Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[jcn3]

6 hours ago, Lukasluis said:

There is a software update for Roon. Do I need to disable Ramroot first before installing the update?

 

you can also do the update within roon and then do a save system in AL when done.  that's how i did it.

[Lukasluis]

7 hours ago, auricgoldfinger said:

 

Disable ramroot, reboot, and then install the Roon update.  You'll need to re-enable ramroot and reboot after the Roon update is complete.

Thanks.

[Lukasluis]

6 hours ago, jcn3 said:

 

you can also do the update within roon and then do a save system in AL when done.  that's how i did it.

What do you mean by AL?

[jcn3]

3 hours ago, Lukasluis said:

What do you mean by AL?

 

I'm an idiot - thought I was in the Audiolinux thread. Please ignore my suggestion as I know nothing about Euphony!

[Lukasluis]

18 minutes ago, jcn3 said:

 

I'm an idiot - thought I was in the Audiolinux thread. Please ignore my suggestion as I know nothing about Euphony!

No worries

[ASRMichael]

Hi, I see there has been 3/4 releases of HQ player since last Euphony update. Do we just need to wait or am I missing something?

[Chopin75]

2 hours ago, ASRMichael said:

Hi, I see there has been 3/4 releases of HQ player since last Euphony update. Do we just need to wait or am I missing something?

Are you referring to when the next Euphony update or HQP update ?

I was told euphony is to update soon to fix some bugs. MY euphony keeps getting stuck when I change track and I need to restart app each time to resolve this. 

[austinpop]

A couple of excellent features are coming to Euphony/Stylus. One that I have been beta testing is a UI option in the Queue view to buffer all tracks in the queue from the current track on. This makes a noticeable impact on SQ, as you can wait for all tracks to be in RAM before playing the list.

 

The other feature that looks promising is the ability to direct Stylus output to a UPnP renderer. I wish I had had this when I had the dCS Bartók review unit.

 

i gather the Euphony folk are busy working on the launch of a new product - their Essentia server, but no details are known yet.

[davide256]

If anyone else  has the Hans Zimmer sound track "the Last Samurai" and is using RAM mode, you may want to give it a listen in normal mode as well. A lot of sonic issues

with it went completely away when I switched from RAM mode to normal mode, tone color purity hugely improved for me.

[Chopin75]

29 minutes ago, davide256 said:

If anyone else  has the Hans Zimmer sound track "the Last Samurai" and is using RAM mode, you may want to give it a listen in normal mode as well. A lot of sonic issues

with it went completely away when I switched from RAM mode to normal mode, tone color purity hugely improved for me.

If the track is too big and takes up too much RAM with 100% buffer the sound can be worse with Ramroot. BUT I have solved this by using Apacer ECC RAM. Before using it Ramroot was not that good. But perhaps also me using SATA instead of M.2 PCle could affect efficiency of RAMRoot, I don't know. You can try without 100% buffer on RAM root and see. 

[Chopin75]

59 minutes ago, austinpop said:

A couple of excellent features are coming to Euphony/Stylus. One that I have been beta testing is a UI option in the Queue view to buffer all tracks in the queue from the current track on. This makes a noticeable impact on SQ, as you can wait for all tracks to be in RAM before playing the list.

 

The other feature that looks promising is the ability to direct Stylus output to a UPnP renderer. I wish I had had this when I had the dCS Bartók review unit.

 

i gather the Euphony folk are busy working on the launch of a new product - their Essentia server, but no details are known yet.

hmm, I have enough RAM space issue with my current high Res GB tracks running Ramroot, as  a single track can be 1-2 GB. An entire DSD256 album can be 10-16 GB (the classical albums area > 60 min long), there is no way one can run Ramroot with 100% buffer of entire album unless one use like 64 GB RAM (actually I am planning to expand to to 32 GB for DSD512 already but still won't be enough!)  Would a more powerful CPU be needed to run 64 GB RAM ! 

[Nenon]

1 hour ago, austinpop said:

One that I have been beta testing is a UI option in the Queue view to buffer all tracks in the queue from the current track on.

 

This is cool. I have been playing with my EtherREGEN, and although my feedback about the switch is positive, I have noticed that nothing beats the quality of 100% buffer and minimal/no I/O activity. The best sound from my source is achieved when there is no extra I/O activity. I would love to try that new UI option. 

[austinpop]

1 hour ago, Chopin75 said:

hmm, I have enough RAM space issue with my current high Res GB tracks running Ramroot, as  a single track can be 1-2 GB. An entire DSD256 album can be 10-16 GB (the classical albums area > 60 min long), there is no way one can run Ramroot with 100% buffer of entire album unless one use like 64 GB RAM (actually I am planning to expand to to 32 GB for DSD512 already but still won't be enough!)  Would a more powerful CPU be needed to run 64 GB RAM ! 

Obviously, the algorithm only buffers what will fit in available RAM disk. There is a visual indicator - a blue fill in the info icon next to every track - that indicates if a track was buffered.

 

Whether the buffering benefit of adding more RAM outweighs the potential loss of SQ due to more noise is something people need to play with.

[austinpop]

1 hour ago, Nenon said:

 

This is cool. I have been playing with my EtherREGEN, and although my feedback about the switch is positive, I have noticed that nothing beats the quality of 100% buffer and minimal/no I/O activity. The best sound from my source is achieved when there is no extra I/O activity. I would love to try that new UI option. 

Indeed, this is what drove the idea. You’ll recall my earlier experiments where I’d prime a queue of tracks, hit play and then pause for the background buffering to happen. This only moved music from its original location to the E_CACHE directory in the /data partition, which is still on the Optane SSD even in RAMROOT.

