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A novel way to massively improve the SQ of computer audio streaming


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Most important: please realize this thread is about bleeding edge experimentation and discovery. No one has The Answer™. If you are not into tweaking, just know that you can have a musically satisfying system without doing any of the nutty things we do here.

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12 minutes ago, tapatrick said:

Ouch!  sorry to hear. What exactly did you change?

 

Thanks Tapatrick. I of course can’t look them up now but if I remember correctly I changed IGD Aperture Size from 256 to 128MB and IGD Minimum Memory from 64MB to 32MB.

 

Once I receive a new machine I’ll make all the exact same changes I made today since I believe those to be the best settings for an AL headless/Roon endpoint except for these video related settings. Then I’ll know for sure if it were these settings.

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1 minute ago, afrancois said:

Very sorry to hear this. I also believe it was the setting you describe above.

 

Have you had any luck restoring yours? I've sent mine back to from whom I've purchased it. As I said I'm not they want to honor the warranty.

 

In the meantime, I've had another problem. A failing hard disk in my NAS. No problem I have spare disks enough. Just takes a long time to copy the whole music library back to this single drive NAS.

 

Thanks afrancois! Unfortunately I too have not been able to restore the NUC and after trying everything you tried as well I have put it back in its box to send it back to the supplier. I registered a RMA case and think I will receive instructions tomorrow.

 

Good luck with your RMA process and though you’ve been honest and mentioned the BIOS changes I believe one should simply not be able to brick a machine this way. I’d be suprised if they would not honor your replacement request. I think there’s a serious bug somewhere in the BIOS of at least this NUC7PJYH. :(

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2 hours ago, jean-michel6 said:

Thank for the answer. 

According to previous posts it seems that the WiFi can be deactivated in the bios and may be for this board physically removed. 

 

Correct, when I look at pictures of the dnhe I can see the WiFi/BT module is an add-in card.

 

edit; see this for example: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/General-Tech/Intel-NUC7i7DNHE-Dawson-Canyon-Review-Quad-Core-Mobile-Hits-Desktop/Pricing-and

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4 hours ago, greenleo said:

Please describe your system in more details.  Which is the audio PC, which is the control PC?  Or both are used as the audio PC with an identical server?

 

He wrote that he used his Dell workstation as the music server, like in part 1 and compared the celeron NUC to the i7 NUC as end-points/renderers/NAA’s or whatever we’d like to call it. :)

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37 minutes ago, afrancois said:

 

So you have a replacement unit. I’ve sent mine back and since then, radio silence. They don’t even bother to reply to my emails. Did you get the unit directly from Intel or from where you bought it?

 

I’ve RMA’ed and returned it to the shop I bought it from. They’ve replaced it for a new one.

 

Sorry to hear they’ve not responded yet to your emails/returned you a new one. I hope you’ll get one back soon!

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28 minutes ago, mourip said:

 

Have you tried locating your Roon server on the dirty side or tried internal storage for the music files as opposed to I assume NAS storage. Just curious...

 

Yes and no. The NAS PC still pictured on the dirty side actually was the Roon server until the moment I tried out the bridge thing that started this topic. After trying that out I did have a ‘wow moment’. So much so I decided to build a new Roon Server machine using a thin-miTX motherboard (Gigabyte GA-H110TN-E) powered by the SR7, with local music storage on SSD.

 

So this new machine improved considerably over the NAS PC (which today no longer performs any active ‘audio related duties’) I just temporarily got downstairs. I used a short AQ Diamond cable to connect it directly to the SMS-200. 

 

With the NUC running AL I had hoped for another ‘wow moment’ but thus far the changes are subtle in my setup. With an audiophile switch I could try moving the Roon Server further away again but I don’t have such a switch yet. Also running AL on the Roon server machine is still a ‘to do’. :)

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Yes it’s a software bridge, bridging two different network segments over L2. Hosts on both segments need to be in the same layer 3 IP network.

 

I’ve always found the bridging solution buggy and had performance issues as well so I’ve setup a routed approach which I believe accomplishes the same in a more stable and better performing way.

 

On my dual NIC server I’ve installed a lightweight DHCP server for the SMS-200 when one could not yet set a fixed IP. That binded to the second NIC.

 

In the central router of my network I’ve added a static route for the second subnet (192.168.2.0/24) in my network. This network ‘lives’ behind the 2nd NIC in my server. The gateway for this subnet is the primary interface of the server in subnet 192.168.1.0/24.

 

For this to work for applications not running on the server (e.g. The Roon Remote) the server needs to have IP forwarding enabled to transfer traffic between the NIC’s. This requires one simple registry change. See for example http://www.itgeared.com/articles/1066-how-to-enable-ip-forwarding-on-windows/ (yes this works on 2012 R2 too)

 

Since the second interface with the second subnet is local to the server it knows where to route the traffic to. Default gateway on the server is the central router so it also knows the ‘way back’ to hosts on the 1st subnet.

 

This method does not work for software that relies on broadcast traffic (e.g. For mDNS) like HQPlayer and Airplay. For that to work hosts need to be in the same broadcast domain, so same L2 network. For Roon, which does not need that, it works great.

 

With all this NUC/AL experimentation I’ll need to look into how to do this on Linux. :)

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17 minutes ago, Darryl R said:

Thank you.  Don't hold your breath for the network engineers.  I've combed the web for days looking for definitive information on this and found very little.  Btw, one article I found said that the bridge is merely a pass-thru, to share the connection.

 

Did you check Wikipedia? ;)

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridging_(networking)

 

It’s the exact same principle solved in software (Windows/Linux)

 

Also see: https://www.dell.com/support/article/nl/nl/nldhs1/sln266178/windows-networking-proper-use-of-a-network-bridge?lang=en for use cases, and when not to use.

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2 minutes ago, Darryl R said:

 

I'd be interested in what you find for Linux.  One of the reasons I switched was because bridging in Windows was such a pain.  In Ubuntu, I just use the connection editor and it's done with a few clicks and a restart (easy in Mac too).  Ubuntu 18 has a minimal install option, and add only add "Vino" to control the whole thing from my main Windows machine with VNC.

 

Well personally I’d like to stay away from bridging so I just need to figure out how to enable the equivalent of IP routing between two separate NICs in Linux. Haven’t searched for this yet, perhaps it’s just as easy.

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