the filters.

[guiltyboxswapper]

2 hours ago, eternaloptimist said:

Well, the ASUS DUAL RTX 2080 arrived in the post today and is now installed. Wow, this card is a beast!

I can upsample to DSD512 (to T+A DAC 8 DSD via NAA) with poly-sinc-xtr, poly-sinc-xtr-mp without a problem.  The CUDA offload is impressive. Task manager tells me the CPU (i6700K) is sitting stable at around 35%, the graphics card at 60 - 70%. With less intensive filter, the GPU usage sits at around 5 - 7%.

Am having a lot of fun experimenting! The poly-sinc-xtr-mp is remarkable - very dynamic!

 

 

Are you able to do 44.1x -> poly-sinc-xtr at 512x 48k base?  My T+A's 44.1k side is broken, hence the question.  Will eventually get this fixed.

[gdpr]

What is the difference in SQ but also technically between a 1-pass filter or a 2-pass filter, such as poly-sinc-xtr and poly-sinc-xtr-2s?

The DAC receiving the upsampled and filtered digital data is not aware of how the filter is calculated.

So why would one spend a fair amount to be able to do CUDA ofload?

 

Dirk

[Yostin]

3 hours ago, elan120 said:

Very good to know this GPU can elevate performance this much.  Could you try "Closed-form-16M" at 512?  This seems to be the real stress test of all the filters.

 

My Quadro M2000M can do that all day long with no stuttering at all but cannot cope with the full on xtr filters so not sure if it's the real stress test.

[elan120]

5 minutes ago, Yostin said:

 

My Quadro M2000M can do that all day long with no stuttering at all but cannot cope with the full on xtr filters so not sure if it's the real stress test.

That is interesting.  Which CPU do you have?

 

I am just the opposite, can only run up to DSD256 with Closed-form-16M, but no problem with all other non-2s filters to DSD512.

[Yostin]

7 minutes ago, elan120 said:

That is interesting.  Which CPU do you have?

 

I am just the opposite, can only run up to DSD256 with Closed-form-16M, but no problem with all other non-2s filters to DSD512.

 

Intel Xeon CPU E3-1545M v5 @ 2.90GHz
 

[elan120]

8 minutes ago, Yostin said:

 

Intel Xeon CPU E3-1545M v5 @ 2.90GHz
 

Thank you, that is very good to know.

[Miska]

40 minutes ago, elan120 said:

I am just the opposite, can only run up to DSD256 with Closed-form-16M, but no problem with all other non-2s filters to DSD512.

 

My slowest somewhat recent Nvidia is GTX 1060 and it can do closed-form-16M from RedBook to DSD512 with about 23% GPU load... So it is not heavy at all.

 

[Miska]

3 hours ago, ddetaey said:

What is the difference in SQ but also technically between a 1-pass filter or a 2-pass filter, such as poly-sinc-xtr and poly-sinc-xtr-2s?

 

There's no practical quality difference from technical point of view. Two-stage ones are combo filters with a special second stage designed for that particular purpose. They are not exactly the same thing as single stage ones, so both options are available.

 

4 hours ago, ddetaey said:

So why would one spend a fair amount to be able to do CUDA ofload?

 

There can be many reasons. Initially one reason for me personally was to make it more feasible to do all kinds of processing and upsampling for stereo and multichannel (PCM and DSD) content to the exaSound e28 8-channel DAC. It certainly helps a lot for things like doing digital room correction for DSD content, even just stereo. Sometimes it is good upgrade for older machine and becomes cheaper than building a whole new machine. And sometimes it helps doing things like running single stage filters to high DSD rates on machine that is not so big iron with many cores, like my i7 7700K. And sometimes it just frees up CPU time for other things.

 

I have not tried yet, but I have also the Intel GPU enabled on 7700K, possibly it would also work to connect display to the Intel GPU for running Roon's graphics (quite heavy) and such, and leave Nvidia GPU to do HQPlayer DSP. This would also free CPU time for running both HQPlayer and Roon in parallel, making overall system snappier when Roon is actively used at the same time when playback is ongoing.

