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

[tapatrick]

9 hours ago, MrUnderhill said:

The sound quality is brilliant.... better than dCS I think... 

?

Thanks M! A statement to make audiophiles sit up and pay attention. The DCS is a $4000 endpoint I believe..

[austinpop]

13 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

1) I understand all that, my point was why boot from usb instead of ssd.

 

So your music files are on an internal drive on the AL PC server, and that is where you are finding a vast improvement?  What was your previous configuration?  I would think that NAS -> rendu would be comparable?

 

Hey B&M,

 

The point about booting from USB is that yes, while it is slow, you can remove the stick (and associated noise) once booted. While an SSD is faster, you can't (easily) disconnect it after boot. 

 

However, you seem to keep missing the point, no matter how many people try to explain it to you. The combination of NUC endpoint running Audiolinux in RAM was arrived at by experimentation, and to some extent, luck. No one here can explain exactly why it's such a great sounding combo. Read this paragraph again a few times until it sinks in, please.

 

There are plenty of theories, but this is not the thread to debate them. May I suggest this thread? Although I see you seem to have worn out your welcome there too. Or start another thread.

 

[austinpop]

3 hours ago, mourip said:

 

I am having a similar problem with adding a second Roon Bridge running Audiolinux on a new NUC.

 

Thanks to Piero, who provided detailed help for the AL command line , I was successful in giving both PC’s unique hostnames: audiolinux1 and audiolinux2. The symptoms have now changed and are even more baffling. I still can only have one device up at a time. In the Roon control app on my desktop PC which ever PC comes up first shows as available but with the IP of the other device and the Roon name(not Linux hostname) of the opposite one. This is hard to really describe well but Roon is definitely confused by having both Audiolinux devices up at the same time, even with different hostnames. I have rebooted Roon Core(it runs on a third PC) but this did not help. Even worse, when I try to choose the one device that it does recognize it says “enabling” but never completes until I turn off the other bridge and reboot Roon Core. This is repeatable. Turning off one of the devices makes things work again and the other device shows up properly again.

 

I have a Windows application that scans all devices on my network. Both AudioLinux bridge boxes show up with the expected IP addresses and if I ping by hostname the correct IP comes up for each.

 

Has anyone successfully made two incidences of Audiolinux running Roon Bridge work on the same network?

 

I love the sound of AL and really want this to work...
 

 

 

Hmm, I've never had this problem with Roon discovery. The only things I can think of, which are long shots are:

1. make sure your router has UPnP, multicast, and IGMP discovery all enabled. Not all of these are visible on all routers.
2. do you have any managed switches? If so, you need to do the same on each switch.

Good luck!

[austinpop]

7 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

 

Why do you suggest i didn't realize it was discovered by experimentation?

I was just curious if it was "thought" there was something unique about nuc hardware or if anyone has tried it on different hardware...i was curious if it was "believed" more related to AL or NUC.

 

Both.

[beerandmusic]

14 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

Both.

Lemitche said he didnt try different hardware and that different hardware may work just as good..

[tapatrick]

3 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

Lemitche said he didnt try different hardware and that different hardware may work just as good...

Why don't you try it out on what you have at hand and report back to add to the knowledge base shared here...

[beerandmusic]

8 minutes ago, tapatrick said:

Why don't you try it out on what you have at hand and report back to add to the knowledge base shared here...

that's my intention...i have a lot of projects here now, may take a month before i get to....right now my main stereo is even disconnected...putting in new flooring.

 

I will also let you know if  hear any difference whether i boot from ssd or boot from usb and remove...I thought davide said he was using AL as server to serve music files too...where does he have his music stored?

[davide256]

13 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

that's my intention...i have a lot of projects here now, may take a month before i get to....right now my main stereo is even disconnected...putting in new flooring.

 

I will also let you know if  hear any difference whether i boot from ssd or boot from usb and remove...I thought davide said he was using AL as server to serve music files too...where does he have his music stored?

my system signature is up  to date, including AL driven change.

[Forehaven]

On 11/20/2018 at 9:46 PM, lmitche said:

The quad core sounds a bit more resolving in the mids to me. I enjoyed listening to this machine and felt sad to see it go!

Oh No!! ;))  Does this quad core NUC Larry use the same Akasa case as the dual core?

[tapatrick]

3 minutes ago, Forehaven said:

Oh No!! ;))  Does this quad core NUC Larry use the same Akasa case as the dual core?

