AudioLinux and NUC Troubleshooting and Tuning

[greenleo]

5 hours ago, davide256 said:

mmm. Received  NUC7PJYH  last nite, straight forward to configure it for USB boot, disable unused peripherals, and get AL headless up and running in RAM as Roonbridge.

But not finding it to be an improvement from overclocked Pi3b+/AL/LPS 1.2 so far; sounds like an improved version of microRendu for detail but tone colors and dynamics

don't "pop" like they do with RPI3. Ran it off 19/12V for HDplex, but could not get it to complete  boot on 12V/ LPS 1.2. Appreciate suggestions above, would really like to

see if  better PS solves.

 

Also 2 simple questions

1) does it matter which USB port is used for boot?

2) does it matter which port is used for asynch USB connection?

.

That's strange.  Mine running Headless NAA can be booted up by LPS-1.2 consistently.

 

1) Seems little difference between USB ports used for boot.  I tried only the front two, though.

2) No idea.  Never tried swapping.

 

A followup Q.  Any SQ difference when boot with different USB sticks?  Well, I know that the answer "should be" No.  But we never know.

[davide256]

14 minutes ago, greenleo said:

Inconsistent in terms of can/cannot boot up or SQ good/bad?

@lmitche

Did you try the power limit option? Seems to be working so far with limiting power to 12 w for burst

[lwr]

29 minutes ago, LTG2010 said:

Go into the console, type alconf there's a list of settings there.

Thanks,  that took care of it.

[greenleo]

41 minutes ago, Middy said:

pushed the mobo back against the where connectors protrudes

@Middy,

"connectors protrudes" are the HDMI ports, LAN ports, ..., correct?

 

How do you do the pushing?  Do you hold the USB ports on the front side or insert something between the metal and the mono as a lever?

 

43 minutes ago, Middy said:

Pull the plastic and metal side away from the mobo. 

This is the front side, the side that has a power button?

 

45 minutes ago, Middy said:

connectors and ensure they are all undone

Only 3 sets of connectors, wide black, small 4-pin white and two point form connector for the WiFi attenna?  Correct?

 

Only two screws needed to be unscrewed from the mother board, correct?

 

There are lots of soft paddings sticked on the ports, should I keep them or take them apart?

54 minutes ago, Middy said:

Fingers on both hands together

Sorry, cannot understand the meaning of the sentence above.

 

Thank you for your help.

 

[Middy]

@greenleo Sorry details from memory, in bed on phone. 

 

Late here very tired

1.

yes make sure if you have serial vga PORT blue the 2 screws are taken off.. 

If you have them

 

2.no levers be careful. Action is like opening curtains 2 hands... push left pull right. Slow experiment.. take time, learn.

 

3 Yes push towards lan port usb. Leave foam stickers but you may have to push them down a little.

You have to bend the outer case a little. So you can get underneath the pcb too pull out. Old case is not issue with bending, just a little strength controlled..

 

4 yes i had just 2 screws. 

 

5 just check all wires so you do not damage anything.

Picture: so you have reference for fitting fanless case

6. I mentioned before when you have the case off, check for any wires again.

The fan must be removed first. There is hidden screw for heat sink below. 

 

7 methelated spirits or 100% alcohol is good to remove old thermal paste.

8. No metal tools. Use cotton bud / q tip and rub a lot. Small capacitors resistors around cpu.

9. Take time and be careful in all actions.

 

10 clean cpu and heat sink again before new thermal paste.

 

11 small thermal paste center and twist left right a little with mother board.

To spread the paste.

 

12. 4 screws all in. Then little turns opposite sides 1 /4 until firm. 

 

13 complete build, connections, ram. Ect

But first boot check temperatures in bios is ok 30 to 40 Oc 

 

14. I  am no expert Greenleo just a fat man from the internet. Helpful but still fat.. mainly fat.. did i say fat..

 

15 apologies i do forget English is a second language for many.  Being English we are very lazy when using it. 

The Americans even more so...? ?

 

I hope this is helpful.

 

Random internet fat man, NUC support

 

Dave

 

[ray-dude]

7 hours ago, austinpop said:

 

Yes, this is the reality of NUC-world. It's a bit wild west. 

 

As regards squeezelite, the main parameter for SQ is the -b one for preallocated buffers. I was lucky that my first experiment with AL was on a Zenith SE that already used squeezelite as its internal player. I was able to duplicate the settings in the existing conf file.