 

[elan120]

20 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

My slowest somewhat recent Nvidia is GTX 1060 and it can do closed-form-16M from RedBook to DSD512 with about 23% GPU load... So it is not heavy at all.

 

I also have the same GPU, so wonder if this is CPU related, since I am using AMD 1950X.

[Miska]

Just now, elan120 said:

I also have the same GPU, so wonder if this is CPU related, since I am using AMD 1950X.

 

I have a bit older Xeon E5v3. But are you getting offload enabled? Please check the status bar message in HQPlayer when starting playback. It is shown for 10 seconds.

 

[elan120]

3 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

I have a bit older Xeon E5v3. But are you getting offload enabled? Please check the status bar message in HQPlayer when starting playback. It is shown for 10 seconds.

 

I do have CUDA offload enabled, but have not paid attention to the status bar message.  I will check it later today and report back.  As a side note, a friend having same CPU also have the same issue, so I speculate this perhaps is CPU related.

[Miska]

1 minute ago, elan120 said:

I do have CUDA offload enabled, but have not paid attention to the status bar message.  I will check it later today and report back.  As a side note, a friend having same CPU also have the same issue, so I speculate this perhaps is CPU related.

 

Please check the offload status first. If you don't get offload, then you likely need to update Nvidia driver (CUDA 10 requires IIRC >= 410). If you indeed get offload, then one possibility is that drop in the CPU load leads to sleeping the CPU too much, in such case setting Power Profile to High Performance (or Ultimate Performance) usually helps.

 

[elan120]

5 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Please check the offload status first. If you don't get offload, then you likely need to update Nvidia driver (CUDA 10 requires IIRC >= 410). If you indeed get offload, then one possibility is that drop in the CPU load leads to sleeping the CPU too much, in such case setting Power Profile to High Performance (or Ultimate Performance) usually helps.

 

I thought I do have Offload, but will check it again later today to be sure.  Meanwhile, I do have latest Nvida drive, but not sure what CPU power profile I used, so if I don't have either High Performance or Ultimate Performance selected, I will be sure to give that a try.  Thank you for the suggestions.

[Account Closed]

All this back and forth about the massive amount of processing power needed to do DSD 512 conversion leads me to to ask this question:

 

How can certain manufacturers who I won't name claim to be doing DSD 1024 on what appears to be an ordinary FPGA chip?

 

Is there some trick to programing or some unknown capability that I am not aware of or do not understand?

 

I know that HQ Player can do higher than DSD 512 but to date I have not seen anyone be able to actually do it and I don't think there is a DAC readily available that can accept it. It is the same issue as these mega million tap high rate PCM filters being run on a FPGA. The PCM scenario seems at least plausible but the DSD 1024 on a FPGA seems far fetched.

 

If this has been discussed before I did not find it so pardon me if I am asking something that has been explained before.

 

Answers appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance to all.

 

 

 

 

[diecaster]

FPGA chips can be immensely powerful. Look at what Ted Smith does with them in the DirectStream DAC. He upsamples 44.1K tracks up to 352.8k and then upsamples them 20x DSD128. All of that in real time!

[elan120]

7 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Please check the offload status first. If you don't get offload, then you likely need to update Nvidia driver (CUDA 10 requires IIRC >= 410). If you indeed get offload, then one possibility is that drop in the CPU load leads to sleeping the CPU too much, in such case setting Power Profile to High Performance (or Ultimate Performance) usually helps.

 

Thank you, Miska,

 

I found out offload was disabled, got the Nvidia driver updated to the current version 416.34, and now with offload enabled, I can run "Closed-form-16M" to DSD512, but I have to disable offload in order to run Poly-sinc-xtr to DSD512.

 

[juanitox]

is it possible to play polysinc XTR 512 non 2s  without an additional videocard ? my  I7 6700K can't do it  any new chip ?

[Miska]

56 minutes ago, juanitox said:

is it possible to play polysinc XTR 512 non 2s  without an additional videocard ? my  I7 6700K can't do it  any new chip ?

 

Only CPU I have that can do it is the i7 6950X, which is not so new anymore. But others have had success with the newer big X-series CPUs.