 NUC7CJYH and NUC7CJYH use the same Akasha fanless case

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/akasa-newton-jc-fanless-low-profile-case-8th-generation-intel-nuc-june-canyon-25-hdd-ssd
Compatible with the following Intel® NUC Boards:
NUC7CJYH / NUC7PJYH / NUC7PJYB

[lmitche]

33 minutes ago, Forehaven said:

Oh No!! ;))  Does this quad core NUC Larry use the same Akasa case as the dual core?

Yes

[lmitche]

1 hour ago, austinpop said:

 

Hmm, I've never had this problem with Roon discovery. The only things I can think of, which are long shots are:

1. make sure your router has UPnP, multicast, and IGMP discovery all enabled. Not all of these are visible on all routers.
2. do you have any managed switches? If so, you need to do the same on each switch.

Good luck!

Sometimes simply rebooting the router can fix this.

[davide256]

3 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

1) I understand all that, my point was why boot from usb instead of ssd.

 

So your music files are on an internal drive on the AL PC server, and that is where you are finding a vast improvement?  What was your previous configuration?  I would think that NAS -> rendu would be comparable?

I retired my NAS for audio use   in January after finding that internal drive of PC Roonserver sounded better... the NAS served files didn't get the benefit of RAAT.

Its easy to boot back and forth between AL and WIN10 with supported media player server to compare. You wont be going back to Windows for very long once you start.

 

Just be prepared for the task of editing the fstab boot file with the right media storage drive info. You can get that by mounting the media drives after boot and then copying the system created config line info into fstab. Just be sure each drive has unique name (Windows, Windows 1, etc)... mine didn't, so at first boot I could access only 1 drive. 

[Dev]

Roon Core/Roon Bridge vs LMS/Squeezelite vs Roon Core/Squeezelite:

 

With the bigger buffer size (I can only set to 1Gb since my NUC is fitted with 4Gb at the moment), the LMS/Squeezelite just sounds so much better than the Roon Core/Bridge combo. Bigger soundstage, more air around vocals, more of everything. This is without up-sampling anything. Just native resolution directly to the DAC. In all the test the server was NUC8i7BEH and NUC7CJYH as the streamer all running AL.

 

Later moving to RoonCore/Squeezelite combo (thanks to @austinpop), it sounds about the same as LMS/Squeezelite combo. With much better user interface of Roon and far better SQ of the squeezelite, you have the best of both the world but keep in mind PCM is limited to 192KHz and DSD to 64. Also, as @austinpop has noted earlier, sometime it skips to the next song. It didn't happen with LMS/Squeezelite combo.

 

I am yet to throw in HQP in the mix. My earlier experiment with HQP vs Roon, Roon again fell short, even without employing up-sampling but as far a audio memory serves, the LMS(or Roon)/Squeezelite is the best combo so far I have heard in my system.

 

[beerandmusic]

1 hour ago, davide256 said:

I retired my NAS for audio use   in January after finding that internal drive of PC Roonserver sounded better... the NAS served files didn't get the benefit of RAAT.

Its easy to boot back and forth between AL and WIN10 with supported media player server to compare. You wont be going back to Windows for very long once you start.

 

Just be prepared for the task of editing the fstab boot file with the right media storage drive info. You can get that by mounting the media drives after boot and then copying the system created config line info into fstab. Just be sure each drive has unique name (Windows, Windows 1, etc)... mine didn't, so at first boot I could access only 1 drive. 

1. I haven't used windows or usb for audio on my main system for 8 years, and don't plan on it in future..

2. Since you have your storage on ssd, all the more reason to boot to ssd....it's not like you would unplug them as austin suggested.

 

Do the new nuc's allow 2 drives?  I haven't tried one for probably over 5 years, and they only supported 1 drive back then and there weren't so manny options either....it was just one model and choice of processor i believe?

 

anyway, thanks for tip on partitioning....

[Dev]

11 hours ago, LTG2010 said:

I don't think its suitable as a DSD upsampling machine you'll need some serious power and these CPU's are mobile units., its better as a roon server etc with the smaller unit as the renderer. You could try the HQP settings without upsampling bit perfect ( some users prefer that) and the the smaller NUC as a networkaudio renderer.

 

DSD up-sampling is fine depending the sample rate. For example, dsd128 with xtr-mp work fine though cpu's were throttled as core temp was high. The -2s should be far less taxing. I haven't tried dsd256 but my gut tells it will do fine with -2s. Don't think it can handle dsd512 remotely.