 

Other than that it's trial and error and forums! I can try and help out, but no guarantees. First, get me a few key things:

• install squeezelite (not R2) from the AL guide
• amount of RAM on your NUC?
• Run squeezelite -l and tell me your output
• Do you care about DSD? Does your DAC require DoP?

We'll go from there.

 

Thank you Rajeev

 

I just got my NUC7CJYH w/ 8GB up and running headless in RAM root (thank you and everyone here).  Runs great as a Roon Bridge, connected via USB to my Chord Blu2 (then Chord DAVE DAC).  Upstream I have a vanilla Mac Mini (OSX) running my Roon Core, not yet optimized.  With this setup, I need the end point to just pass things bit perfect to the BluDAVE and let it do its (considerable) magic.

 

The tunability of the Squeezelite end point (vs Roon Bridge) seems like a great opportunity to dig in and figure out what is driving the SQ boosts we're all hearing.

 

 

 

Quote

 

[audiolinux@audiolinux ~]$ squeezelite -l

Output devices:

  null                           - Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)

  default:CARD=Blu2              - Blu2, USB Audio - Default Audio Device

  sysdefault:CARD=Blu2           - Blu2, USB Audio - Default Audio Device

  front:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0          - Blu2, USB Audio - Front speakers

  surround21:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0     - Blu2, USB Audio - 2.1 Surround output to Front and Subwoofer speakers

  surround40:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0     - Blu2, USB Audio - 4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers

  surround41:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0     - Blu2, USB Audio - 4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

  surround50:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0     - Blu2, USB Audio - 5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers

  surround51:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0     - Blu2, USB Audio - 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers

  surround71:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0     - Blu2, USB Audio - 7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers

  iec958:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0         - Blu2, USB Audio - IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output

 

 

My /etc/conf.d/squeezelite settings are:

 

parameters="-o front:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0 -b 2097152:2097152"

 

(piggybacking on your findings that maximizing buffers makes things better, although I'm wondering if weighting more towards the input or output would move the SQ needle...TBD)

 

However, I was also looking at the real time priority, parameters for connecting to the DAC, and even codec settings as potential SQ levers (TBD how the stew of latency and compute and OS priorities all come together when you expand the test matrix)

 

I hoping to dive in this weekend and start doing some investigations.  If you (or others) have run into dead ends or opportunity areas with Squeezelite as the end point, it be great to build on that!

 

 

 

[austinpop]

6 minutes ago, ray-dude said:

 

Thank you Rajeev

 

I just got my NUC7CJYH w/ 8GB up and running headless in RAM root (thank you and everyone here).  Runs great as a Roon Bridge, connected via USB to my Chord Blu2 (then Chord DAVE DAC).  Upstream I have a vanilla Mac Mini (OSX) running my Roon Core, not yet optimized.  With this setup, I need the end point to just pass things bit perfect to the BluDAVE and let it do its (considerable) magic.

 

The tunability of the Squeezelite end point (vs Roon Bridge) seems like a great opportunity to dig in and figure out what is driving the SQ boosts we're all hearing.

 

 

 

 

My /etc/conf.d/squeezelite settings are:

 

parameters="-o front:CARD=Blu2,DEV=0 -b 2097152:2097152"

 

(piggybacking on your findings that maximizing buffers makes things better, although I'm wondering if weighting more towards the input or output would move the SQ needle...TBD)

 

However, I was also looking at the real time priority, parameters for connecting to the DAC, and even codec settings as potential SQ levers (TBD how the stew of latency and compute and OS priorities all come together when you expand the test matrix)

 

I hoping to dive in this weekend and start doing some investigations.  If you (or others) have run into dead ends or opportunity areas with Squeezelite as the end point, it be great to build on that!

 

 

 

 

Excellent. If those setting are working, then you're good to go, and we would love to hear about your findings.

 

[rickca]

41 minutes ago, Middy said:

methelated spirits or 100% alcohol is good to remove old thermal paste.

This stuff also works very well.

https://www.amazon.com/ArctiClean-Thermal-Compound-Remover-Purifier/dp/B001JYQ9TM

[davide256]

After playing with it every which way I could for PS/BIOS config/ AL config, I'm not finding that the NUC7PJYH  can be my final destination for a Roon endpoint.

