HQ Player

[Miska]

12 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

@Miska Any ideas if your NAA image on a Raspberry Pi 4 will continue to work when Roon enforces their Roon Certified program on the 21st?

 

Roon doesn't know anything about NAAs, it is totally invisible to Roon. Roon only knows and sees HQPlayer. HQPlayer support in Roon is separate from their Roon Ready endpoint support.

 

 

[Gavin1977]

19 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Because HQPlayer Embedded stores information on disk and ramdisk is not persistent storage. In addition there's no point in doing that because the OS disk activity is minimal and the only notable activity is the content, for which there's no point in storing it on ramdisk because it would take huge amount of memory and long time to transfer (depending how large your library is).

 

Closest to persistent RAM storage is to use Optane M.2 storage for the OS and HQPlayer Embedded. Then it is pretty similar to ramdisk.

 

Interesting... because I've been running Gentoo Player and HQPlayer Embedded in RAM  (16GB Apacer) all this time and worked great.  So is it suggested that I shouldn't be doing this?

[AudioDoctor]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Roon doesn't know anything about NAAs, it is totally invisible to Roon. Roon only knows and sees HQPlayer. HQPlayer support in Roon is separate from their Roon Ready endpoint support.

 

 

 

Thanks Miska!

[madman73]

20 hours ago, Miska said:

I have never used Gentoo player, but you can use realtime kernel and for NAA you can also use ramdisk since it doesn't store anything on the disk. For HQPlayer Embedded you shouldn't use ramdisk.

Does HQPlayer Embedded store data on the disc during playback even if used via Roon and you don't change the settings?

In my setup, the goal is to switch on and listen, once the best settings for me are set, I want to forget them.
Also for this reason I preferred the Embedded to the desktop version.

[luisma]

23 hours ago, Miska said:

one can look to what depth the converter is actual linear.

How can we know this? You referring to filter in the PCM mode or dither?

[scintilla]

24 minutes ago, luisma said:

How can we know this? You referring to filter in the PCM mode or dither?

 

You look at published test measurements of the linearity of the DAC in question, which looks like a straight line down to the point where the DAC chip becomes less linear and it jumps around the baseline.  Those graphs are published by Stereophile and others and are typically in db, so to get the bits you need to convert db range to number of bits.  This is the inherent linearlity of the DAC chip, and not referring to dither or filter other than changing those once you know the actual linearity capability of the DAC chip itself. If the chip's inherent linearirty only extends to 19 bits, then you would dither your output to 19 bits in order to maximize the real-world performance of the chip.

[Miska]

1 hour ago, madman73 said:

Does HQPlayer Embedded store data on the disc during playback even if used via Roon and you don't change the settings?

In my setup, the goal is to switch on and listen, once the best settings for me are set, I want to forget them.
Also for this reason I preferred the Embedded to the desktop version.

 

Things like log file are written at the moment. In future there could be more things. HQPlayer Embedded assumes normal persistent storage to be available.

 

With HQPlayer Embedded, using ramdisk also means loading a lot of unnecessary things that are never used into memory which reduces amount of memory available for more useful things

[Miska]

2 hours ago, luisma said:

How can we know this?

 

From linearity sweep measurement, or measuring THD at low level signals such as -120 dB. I usually use low level signals.

 

2 hours ago, luisma said:

You referring to filter in the PCM mode or dither?

 

Dither/noise-shaper, filter has no role in this.

[gixxer]

Hello,

 

I'm at a "weirdest" situation.

 

Been playing tonight from Roon through HQPlayer through NAA output device (microrendu) and Brookly DAC.  No issue.

 

Then on the PC (where HQPlayer) is running, installed virtualbox and vmware workstation.

 

Rebooted.

 

No other change other than these 2 programs installed.  They add their own virtual network adapters, okay, that's fine.

 

After reboot, starting HQPlayer throws following message:

 

"Failed to open audio device.  Please check settings!"

 

What?

