SGC - sonicTransporter Series and Signalyst HQPlayer 4 Embedded

[Miska]

9 hours ago, soares said:

As your Mojo with the NAS upgrade started to work, perhaps my Qutest will follow his little brother behaviour.

 

That's what I was hoping for and reason I posted about this. But it means that both are really picky to the source. I would really prefer to have this sorted out with Chord, but sometimes it needs some push from customers to get things initiated.

 

I would be interested to hear the results if someone can try this out.

 

9 hours ago, soares said:

Of course I would first need to sell my DAC and buy a new one, unless a miracle happens...

 

That is always plan B...

 

9 hours ago, soares said:

Roon upsamples to 768PCM and 256DSD without any white noise.

 

Do you have both Roon and HQPlayer running on the same sonicTransporter? It could be that Roon alone is lighter load than Roon + HQPlayer together making slight difference in USB noise or whatever. Please also check that the Roon DSP engine is disabled for the HQPlayer output (switch in the left corner of DSP dialog). But you can anyway see things also from the signal path display of Roon...

 

[Miska]

4 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

How about convert option 2 into a option 1 ? ?

 

Possible ?

 

Possibly maybe, but that would need co-operation between @agillis and me and would probably cost something (bunch of manual extra work at both sides needed).

 

If Andrew wants, he could also sell "type 1" licenses for the pre-existing units. He is official reseller so he has  both options at his disposal.

 

[Miska]

6 hours ago, soares said:

Yes Jesus... Qutest.

Will do it this weekend. Does anyone know how to grab a screen photo from an iPad? Sorry for my ignorance...☺

 

Power- and home-buttons simultaneously takes a screenshot on iPhone/iPad.

 

[Miska]

It will likely take a little bit of time for updates to propagate...

[Miska]

5 hours ago, simplythere said:

poly sinc xtr lp, poly sinc xtr lp, dsd7, not dop for SDM.

 

If you are doing DSD512, then you need to use -2s variants of the filters...

[Miska]

15 hours ago, simplythere said:

But when I check the cpu usage, it is merely 30% but with some of the cpu having 99% workload causing the issue. 

 

So I wonder if its a hardware limitation or a solvable/unsolvable software issue of the STi7. I am not good at computer hardware. I just wish other cores of the CPU can help the job so that none of them are reaching 99% level, causing the problem

 

Starting with latest hqplayerd 4.2.0, Andrew can try to tune by adjusting multicore="1" instead of multicore="auto". This will force more work to all cores. But note that since i7 is HyperThreading model, it has twice the number of virtual cores compared to real physical cores. HQPlayer doesn't attempt to put work on those virtual siblings, because they cannot do any real work, but help the OS on context switching.

 

This may have positive or negative impact on performance depending on hardware. It really needs to be tested case by case.

 

[Miska]

6 minutes ago, BlueDL said:

Embarrassingly, the ‘About’ page is showing ‘Trial’. Thanks.

 

But what confuses me is that, on the ‘Key’ page with ‘Scope’ set to ‘System’, I appear to be able to upload ‘hqplayer3w-Key.xml’ with me temporarily being diverted to a similar ‘Key’ page showing ‘Success!’.

 

Based on file name that sounds like key for HQPlayer Desktop 3.x for Windows?

[Miska]

20 hours ago, Em2016 said:

If you don’t want to implement his kernel changes, please consider using altset = 3 for iFi Pro iDSD DAC.

 

In addition to having a microRendu and ultraRendu, I have an Allo USBridge in another system and Allo Support were able to implement a patch manually for me a few days ago. They said the way they did it, it won’t affect other iFi DACs.

 

Problem with the old approach are devices that share same VID:PID while having different altset for different devices/firmware versions. With my changes, this is not a problem and works because the correct altset is determined at runtime instead of relying on hardcoded one.

 

In the code there's nothing specific to iFi Pro iDSD, it just works automagically as it is supposed to.

 

I believe for example Oppo changed their USB firmware in recent firmware update and the altset number changed while retaining same old VID:PID, essentially breaking the old existing Linux support. Unfortunately I don't have Oppo BD player, so I cannot test. And that particular problem will go away in a different way because Oppo has stopped production of BD players and DACs.

 

[Miska]

20 hours ago, vortecjr said:

Not Andrew, but we are aware of Jussi changes to the Linux Kernel and they indeed very interesting. We are looking into it, but understand that this kind of update would affect every unit in the field so we have to proceed with caution. 

 

Note that the code is done in such way that the old hardcoded tables take precedence over the new code. I removed the hardcoded parts only for devices I could test and I know are compatible with this. iFi being among those. Since multiple iFi products share same USB VID:PID the new approach is more robust regarding possible firmware differences for altsettings.

 

So I took a cautious approach on the implementation. If someone wants to try, my latest bootable NAA and HQPE images have this stuff already.

 

[Miska]

On 8/30/2018 at 8:21 AM, R1200CL said:

 

Yes. And it’s hard to find ?

 

Actually the only way I know about is to install the windows version in order to get it. 

