Phasure NOS1a DAC

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Just got my NOS1a up and running using XXHE playback software on Windows 10. Definitely a fidgety project to get it all working but most likely because I'm a Windows dummy and I started trying to get this working as an NAA with HQPlayer... In any case the sound is terrific. XXHE is very CPU efficient for the degree of upsampling it does. Did I say the sound is terrific. My FirstWatt J2 is very happy.

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10 hours ago, bibo01 said:

Congratulations! I would have always liked to lay my hands on such device.

Did you have a Windows based NAA? I suppose not your Clearfog...  

 

So it turns out that since I have the clearfog, I happen to have a spare NAA that was booting from iSCSI. I added an SSD and installed Windows 10, got everything up and running including XXHighEnd, and then cloned the SSD to my iSCSI server (different endpoint). Trying to get this to boot entirely in iSCSI...

 

I have some other tricks I'm playing around with but don't want @PeterSt to have too large of a heart attack before I get it working (or not  ... I am *also* working on getting the NOS1a up and running with this Windows NAA. The fact is, I am so pleasantly surprised that XXHighEnd is running so well on my very low power NAA machine ... would it run better on a higher power machine? Lots and lots and lots of variables...

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1 hour ago, bibo01 said:

What does your NAA do with XXHighEnd installed on it? Can you please explain.

 

The 'NAA' in this case refers to the computer which ran networkaudiod. It has an ASRock Q1900 motherboard, and an Intel x520 NIC. Powered by a 12V LPS into a picoPSU.

 

Now the machine is loaded with Windows 10 and XX HighEnd. It gets music from the NAS over my (fiberoptic) network.

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11 hours ago, manisandher said:

Congrats Jonathan. And you have the latest G3 upgrade, which is simply phenomenal. I'll be posting about it soon...

 

Sorry I wasn't able to help out - your request for help/ideas on the Phasure forum came just as I was travelling a lot for work. And in any event, I've never used the NOS1a with an NAA (in the way I think you mean). In my office, I use HQPlayer on a high-powered dedicated audio PC (28-thread Xeon running Win10 from RAM - runs totally cool with only passive cooling) which feeds the NOS1a there. I have Roon on the music server in my basement, which feeds HQPlayer via the network. It works very, very well. I love the usability of Roon/Tidal, and the flexibility of being able to feed any of combination of HQP's filters @705.6/768 and noise-shapers to the NOS1a. But for my main system, I stick with XXHighEnd, because it sounds so good.

 

Congrats again.

 

Mani.

 

Not sure if I know what the "G3 upgrade is" but my listening so far is really fantastic. The level of detail is impressive and I'm going to continue to listen longer to get a full impression. Sounds like a cliche but I'm hearing details in recordings that I haven't heard before. I am extremely impressed with the ability of the XXHE Engine to perform on my low powered machine!

 

Have you compared the CPU needs of HQPlayer vs. XXHE? Not fair because DSD is its own thing, and HQPlayer does some really special things but nonetheless XXEngine3 is running with 10% of my dual Celeron CPU and in 24mb memory while upsampling 44100 to 705600!

 

It would be *ahem* interesting if @PeterSt could let XXEngine3 run on one machine and control over the network...

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7 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Why don't you just try?

 

Upsampling 44.1k to 705.6k on Intel Atom CPU or similar is not a problem.

 

I would if I could but can't get networkaudiod properly working with the NOS1a -- not networkaudiod's issue rather than the "good" driver is kernel streaming not WASAPI... oh boy I am learning Windows details I never thought I would, or actually I *remember* when kernel streaming came out decades ago ...

 

What would be terrific would be a common network transport layer for audio drivers -- like the NAA protocol -- does just what it needs to do unlike AES67/Ravenna which, although does transport audio for playback, is unnecessarily complex for what we want to do. So I'd rather have a stripped down protocol that does just what is needed, i.e. NAA

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3 hours ago, manisandher said:

Interesting perhaps, but unnecessary, IMO. Apart from the cost (perhaps a consideration, but I doubt it at this level of performance), there is simply no reason that I can see for going the ultra-low-footprint NAA route over what I currently have. As I said, my audio PCs run very cool with only passive cooling, and draw very little mains power. They are totally silent, as they contain no fans/HDDs/SSDs, and run totally headless (no GPU in either PC). The Phasure audio PC also uses a built-in linear power supply.

 

I did use a Linux NAA with HQPlayer for quite a while, many years ago now. But I got frustrated with not being able to use the DACs I wanted to, due to a lack of Linux drivers.

 

Aside from the ability to use a Windows NAA with Windows drivers (either WASAPI or ASIO), my reasons are different. The current "world" of DACs uses USB input ... and despite the very excellent efforts of many, we continue to see various "improvements" made to the USB interface, often with add on boxes.

 

In the future, including near future, we are seeing increasing use of direct Ethernet interfaces for DACs. What will these look like? Various things perhaps, though it is interesting that Merging has announced a very similar approach to the one I have been working on: using the Xilinx Zynq (pretty much very similar hardware to the Merging ZMan) and I can tell you that the driver does so called "kernel streaming" in hardware... you just write the bits to memory and send DMA...

 

So anyways I am asking "what's possible" but have reasons for asking the question that are my own reasons...