 

And i've been trying few things to help isolate this from, such as turned off Windows 10 firewall completely, no anti-virus, nothing.  I've rebooted microrendu, the Brooklyn DAC.  No ddifference.

 

At the microrendu app switcher, changed from HQPlayer NAA to RoonReady.  Music plays through DAC just fine.

 

What, where else can i do to troubleshoot this symptom?

 

I've also disabled the virtualbox and vmware workstation added virtual network adapters.  No difference.

 

Thank you.

 

 

* 2020/09/17 00:33:34 Starting...
  2020/09/17 00:33:34 Signalyst HQPlayer Desktop v3.25.6
  2020/09/17 00:33:34 Engine selected: 
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Restore GUI state
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 libDSP version 21.3.3
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 CUDA offload requested
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Number of processor cores: 10
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 DSP thread pools enabled (5)
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Pipelined DSP enabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Audio engine: network
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Network Audio IPv6 support disabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Discovery from 0.0.0.0
  2020/09/17 00:33:40 Discovered 0 Network Audio Adapters
  2020/09/17 00:33:40 Set channels: 2 (2)
! 2020/09/17 00:33:40 createEngine(): clHQPlayerEngine::Initialize(): clNetMiniEngine::Initialize(): adapter not found
- 2020/09/17 00:33:42 Network engine stopping...
  2020/09/17 00:33:42 Network Audio IPv6 support disabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:42 Discovery from 0.0.0.0
- 2020/09/17 00:33:45 Network engine stopping...
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 libDSP version 21.3.3
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 CUDA offload requested
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Number of processor cores: 10
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 DSP thread pools enabled (5)
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Pipelined DSP enabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Audio engine: network
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Network Audio IPv6 support disabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Discovery from 0.0.0.0
  2020/09/17 00:33:46 Discovered 0 Network Audio Adapters
  2020/09/17 00:33:46 Set channels: 2 (2)
- 2020/09/17 00:33:46 Network engine stopping...
! 2020/09/17 00:33:46 clMainWindow::settingsTriggered(): clMainWindow::reinitEngine(): clHQPlayerEngine::Initialize(): clNetMiniEngine::Initialize(): adapter not found
  2020/09/17 00:33:47 Store GUI state
  2020/09/17 00:33:47 Shutting down...
* 2020/09/17 00:33:47 Exit

 

[gixxer]

6 minutes ago, gixxer said:

Hello,

 

I'm at a "weirdest" situation.

 

Been playing tonight from Roon through HQPlayer through NAA output device (microrendu) and Brookly DAC.  No issue.

 

Then on the PC (where HQPlayer) is running, installed virtualbox and vmware workstation.

 

Rebooted.

 

No other change other than these 2 programs installed.  They add their own virtual network adapters, okay, that's fine.

 

After reboot, starting HQPlayer throws following message:

 

"Failed to open audio device.  Please check settings!"

 

What?

 

And i've been trying few things to help isolate this from, such as turned off Windows 10 firewall completely, no anti-virus, nothing.  I've rebooted microrendu, the Brooklyn DAC.  No ddifference.

 

At the microrendu app switcher, changed from HQPlayer NAA to RoonReady.  Music plays through DAC just fine.

 

What, where else can i do to troubleshoot this symptom?

 

I've also disabled the virtualbox and vmware workstation added virtual network adapters.  No difference.

 

Thank you.

 

 

