AudioLinux and NUC Troubleshooting and Tuning

[austinpop]

9 minutes ago, Johnseye said:

 

Who else concluded this? Just curious. 

 

 

16GB of RAM for the Core and there should be no DB issues. Save to RAM is super easy with Piero's one click menu item. 

 

I played around with Optane as a drive and as memory for months but found it a little more edgy than without. Since it's behind the switch and not in the endpoint it will have less impact. I'm of the mind that anything requiring power is going to add noise. The only question is how much. 

 

I’ve tried it both ways on the server, and concluded for myself the trade off is worth it.

 

You may disagree, which is fine.

[austinpop]

16 minutes ago, Johnseye said:

 

Yes there are many ways to skin the audio cat. No reason for everyone to agree on it all. 

 

On another note I think the 400w HDPlex supply is an improvement from going through their converter, even with the SR7. A very slight improvement, but one none the less. Thanks for the recommendation. 

 

 

You're welcome. That was always the question, wasn't it. Does a decent (but not Paul Hynes quality) LPSU like the HDPlex 400W, with independent rails for each ATX voltage and the CPU, sound better than a single SR-7 rail followed by a DC-ATX converter. Your finding is really valuable, as you seem to have concluded that good as the SR-7 is, it is undone by the limitations of the DC-ATX converter. Of course the ideal would be a very high quality multi-rail ATX LPSU, which is where the Sean Jacobs of the world come in. This is why the ZENith's cost so much.

 

Regarding Optane SSD on the server, here's how to think about it. If the premise is that any media (USB stick, Optane SSD, etc) add noise, then the cleanest path is to place the Roon DB on the root partition, boot off a USB stick in ramroot and remove the stick. Of course, now your database is transient. You can't run the ramsave timer because there's no media to save to. The only way to persist changes is to manually insert the stick and do a ramsave. I've tried this path, and even though I'm a meticulous person, have forgotten to do this step before rebooting for whatever reason. Poof - changes lost.

 

OK, so let's add the Optane SSD. Well, now the noise penalty, such as it is, is ever-present. So is there an advantage to having the Roon DB in the root partition, so it gets loaded into ramroot? Not that I could hear. And the downsides are - it takes longer to boot, it requires more RAM (without the DB, I can easily run with 8GB RAM), which consumes more power. By moving the DB to a separate partition which is mounted, all database I/O is persistent to that partition, not transient to the ramroot RAM disk.

 

On the endpoint, no question: no media sounds best. Boot off a USB stick and remove after boot. Since there's no real "state" to persist with Roon Bridge of Squeezelite, this works great.

[austinpop]

6 hours ago, Monge said:

Hi austinpop,

 

I tried you SqueezeLite buffer and alsa settings on my NUC with 8GB ram

• OPTIONS="-n sq-NUC -o hw:CARD=Interface -b 2097152:2097152 -a 52428800:4:: -D"

and made an USB stick with 

• OPTIONS="-n sq-NUC -o hw:CARD=Interface -b 2097152:1572864 -a 52428800:4:: -D"

for Tidal streaming and wow it sound very nice. What can I say. Thanks a lot 😀

 

Regards Monge

 

Very glad you found this an improvement!

[austinpop]

6 hours ago, Gavin1977 said:

@austinpop

Could you add this to your sticky "Summary of useful findings and recommendations" as I think it would be useful for newcomers.  After much effort (and advice from Piero) I now have AudioLinux working perfectly and am very happy.  I would suggest that the following steps are therefore recommended as 'good practice' for a new installation.

 

Before your suggestion to enable RAMROOT please include the following guidance:

 

1. Exit to console and run system upgrade (network connection to internet required obviously)

For updating the system (expert users)
pacman -Syu

after this, update the AUR packages with
yaourt -Syua

 

Running the latest version will help avoid any unexpected behaviour of audiolinux (e.g. WiFi config not working correctly etc...).

 

2.  Set default soundcard, by following guidance here: https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/Setting_the_default_device, which is:

 

Find your desired card with:

   cat /proc/asound/cards

and then create /etc/asound.conf with following:

   defaults.pcm.card 1
   defaults.ctl.card 1

Replace "1" with number of your card determined above.

 

I found this to be important as audiolinux sometimes wouldn't allow me to set and retain the desired audiocard/DAC within AlsaMixer.  This config file means that it'll always work.

 

3. Very important - only run one audio service at a time! For example don't run RoonBridge and uPNP functions at the same time as it will cause a conflict with no sound / unexpected behaviour.  Stop and disable all audio services, then select the service you want (reboot might also be required)

 

Actually the content in sticky up top was created by @bobfa, so I'd as him to consider the changes you recommend. 

 

(The AS topic owner actions have some quirks, so the sticky shows the owner to be whoever originally created the message, not who last edited it.)