 

11 hours ago, LTG2010 said:

You could also test it as a renderer with your PC as server it may outperform the smaller NUC, that comparison would be very useful. 

 

At some point I plan to do this as well, now that I have more or less settled on the music player s/w.

 

 

[austinpop]

14 hours ago, bibo01 said:

This is the setting the developer of C-3PO (marcoc1712) uses for non-DSD:

-n squeezelite-R2-o hw:CARD=J20 -x -m 00:e0:4c:68:ce:78 -r 44100-768000 -c aif,wav,pcm -b 1048576:1048576 -a 499:3::0 -f /var/log/squeezelite-R2/squeezelite-R2.log

 

I do not want to divert traffic on another site, but you guys having problems with LMS/Squeezelite are really better off posting your problems (you can post in English) on Italian NextHardware, in this thread.

You will find many developers and users of Squeezelite, HQPlayer... and myself! 

 

Could you please clarify the various squeezelite versions? Is R2 a different branch? What are the benefits of using it vs. the Ralph Irving latest 1.9.0-1 version? Especially if you don't need:

• HQPlayer
• transcoding via C-3PO?

[Dev]

6 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

Could you please clarify the various squeezelite versions? Is R2 a different branch? What are the benefits of using it vs. the Ralph Irving latest 1.9.0-1 version? Especially if you don't need:

• HQPlayer
• transcoding via C-3PO?

 

The v1.8.4 (R2) didn't seem to handle the -b option though the help specifies it. When I used that version with -b option of 1Gb, I didn't see any change in free memory. Roon vs Squeezelite sounded about the same and I thought what the heck is all this fuss about ? until I used the 1.9.0-1 from you.

[afrancois]

I'm staring with AudioLinux lxqt to keep it simple at the moment, but...

 

I'm setting up a NUC as a RoonServer + HQPlayer in AudioLinux lxqt and I want to use my sMS-200Ultra as NAA.

I'm heaving no problems configuring HQPlayer Desktop with the NAA as backend.

However, "Network Audio Backend - Device" in the HQPlayer embedded configuration doesn't show the sMS-200?

 

I imagine that HQPlayer embedded can stream to NAA on another device?

 

I'm surely missing something...

[hifi25nl]

In audiolinux the configuration files are in /home/audiolinux/.hqplayer  (you must enable "Show hidden files in pcmanfm-qt menu)

There you can find the log file hqplayerd.log

You could also copy the HQPlayer configuration in settings.xml to hqplayerd.xml or remove hqplayerd.xml (the effect is the same)

 

Try first without Roon running, only hqplayer embedded and NAA

[bibo01]

1 hour ago, austinpop said:

 

Could you please clarify the various squeezelite versions? Is R2 a different branch? What are the benefits of using it vs. the Ralph Irving latest 1.9.0-1 version? Especially if you don't need:

• HQPlayer
• transcoding via C-3PO?

You better post where I told you before and ask Marco directly.

[bibo01]

16 hours ago, Dev said:

 

@bibo01, thanks.

 

Quick question - will removing the C-3PO plugin disable upsampling/conversion of the original files ? I have few DSD256 content but my DAC supports only DSD128. How do I down-sample in this case ?

In C-3PO just disable DSD256 as supported rate.

[afrancois]

43 minutes ago, hifi25nl said:

In audiolinux the configuration files are in /home/audiolinux/.hqplayer  (you must enable "Show hidden files in pcmanfm-qt menu)

There you can find the log file hqplayerd.log

You could also copy the HQPlayer configuration in settings.xml to hqplayerd.xml or remove hqplayerd.xml (the effect is the same)

 

Try first without Roon running, only hqplayer embedded and NAA

hqplayerd.log says it has found the NAA, however, I can't select. I only have Device Current("\")

[hifi25nl]

Did you try to enable/disable ipv6?

And try to use the same settings as Desktop as I told before.

 

Finally poweroff everything (computer, dac etc.)

Power on DAC

Start sMS-200Ultra

After some minutes, start audiolinux 

[afrancois]

7 minutes ago, hifi25nl said:

Did you try to enable/disable ipv6?

And try to use the same settings as Desktop as I told before.

 

Finally poweroff everything (computer, dac etc.)

Power on DAC

Start sMS-200Ultra

After some minutes, start audiolinux 

deleting hqplayerd.xml didn't take the settings of settings.xml. Copying settings.xml to hqplayerd.xml also didn't work.

Config in HQPlayer Desktop always finds the NAA. I will try powering off everything, but I would be surprised that this will solve the problem.