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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 hour ago, Dutch said:

 

The exact same thing just happened to me with the same NUC7PJYH. *cry*

 

I’m fairly sure it’s the graphics memory BIOS settings that caused this as I’ve come across posts on the Intel forum describing the same issue so I’d advise anyone not to touch those.

 

As afrancois experienced I to have been unable to revive the NUC and will RMA it asap. Strange thing is others on the Intel forum have been able to revive their machines using the BIOS restore feature but those were other NUC’s.

 

It’s unbelievable one can brick a machine in this way but since I’m second I thought it would be wise to sign up here and warn about this.

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.

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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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On 11/27/2018 at 8:06 PM, afrancois said:

128M video RAM instead of 256M

Which BIOS setting did you change ... IGD Minimum Memory or IGD Aperture Size  ... I assume it was the former?

 

Have a look at this document page 18.  There are a bunch of interesting comments about platform restrictions.  Nothing about Gemini Lake, however.  

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/mini-pcs/BIOSGlossary_NUC.pdf

 

I think further discussion should probably move over to this new thread

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/54933-audiolinux-and-nuc-troubleshooting-and-tuning/

 

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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11 minutes ago, Dutch said:

 

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. :(

Did you do the change in the latest BIOS 0046?

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6 minutes ago, rickca said:

Which BIOS setting did you change ... IGD Minimum Memory or IGD Aperture Size  ... I assume it was the former?

 

Have a look at this document page 18.  There are a bunch of interesting comments about platform restrictions.  Nothing about Gemini Lake, however.  

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/mini-pcs/BIOSGlossary_NUC.pdf

Perhaps an option that should not have been selectable, if it's not supported.

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Just now, afrancois said:

Perhaps an option that should not have been selectable, if it's not supported.

Exactly.  That's what I thought after looking at the NUC Bios Glossary.  

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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Well I have a NUC7PJYH coming soon.  Many thanks to @Dutch and @afrancois for posting about your experience and saving me a big headache.

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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1 minute ago, Dutch said:

 

Yes, it was the first thing I did after powering up the machine for the first time. :) I also noticed you were running this version. Perhaps the issue is in this version but it could be in any of course.

Standard procedure for me, as for you I see, is to update the BIOS of a new PC right after getting it out of the box. I'm always amazed how far behind the BIOS versions are upon delivery. 

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Intel NUC ARCHES CANYON NUC6CAYH 

I reduced the memory for the GFX but no issues. Lastest bios added by myself.

I did think of asking people to post screen shots but the bios seem to vary a lot per CPU  and series.

Ill be careful as i have a second hand media nuc coming from Ebay.   D34010WYK i3  4th gen but has akasa case but 2 Gb memory. 

8 Gb enough for the server roon core side? 

 

 

 

 

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A good switch between mentioned in the past post seems to be quite important to the NUC setup.  I had some open moment earlier, decided to do a quick comparison between WiFi, bridged, and bridged with my OCXO clocked switch, and like having OCXO clocked switch in the loop much better.  It adds quite a bit of dynamic and additional details, making the already crazy good NUC setup another clear notch up in SQ.  Now I am wondering what will a good switch like sNH-10G or upcoming EtherRegen be able to further contribute.

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If both latency and isolation were such a big deal according to Roy's post linked below, then it might be hard to beat a direct connection between two ultra-low (i.e. sub-micro) latency NICs from Exablaze/Mellanox/Solarflare etc.

 

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/30376-a-novel-way-to-massively-improve-the-sq-of-computer-audio-streaming/?page=359&tab=comments#comment-860030

 

In addition, we could also take advantage of NVMe over Fibre Channel and RDMA for the sake of bypassing OS and CPU if all that were achievable under AudioLinux. Of course the tricky part should be adding one of those PCIe fiber optic NICs to the NUC, both June Canyon models with Celeron J4005 and Pentium J5005 are outta luck.

 

Dawson Canyon could accept M.2 adapters, while Bean Canyon could do both M.2 and Thunderbolt 3. It's just somewhat "awkward" to have an add-on card sticking out so that might not be ideal for everyone. If things were going as planned, then expensive switches might become obsolete just like how some of us no longer needed fixer upper such as tX-USBultra / REF 10 etc.

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8 hours ago, rickca said:

When you buy the headless/LXQt version for $49 can we run it on multiple computers with just a single license?  I've seen someone ask this before, but I don't recall seeing an answer from Piero.

 

Also, and you may already know this, you need to use a separately configured USB stick for each PC. You cannot use one drive to boot multiple machines to ramboot as there is information that will be unique to each machine even if they have exactly the same hardware...


"Don't Believe Everything You Think"

System

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13 hours ago, rettib2001 said:

Given the highly subjective nature of our personal findings, this might not necessarily be of interest to many but the nuc7i7bnh (and I assume the more recent i7 nucs) handles upsampling to dsd512 well in terms of playback (smooth/uninterrupted) but the cpu temps are a little worrying when this is done under AL headless extreme. 

 

CPU temps, in this scenario, are hitting 90°.

 

Adding convolution into the mix obviously doesn't do them any favours either. 

 

CPU usage is around 120% when using these 'to the max' settings which suggests the system is being pushed a little beyond what it can comfortably handle, however as I said earlier playback is smooth and as blip/pop/click free as I've heard dsd512. 

 

To my ears the use of the extreme mode offers a sufficiently valuable improvement in sound quality to warrant exploring more creative cooling approaches...

 

 

 

 

Here is my NUC7i7DNHE in a Plato X7D fanless case, using their stock/included thermal paste...

 

Running Roon Server on the same machine too, at the same time of course...

 

Look carefully below at the filter used at DSD512.

 

Obviously the “xtr-2s” filter is not an option with this NUC at DSD512 but it’s fine for DSD256.

 

This is after running for a few hours at DSD512:

 

3A218742-A2BD-4805-AEB2-B987BE7B8795.thumb.png.a1b778eb1f1e109d1a85c49ccbd20861.png

 

18C44095-E40D-4E9D-862E-0A6C44E8FF06.thumb.png.a5d69605d9561f1480c04571d8f4820e.png

 

 

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30 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

 

If it wasn't clear, this NUC’s CPU can’t do xtr-2s at DSD512...

 

Thanks Em2016, 

 

I haven't explored hqplayer desktop or server on the NUC as Roon running bitperfect sounds so great there hasn't been a need. Also I could never get Roon and Hqplayer to run without a tolerable, but nevertheless annoying level of glitchyness that is now gone.

 

I'm surprised to see these results. The NUC quad core CPU appears so close to an i7-6700k in benchmarks it didn't occur to me that it was deficient in this area.

 

Thanks,

 

Larry

Pareto Audio aka nuckleheadaudio

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