* 2020/09/17 00:33:34 Starting...
  2020/09/17 00:33:34 Signalyst HQPlayer Desktop v3.25.6
  2020/09/17 00:33:34 Engine selected: 
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Restore GUI state
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 libDSP version 21.3.3
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 CUDA offload requested
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Number of processor cores: 10
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 DSP thread pools enabled (5)
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Pipelined DSP enabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Audio engine: network
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Network Audio IPv6 support disabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:39 Discovery from 0.0.0.0
  2020/09/17 00:33:40 Discovered 0 Network Audio Adapters
  2020/09/17 00:33:40 Set channels: 2 (2)
! 2020/09/17 00:33:40 createEngine(): clHQPlayerEngine::Initialize(): clNetMiniEngine::Initialize(): adapter not found
- 2020/09/17 00:33:42 Network engine stopping...
  2020/09/17 00:33:42 Network Audio IPv6 support disabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:42 Discovery from 0.0.0.0
- 2020/09/17 00:33:45 Network engine stopping...
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 libDSP version 21.3.3
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 CUDA offload requested
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Number of processor cores: 10
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 DSP thread pools enabled (5)
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Pipelined DSP enabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Audio engine: network
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Network Audio IPv6 support disabled
  2020/09/17 00:33:45 Discovery from 0.0.0.0
  2020/09/17 00:33:46 Discovered 0 Network Audio Adapters
  2020/09/17 00:33:46 Set channels: 2 (2)
- 2020/09/17 00:33:46 Network engine stopping...
! 2020/09/17 00:33:46 clMainWindow::settingsTriggered(): clMainWindow::reinitEngine(): clHQPlayerEngine::Initialize(): clNetMiniEngine::Initialize(): adapter not found
  2020/09/17 00:33:47 Store GUI state
  2020/09/17 00:33:47 Shutting down...
* 2020/09/17 00:33:47 Exit

 

The oddness continues...

 

After about an hour after the reboot of Windows 10 PC, this time when restarting HQPlayer, it detects the NAA output device.

 

Again, what .........

 

I need to note that this behavior can happen, next time i reboot the PC.

[Miska]

2 hours ago, gixxer said:

Then on the PC (where HQPlayer) is running, installed virtualbox and vmware workstation.

 

Rebooted.

 

No other change other than these 2 programs installed.  They add their own virtual network adapters, okay, that's fine.

 

It is quite usual for those virtual adapters to mess up multicast routing.

 

2 hours ago, gixxer said:

I've also disabled the virtualbox and vmware workstation added virtual network adapters.  No difference.

 

That should make it work again.

 

[Miska]

19 hours ago, Gavin1977 said:

Interesting... because I've been running Gentoo Player and HQPlayer Embedded in RAM  (16GB Apacer) all this time and worked great.  So is it suggested that I shouldn't be doing this?

 

If it works, good, but I don't recommend it. And any future HQPlayer update may break it. But since Gentoo Player is not among my supported distributions, it is all up to provider of Gentoo Player anyway.

 

[Miska]

15 hours ago, scintilla said:

Those graphs are published by Stereophile and others and are typically in db, so to get the bits you need to convert db range to number of bits.

 

And you get number of bits from x dB with:

log2( 10 ^ ( abs ( x ) / 20 ) )

 

And then round down the number of bits. So if you get for example 19.9 as result, you should use 19 as value.

 

With a noise shaper and high rate, you can reduce number of bits a lot without affecting audio band SNR at all.

 

[Miska]

Some optimizations one can do with HQPlayer Embedded unless you buy a ready made system:

• If you use Roon, split Roon to a separate computer
• Play local and remote content directly with HQPlayer
• If you have DAC directly connected to HQPlayer computer, use HQPlayer OS
• If you use NAA, use minimal installation of Ubuntu Server and possibly use some powerful Nvidia GPU for offload
• If you use NAA, use the bootable NAA image (HQPlayer / NAA OS)

If you use a NAA, you don't need to worry about computer running HQPlayer because it is not doing the actual playback, it is just a DSP pipeline. It can have loud fans and whatever, placed in another room, in the basement or somewhere else. Just have something as powerful as possible so that you can run all algorithms you want.

 

And remember to only use UTP Ethernet cable type, or even better optical one, never a shielded one.

 

[madman73]

•  

1 hour ago, Miska said:

Some optimizations one can do with HQPlayer Embedded unless you buy a ready made system:

Quote

If you use Roon, split Roon to a separate computer

Already done.