 

With this new feature, files are actually copied into RAMdisk (technically /tmp I believe), so once buffered this way, you can observe that there is almost no disk or network I/O.

 

I hope people are using the disk and network monitors, by clicking on the word Registered and the build number respectively at the bottom right of the UI?

[Lukasluis]

8 minutes ago, austinpop said:

Indeed, this is what drove the idea. You’ll recall my earlier experiments where I’d prime a queue of tracks, hit play and then pause for the background buffering to happen. This only moved music from its original location to the E_CACHE directory in the /data partition, which is still on the Optane SSD even in RAMROOT.

 

With this new feature, files are actually copied into RAMdisk (technically /tmp I believe), so once buffered this way, you can observe that there is almost no disk or network I/O.

 

I hope people are using the disk and network monitors, by clicking on the word Registered and the build number respectively at the bottom right of the UI?

Yup, even with 100% buffer before play and Ramroot-Enabled, I still see quite a bit of Network and Disk activity around the time when the next track starts. The duration of activity varies on the size of the file being loaded and whether the file is fetched from the NAS or from the local temp drive. I use temp drive for faster loading of tracks. 

[austinpop]

2 minutes ago, Lukasluis said:

Yup, even with 100% buffer before play and Ramroot-Enabled, I still see quite a bit of Network and Disk activity around the time when the next track starts. The duration of activity varies on the size of the file being loaded and whether the file is fetched from the NAS or from the local temp drive. I use temp drive for faster loading of tracks. 

Bingo. That’s what this new feature is solving. It’s extending the idea of “Buffer before play=100%” to a set of tracks. It’s a nice SQ lift.

[Lukasluis]

38 minutes ago, austinpop said:

Bingo. That’s what this new feature is solving. It’s extending the idea of “Buffer before play=100%” to a set of tracks. It’s a nice SQ lift.

Thanks for working with the Euphony developers in getting these SQ improvements included in the next release. 

[austinpop]

2 minutes ago, Lukasluis said:

Thanks for working with the Euphony developers in getting these SQ improvements included in the next release. 

 

All credit goes to Željko - he came up with this one himself!

[Lukasluis]

19 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

All credit goes to Željko - he came up with this one himself!

I hope this feature will be extended to Tidal tracks. 

[flkin]

It will be interesting to see whether the new EtherRegen will have any effect as the music is buffered 100% in such an Euphony setup. 

[davide256]

9 hours ago, Chopin75 said:

If the track is too big and takes up too much RAM with 100% buffer the sound can be worse with Ramroot. BUT I have solved this by using Apacer ECC RAM. Before using it Ramroot was not that good. But perhaps also me using SATA instead of M.2 PCle could affect efficiency of RAMRoot, I don't know. You can try without 100% buffer on RAM root and see. 

CD quality so under 650mb for the entire recording. Buffer/cache absence/presence did not change the symptoms/outcomes.

 

 

[Chopin75]

3 minutes ago, davide256 said:

CD quality so under 650mb for the entire recording. Buffer/cache absence/presence did not change the symptoms/outcomes.

 

 

Could it be RAM quality, as I am now able to run Ramroot much better with Apacer ECc than with my Gskill, despite using large files

[davide256]

4 minutes ago, Chopin75 said:

Could it be RAM quality, as I am now able to run Ramroot much better with Apacer ECc than with my Gskill, despite using large files

Possible, using Crucial memory in the NUC. Would like to buy Apacer but all I see advertised for NUC are the 16gb sticks of non-ECC, not sure if that would

make any difference.

[Lukasluis]

27 minutes ago, davide256 said:

Possible, using Crucial memory in the NUC. Would like to buy Apacer but all I see advertised for NUC are the 16gb sticks of non-ECC, not sure if that would

make any difference.

I changed my Crucial rams in my NUC 8i7beh into these HyperX HX424S14IB2K2/16 Impact... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722Q3243?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

 I also turned off all BIOS devices that I don't use including all USB ports except the ones at the back. I am running my NUC fanless using Akasa case. I also removed all usb enhancers/cleaners/reclockers. No SATA/SSD disks installed nor USB-attached HDDs. These changes make quite a big difference in terms of less grunge (more smooth) sound. I also found that I like the back bottom USB port the most. 

[davide256]

2 hours ago, Lukasluis said:

I changed my Crucial rams in my NUC 8i7beh into these HyperX HX424S14IB2K2/16 Impact... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722Q3243?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

 I also turned off all BIOS devices that I don't use including all USB ports except the ones at the back. I am running my NUC fanless using Akasa case. I also removed all usb enhancers/cleaners/reclockers. No SATA/SSD disks installed nor USB-attached HDDs. These changes make quite a big difference in terms of less grunge (more smooth) sound. I also found that I like the back bottom USB port the most. 

Haven't used a reclocker  for about a year, AL/Euphony sounded worse with a reclocker. Able to run all processor options after upgrading power supply from HDPlex200W to an Uptone Audio JS-2, really doesn't make a difference disabling ports now and speed step actually helps SQ. And was finally able to see why others preferred HD to  SDXC cards media after I upgraded from Metrum Octave DAC to a multibit Gungnir, much better midrange information without a treble brightness.

 

But some of my 44.1/16 collection still has issues with threadbare treble tone color,  raw edges that other solutions I've listened to don't present.

Fingers crossed that a Stylus server to Stylus endpoint option will outperform a Roon  or 1 box Stylus server solution in this area