 

While its detailed and clean with AL, even better so than microRendu, its not matching up to overclocked RPI3B+/AL for midrange bloom and for reach/impact with low bass.

As a tuba player, I'm sensitive to muddy bass, the RPI3B+ doesn't suffer at all here, just has issues with cymbals and other complex high frequencies. The NUC7PJYH

in contrast makes me grit my teeth when low bass percussion is happening.

 

What really hit me hard was playing a random track, Elvis Presley's "Suspicious minds", the  NUC/AL  made it sound lifeless/AM radio fodder, whereas the RPI/AL  brought it to life, showed nuance and expression.

 

[clipper]

1 hour ago, davide256 said:

After playing with it every which way I could for PS/BIOS config/ AL config, I'm not finding that the NUC7PJYH  can be my final destination for a Roon endpoint.

 

While its detailed and clean with AL, even better so than microRendu, its not matching up to overclocked RPI3B+/AL for midrange bloom and for reach/impact with low bass.

As a tuba player, I'm sensitive to muddy bass, the RPI3B+ doesn't suffer at all here, just has issues with cymbals and other complex high frequencies. The NUC7PJYH

in contrast makes me grit my teeth when low bass percussion is happening.

 

What really hit me hard was playing a random track, Elvis Presley's "Suspicious minds", the  NUC/AL  made it sound lifeless/AM radio fodder, whereas the RPI/AL  brought it to life, showed nuance and expression.

 

Before you give up on it, try it with Intel SpeedStep off.

 

I was much more impressed once it was running with SpeedStep off. 

[simonklp]

I notice that no matter it is AL lqxt or headless, there is always a problem of running HQPE with the "poly-sinc-lp" filter for playing Redbook to DSD512. The problem is that just when the music started to play after the initialization time of about a minute or so, there is always some error messages saying like "… no body care … irq #136 … disabled …", or similar. The HQPDcontrol also returns an error message of "failure to connect to HQPlayer".

 

However, I haven't encountered this kind of problem for HQP on Windows.

 

Have any of you also encountered this problem on AL?

[Middy]

5 hours ago, rickca said:

This stuff also works very well.

https://www.amazon.com/ArctiClean-Thermal-Compound-Remover-Purifier/dp/B001JYQ9TM

@rickca

@greenleo

 

Thanks mate, i have some somewhere and the sensible answer for here. 100 % isopropyl alcohol   was at hand at the time,  my brain is mush with my baby not sleeping..

 

Cheers 

Dave

[Middy]

Deleted

[davide256]

6 hours ago, clipper said:

Before you give up on it, try it with Intel SpeedStep off.

 

I was much more impressed once it was running with SpeedStep off. 

Yup, been there. Setting temp to allowed max before fan cuts in was also helpful. But no checkered flag for the NUC in the end

 

[greenleo]

@austinpop

 

Hi Rajiv, For your current NUC, which is NUC7i7DNBE, is the size of the dc plug also 2.5, like the NUC7CYJH?

[BigAlMc]

Apologies if I've missed this either here or on the mothership as Rajiv put it ?

 

I have the parts arriving today and tomz to attempt building an AL NUC server over the weekend. Occurred to me when walking into work this morning that there are a couple items I don't have a clue about. [Ok there are many, many items I don't have a clue about ?, but these are specific items].

 

I know how to install and format an SSD in a windows environment where it would detect the new drive and prompt you to take actions from there.

 

Q1. What is the story on AL? Will it recognise the drive and prompt me? Or (gulp!) do I need to use Linux commands to install and format it? And if the latter can anyone point to simple instructions for this?

 

Q2. If I have my music files available on either a Windows laptop or an external USB harddrive, how do I copy them onto the SSD in the AL NUC server. I'm assuming this is definitely Linux commands. Again any guide for this sort of thing would be great.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Alan

 

[seeteeyou]

17 minutes ago, greenleo said:

For your current NUC, which is NUC7i7DNBE, is the size of the dc plug also 2.5, like the NUC7CYJH?

 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/mini-pcs/nuc-kits/NUC7i7DN_TechProdSpec.pdf#page=53

Quote

The back panel DC connector is compatible with a 5.5 mm/OD (outer diameter) and 2.5 mm/ID (inner diameter) plug

 

[lmitche]

7 hours ago, davide256 said:

After playing with it every which way I could for PS/BIOS config/ AL config, I'm not finding that the NUC7PJYH  can be my final destination for a Roon endpoint.