Quote

Play local and remote content directly with HQPlayer

What do you mean? Roon sends the stream to HQPlayer Embedded

Quote

If you use NAA, use minimal installation of Ubuntu Server and possibly use some powerful Nvidia GPU for offload

Now using Gentoo Player and i'll buy an Nvidia 1660 Super asap (waiting for lower prices, after the new 3xxx models). I will test it vs HQPlayer OS.

Quote

If you use NAA, use the bootable NAA image (HQPlayer / NAA OS)

Tried it in the past, but my NAA hardware is not fully supported, so i started with Gentoo Player

Quote

And remember to only use UTP Ethernet cable type, or even better optical one, never a shielded one.

Now on UTP cat. 5/5e. Optical Cable will be a next upgrade.. but why not shielded cables?

 

[Miska]

3 hours ago, madman73 said:

What do you mean? Roon sends the stream to HQPlayer Embedded

 

Yes, I mean to skip Roon altogether...

 

3 hours ago, madman73 said:

Now using Gentoo Player and i'll buy an Nvidia 1660 Super asap (waiting for lower prices, after the new 3xxx models).

 

I'd rather go with the new 30-series ones, such as 3070.

 

3 hours ago, madman73 said:

I will test it vs HQPlayer OS.

 

Note that CUDA offload is not supported on HQPlayer OS. Only on Ubuntu. That is one reason I recommended to consider Ubuntu Server if you use a NAA.

 

I have also several servers running Ubuntu Server that are used without a NAA, directly connected to DACs. But especially in such case I'd recommend using my custom kernel build.

 

3 hours ago, madman73 said:

Now on UTP cat. 5/5e. Optical Cable will be a next upgrade.. but why not shielded cables?

 

Because shield spoils the galvanic isolation Ethernet would otherwise provide... UTP doesn't have a shield and thus everything is transformer isolated unless you use PoE.

 

[Yviena]

@Miska where can i download the 4.6.0 version i tried manually typing in bins/HQPlayer4Desktop-setup-460.exe but it seems to have been removed?

[Mahler and Bach on Computer]

11 hours ago, Miska said:

If you use a NAA, you don't need to worry about computer running HQPlayer because it is not doing the actual playback, it is just a DSP pipeline. It can have loud fans and whatever, placed in another room, in the basement or somewhere else. Just have something as powerful as possible so that you can run all algorithms you want.

Hi, @Miska:

 

Any specific suggestion how to connect a computer at another other room with the NAA close to the the main system not sacrificing SQ.  Mine is Sotm sMS 200.  Can I use WiFI toggle? 

[Miska]

2 minutes ago, Mahler and Bach on Computer said:

Any specific suggestion how to connect a computer at another other room with the NAA close to the the main system not sacrificing SQ.  Mine is Sotm sMS 200.  Can I use WiFI toggle? 

 

Some WiFi extenders can be configured as bridges (for example Zyxel calls this Client Mode). This should work fine if the WiFi around you is not very crowded. If it's too crowded you get drop-outs because bandwidth gets limited too much. There is no other sound quality impact except drop-outs in cases where there's too much other traffic around.

 

I can play 8 channels of DSD256 over WiFi to a NAA, so it certainly works.

 

[Miska]

27 minutes ago, Yviena said:

@Miska where can i download the 4.6.0 version i tried manually typing in bins/HQPlayer4Desktop-setup-460.exe but it seems to have been removed?

 

I always remove versions older than the one before latest. So now 4.7.0 and 4.7.1 are online.

 

[Mahler and Bach on Computer]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Some WiFi extenders can be configured as bridges (for example Zyxel calls this Client Mode). This should work fine if the WiFi around you is not very crowded. If it's too crowded you get drop-outs because bandwidth gets limited too much. There is no other sound quality impact except drop-outs in cases where there's too much other traffic around.

 

I can play 8 channels of DSD256 over WiFi to a NAA, so it certainly works.

 

@MiskaThank you very much.  I have a dedicated Network specifically for music playing only.  Any advantage of WIFI in the bridged mode vs. regular mode?

 

Thank you again!