 

 

 

hqplayer-manual-3-20.pdf

 

Yeah, HQPlayer Desktop manual contains descriptions. Manual PDF is included in all three installation packages (Linux, Mac, Windows). For Mac users, the Mac version is easiest because it doesn't even require installing HQPlayer Desktop because the manual PDF sits side by side with the application in the DMG file, so it can be just copied out from there.

 

I'm working on adding same things to "online" help/manual that will be accessible from the web interface, from corresponding pages. I hope to get that included in near future.

 

[Miska]

9 hours ago, Em2016 said:

Hi @Miska, I updated to version 4.3.1 but now can't change from startup volume to fixed volume, even with ticking the new little 'enabled' box.

 

Uhh oh, I thought I had it thoroughly tested, I'll check it once again...

 

8 hours ago, alcarp said:

HQPlayer stopped playing after 30 mins of the Trial version, I think. How do I restart? Do I have to reboot the ST or the uRendu?

 

If the web management interface of ST doesn't have option to stop/start HQPlayer, you can just reboot ST. No need to touch microRendu.

[Miska]

1 hour ago, alcarp said:

I've tried rebooting the ST as suggested by @Miska, rebooting the Rendu but nothing seems to work. Sometimes, pressing the play button in Roon plays for a few more minutes - then the cursor in the progress bar at the bottom of the screen goes crazy and the music stops. I'm stuck and can't proceed any further.

 

Any errors in the log? Please remember that Rendu needs to be up before ST is booted up. Otherwise ST will fail to connect to the Rendu and go to unconfigured state refusing any controls from Roon until some functioning audio device has been configured again.

 

Generally you can keep Rendu up and running at all times, no need to shut it down ever.

[Miska]

4 hours ago, soares said:

I am posting here because over the last 2 months there was also a couple of upgrades not just the one from HQPe from last week but also some related to the OS from STi5 and uR if I am not mistaken. So because I just switch on today my Oppo 205 for the USB Dac firmware upgrade I can't know for sure if it is related to this upgrade or the STi5 or uR upgrades. Any help would be much appreciated. I am going to post my comments on other related fora. Thank you.

 

As I wrote on the SGC ST thread, I believe Oppo changed the native DSD support stuff on their firmware update to BD players (205, etc) and that caused the driver to break. I believe I know how to fix it, but I don't have a suitable Oppo device to test it.

 

If it is possible to get a test update for your µR, I can tell @agillis what to change in the driver. @vortecjr

[Miska]

On 9/1/2018 at 2:14 PM, Miska said:

On 9/1/2018 at 4:16 AM, Em2016 said:

Hi @Miska, I updated to version 4.3.1 but now can't change from startup volume to fixed volume, even with ticking the new little 'enabled' box.

 

Uhh oh, I thought I had it thoroughly tested, I'll check it once again...

 

I tested the fixed volume enable/disable and for me, it works with all the browsers I tried. So I'm not sure what is going wrong for you. Which browser are you using?

 

[Miska]

3 hours ago, fmzip said:

Also, can filters be changed mid song playback like in Roon?

 

No, playback needs to be in stopped state to change filters, dithers/modulators or output rate.

 

3 hours ago, fmzip said:

Can anyone share a screen shot of HQplayer with how they have it setup on their i5? Trying to upsample to DSD128 and have no clue as to what goes in each box.

 

Not i5, but you could get started with these settings for DSD128 output, just output device settings according to your hardware:

[Miska]

Just now, musicjunkie917 said:

I am using HQPlayer Embedded 4.28.3 on a sonicTransporter i9. I upsample everything to DSD256. Sometimes, on the main screen, it shows the filter as the one I am actually using. But, most of the time, it shows “wide” as the filter being used. Why? 

 

Because your source is DSD and not PCM.

 

See settings here:

 

[Miska]

30 minutes ago, musicjunkie917 said:

Does that mean when I am upsampling DSD64 and DSD128 to DSD256 and I have the poly-sinc-ext2 filter set in both 1x and Nx, that those filters are not used and “wide” is used instead?

 

Yes, exactly. You are upsampling DSD with "wide" converter. 1x and Nx filters are for oversampling PCM sources.

 

[Miska]

34 minutes ago, musicjunkie917 said:

Ok. What is the difference between the "wide" and "narrow" converts and how might using one or the other affect the sound?

 

It only affects how wide frequency area is considered to be audio signals. It shouldn't actually make any real difference to the sound, but I wasn't able to make up my mind which one to choose. So I left both there as options.

 

34 minutes ago, musicjunkie917 said:

Also, what is the between the various integrator options? When would we want to chose one other than the default? Which one do you use and why?

 

This affects the sound more. Since "Nyquist" frequency of DSD sampling rates is pretty high (half of the sampling rate), most of it is not occupied by audio signals. Then some certain range of that bandwidth is considered to be audio signals. Different integrators have different frequency response in terms of audio vs noise bandwidth.

 

IIR ones are the most regular type. "IIR" matches SACD specification, for DSD64 considering 50 kHz usable bandwidth. "IIR2" considers 25 kHz for DSD64. And "IIR3" 30 kHz for DSD64 and assuming high order modulator for the source. Every time source rate is doubled, these frequencies are doubled as well. Generally, I would recommend to get started with either IIR or IIR2.