 

While its detailed and clean with AL, even better so than microRendu, its not matching up to overclocked RPI3B+/AL for midrange bloom and for reach/impact with low bass.

As a tuba player, I'm sensitive to muddy bass, the RPI3B+ doesn't suffer at all here, just has issues with cymbals and other complex high frequencies. The NUC7PJYH

in contrast makes me grit my teeth when low bass percussion is happening.

 

What really hit me hard was playing a random track, Elvis Presley's "Suspicious minds", the  NUC/AL  made it sound lifeless/AM radio fodder, whereas the RPI/AL  brought it to life, showed nuance and expression.

 

Hi David,

 

We can help but need a bunch of details first. As you know there are a lot of knobs to set. Do you want to keep exploring options or are you done with the NUC?

 

I see you use a DDC for USB to spdif conversion. Do you know if the schitt eitr uses a XMOS USB chipset?

 

It would also be good to know how you are powering your NUC.

 

Thanks,

 

Larry

[davide256]

25 minutes ago, lmitche said:

Hi David,

 

We can help but need a bunch of details first. As you know there are a lot of knobs to set. Do you want to keep exploring options or are you done with the NUC?

 

I see you use a DDC for USB to spdif conversion. Do you know if the schitt eitr uses a XMOS USB chipset?

 

It would also be good to know how you are powering your NUC.

 

Thanks,

 

Larry

Willing to play around, still experimenting. Loaded 3.0 version of LXQT last nite, seeing what a NUC can do as a direct connect Roon server with USB3 attached SDXC storage,

easy to flip back to headless configuration

 

1) power supplies; HDPlex  19V or LPS 1.2 12V

2) Eitr is Schiits DDC, same Gen 5 board as used in Yggdrasil, not XMOS based

3) current config is SATA/sound/microphone disabled, fan speed set to 55C before cut in, Intel speed step disabled, sustained/burst power at 10/15, secure boot disabled.

  I haven't played with HDMI or video memory, didn't want to risk monitor issues with BIOS access

4) BIOS version when received 31, updated to 46

5) Running latest AL headless version

 

Disabling hardware/setting fan kick in speed higher so far has solved boot issues with LPS 1.2

[mourip]

25 minutes ago, lmitche said:

Hi David,

 

We can help but need a bunch of details first. As you know there are a lot of knobs to set. Do you want to keep exploring options or are you done with the NUC?

 

I see you use a DDC for USB to spdif conversion. Do you know if the schitt eitr uses a XMOS USB chipset?

 

It would also be good to know how you are powering your NUC.

 

Thanks,

 

Larry

 

From the website looks like C-Media CM6631A USB 2.0

[greenleo]

39 minutes ago, seeteeyou said:

 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/mini-pcs/nuc-kits/NUC7i7DN_TechProdSpec.pdf#page=53

 

Thank you very much!

[lmitche]

14 minutes ago, davide256 said:

Willing to play around, still experimenting. Loaded 3.0 version of LXQT last nite, seeing what a NUC can do as a direct connect Roon server with USB3 attached SDXC storage,

easy to flip back to headless configuration

 

1) power supplies; HDPlex  19V or LPS 1.2 12V

2) Eitr is Schiits DDC, same Gen 5 board as used in Yggdrasil, not XMOS based

3) current config is SATA/sound/microphone disabled, fan speed set to 55C before cut in, Intel speed step disabled, sustained/burst power at 10/15, secure boot disabled.

  I haven't played with HDMI or video memory, didn't want to risk monitor issues with BIOS access

4) BIOS version when received 31, updated to 46

5) Running latest AL headless version

 

Disabling hardware/setting fan kick in speed higher so far has solved boot issues with LPS 1.2

Extreme mode?

[MrUnderhill]

25 minutes ago, davide256 said:

....

....and ramroot & remove the boot USB.

 

M

[davide256]

1 hour ago, lmitche said:

Extreme mode?

Will try next, fingers crossed that doesn't drive it over LPS 1.2 current limit ?

[austinpop]

2 hours ago, greenleo said:

@austinpop

 

Hi Rajiv, For your current NUC, which is NUC7i7DNBE, is the size of the dc plug also 2.5, like the NUC7CYJH?

 

Yup, 2.5mm. I am using a 2.1-to-2.5mm barrel adapter for now.