[Yviena]

@Miska damn something in hqplayer when changing settings fcked it up really good triggered a instant BSOD  2 times when trying to change settings again, maybe it was the Kaspersky AV doing shit again, but even a uninstall of the AV, and a reinstall of Hqplayer did not fix it, HQplayerdesktop.exe plainly just won't execute anymore even if I install in a different folder, or older version, I'm doing a reset of the OS now via the reset windows feature to see if that fixes it.

 

Curiously the hqplayerclient.exe functions as expected, no idea how changing filters, dac bits, and audio device can trigger instant bsod though, will report back after the reset is finished.

 

EDIT: yeah I believe it was the AV, never getting that shit of a aggressive  AV software again, I'm  glad I was only trialing it, I'm  sticking.with windows defender, it atleast  doesn't  BSOD the PC, and brick software....

[Miska]

6 hours ago, Yviena said:

@Miska damn something in hqplayer when changing settings fcked it up really good triggered a instant BSOD  2 times when trying to change settings again, maybe it was the Kaspersky AV doing shit again, but even a uninstall of the AV, and a reinstall of Hqplayer did not fix it, HQplayerdesktop.exe plainly just won't execute anymore even if I install in a different folder, or older version, I'm doing a reset of the OS now via the reset windows feature to see if that fixes it.

 

Curiously the hqplayerclient.exe functions as expected, no idea how changing filters, dac bits, and audio device can trigger instant bsod though, will report back after the reset is finished.

 

EDIT: yeah I believe it was the AV, never getting that shit of a aggressive  AV software again, I'm  glad I was only trialing it, I'm  sticking.with windows defender, it atleast  doesn't  BSOD the PC, and brick software....

 

I once had this kind of problem on my measurement NUC, it also affected some other applications like for example Chrome browser didn't start up, while the measurement software started fine. In the end I found out some Windows update had broken the version of Intel GPU driver there was installed. Downloading and installing latest driver from Intel fixed it.

 

I suspect this may be also the CUDA stack or the DAC driver, since Client doesn't use those, but Desktop of course does. CUDA gets initialized at startup time, but only if you have Nvidia GPU. If the drivers are too old it doesn't get enabled but could behave funnily. Changing audio device can certainly do it if the driver crashes.

 

Normal application software like HQPlayer cannot crash the OS, but drivers it interacts with can. Application software runs in protected memory. While drivers run in unprotected kernel space and can do anything. If a driver misbehaves, it usually leads to immediate BSOD. So this kind of behavior is almost certainly some driver (kernel) level software.

 

This includes AV software too which needs low level access to other applications... I have Kaspersky on two of my servers and I haven't got any problems with it, but they could of course have a bad update at any point in time since it updates automatically in background all the time. Another AV I use in most computers is F-Secure and that works fine for me as well. Both have a "gaming mode" and/or high load idle so that they don't interfere with HQPlayer by consuming lot of resources. Kaspersky needs some settings modifications to behave nice (disable idle background scans and enable gaming mode and option to give back resources on high load). Windows Defender also works OK, but may sometimes cause HQPlayer startup to take a really long time.

 

[Miska]

6 hours ago, Mahler and Bach on Computer said:

@MiskaThank you very much.  I have a dedicated Network specifically for music playing only.  Any advantage of WIFI in the bridged mode vs. regular mode?

 

I just thought you wanted wireless between HQPlayer and the sMS-200, and since the latter one doesn't have WiFi you'd need to have something between WiFi and wired Ethernet. That would be a bridge device...

 

I have just a single network with everything on it. Works fine.

 

[SunYang]

If HQ Player is stopped playing music track, even my sensitive full range OB speakers are deathly quiet. Digital output of Amanero card is 010101010101...

But if player is only paused or is quiet passage in the track, I can hear some noise from distance about 0.5 m from speaker. If I checked DSD data in this time by scope, signal is more chaotic then only continuous changings 0 1. Different modulators change style of this strange noise. What is reason for this behaviour?