Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[davide256]

On 8/16/2019 at 5:10 PM, austinpop said:

For folks who are using Euphony OS, you may be interested in this. Željko now has an experimental build where he has implemented ramroot support, which can be enabled/disabled from the Expert Settings area of the UI.

 

I've been trying it out for a couple of days, and my results so far have been promising. Just like in AL, enabling ramroot (loading the root partition into a RAM disk, and then booting from it) results in a definite uptick in sound quality.

 

Željko wants to get a few more proof points before releasing it, and asked me to convey this call for testers. If you're interested in testing it out, and reporting your results here in this thread, please reach out to him by opening a support ticket in the Euphony system.

 

Tried OS in RAM, wasn't pleased. Vocal harmonics for female "crooners" on soundtracks in "A Beautiful mind" developed harmonic dissonance, overall sound while detailed seemed blunted compared to stock Euphony goodness. Think I'll go the Optane SSD route for boot drive.

[Anwar]

9 minutes ago, davide256 said:

 

Tried OS in RAM, wasn't pleased. Vocal harmonics for female "crooners" on soundtracks in "A Beautiful mind" developed harmonic dissonance, overall sound while detailed seemed blunted compared to stock Euphony goodness. Think I'll go the Optane SSD route for boot drive.

I had the same experience.  It's like Euphony is trying to produce more details than necessary.  Based on my observation, "Buffer before Play" may not work properly with RAM root option - I can see the HDD light blinking most of the time.

[davide256]

On 8/16/2019 at 3:41 PM, Holzohr said:

 

If you want to install the trial on ssd/hdd you find Nenon's method here: https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/55916-euphony-os-wstylus-player-setup-and-issues-thread/page/15/?tab=comments#comment-969660

 

Mine is here: https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/55916-euphony-os-wstylus-player-setup-and-issues-thread/page/3/?tab=comments#comment-941032

not getting me through the critical point...neither post describes how to use a memory stick as an SSD. I have licensed version of Euphony so can easily install via Euphony menu, how  does one convert the Optane memory to an attachable disk for format/write? Or is this as simple as the memory already shows

as a disk device in Optane capable machine? Hesitant to buy without validation of this part.

[austinpop]

On 8/23/2019 at 10:14 PM, HeeBroG said:

At the moment I run AL on my Macmini server and Euphony on my NUC7PJYH.

 

Hi Geoff,

 

The above are OSes. What music software do you run on:

1. the server
2. the NUC endpoint?

 

On 8/23/2019 at 10:14 PM, HeeBroG said:

I tried Stylus EP but found long pauses between tracks and new tracks take 10-20sec to load depending on file size.

 

This isn't my experience at all with StylusEP. Are you loading music files from a very slow device - like a USB stick or a USB 2.0 drive? Also, what network speed are you running? (1Gbps, or 100Mbps, or 10Mbps)?

 

On 8/23/2019 at 10:14 PM, HeeBroG said:

I noticed that memory usage was only 4% and it is not adjustable.

 

Yes, StylusEP does not preallocate large buffers like squeezelite, that I've used extensively, as you know. That notwithstanding, to my ears StylusEP sounds better than SL with large buffers, without the annoying glitchiness that plagues the SL configuration.

 

On 8/23/2019 at 10:14 PM, HeeBroG said:

Things run more smoothly using Stylus Squeezlite and the buffers are adjustable and it so happens that 79% of 8Gb is used with my settings.

 

From this I surmised that Stylus EP doesn't use the RAM in my NUC and is more reliant on AL/Macmini to preload files which I am not sure I can adjust.

 

Could be wrong.

 

In any case in my system there is not much difference in performance.

 

G

 

Ultimately, it's what you hear in your system that counts, so fair enough. But I'm puzzled by the behavior you mentioned, as it's not my experience at all, and suggests you may have some configuration issues.

[austinpop]

14 hours ago, Anwar said:

I had the same experience.  It's like Euphony is trying to produce more details than necessary.  Based on my observation, "Buffer before Play" may not work properly with RAM root option - I can see the HDD light blinking most of the time.

 

Are you using Stylus? "Buffer before play = 100%" and "Use cache" are only applicable to the Stylus server.

[austinpop]

2 hours ago, davide256 said:

how  does one convert the Optane memory to an attachable disk for format/write?

 

Hi David,

 

Optane storage is not a "menory stick" in that it does not plug into a memory slot, nor does the BIOS present it to the OS as RAM.

 

Optane storage (using a technology called 3-D X-Point), while faster than conventional NAND SSD storage, still presents to the OS as an SSD. The HW packaging is in the same M.2 form factor as NVMe SSDs, and so to the OS it just looks like an NVMe SSD, albeit with different speed and latency characteristics.

 

What often confuses matters is that one of the use cases Intel touts for Optane is as a cache accelerator for a slower (but much larger) HDD. This use case requires additional software support (Intel® Rapid Storage Technology), which as far as I know, is only supported on Windows.

 

None of us are using this use case, so for the purposes of this discussion, think of Optane as just an SSD with outstandingly low latency, and very low electrical noise.

[davide256]

5 hours ago, austinpop said:

 

Hi David,

 

Optane storage is not a "menory stick" in that it does not plug into a memory slot, nor does the BIOS present it to the OS as RAM.

 

Optane storage (using a technology called 3-D X-Point), while faster than conventional NAND SSD storage, still presents to the OS as an SSD. The HW packaging is in the same M.2 form factor as NVMe SSDs, and so to the OS it just looks like an NVMe SSD, albeit with different speed and latency characteristics.

 

What often confuses matters is that one of the use cases Intel touts for Optane is as a cache accelerator for a slower (but much larger) HDD. This use case requires additional software support (Intel® Rapid Storage Technology), which as far as I know, is only supported on Windows.

 

None of us are using this use case, so for the purposes of this discussion, think of Optane as just an SSD with outstandingly low latency, and very low electrical noise.

Thank you! 

[Anwar]

6 hours ago, austinpop said:

 

Are you using Stylus? "Buffer before play = 100%" and "Use cache" are only applicable to the Stylus server.

I am using Stylus and play from local USB music SSD.  "Buffer before play = 100%" always checked and "use cache" always unchecked.

 

Let me clarify after additional observations.  Apparently for all versions, RAM root or not, for the first folder I "Add & Play" after boot, a green box appears with "Playing dir ....  from song number:1".  When changing tracks, the orange small box "Buffering" never shows up.

 

The second folder I "Add & Play" after boot, the green box appears with 

Buffering
Playing dir ... from song number:1

 

When changing tracks, the orange small box "Buffering" shows up.

 

So it seems there is no buffering for the first folder we selected and played.  I hope others can share their observation too.

[austinpop]

1 hour ago, Anwar said:

I am using Stylus and play from local USB music SSD.  "Buffer before play = 100%" always checked and "use cache" always unchecked.

 

Let me clarify after additional observations.  Apparently for all versions, RAM root or not, for the first folder I "Add & Play" after boot, a green box appears with "Playing dir ....  from song number:1".  When changing tracks, the orange small box "Buffering" never shows up.

 

The second folder I "Add & Play" after boot, the green box appears with 

Buffering
Playing dir ... from song number:1

 

When changing tracks, the orange small box "Buffering" shows up.

 

So it seems there is no buffering for the first folder we selected and played.  I hope others can share their observation too.

 

Interesting. It would be interesting to get some information from Euphony on how to confirm buffering is working.

[davide256]

On 8/24/2019 at 9:39 PM, davide256 said:

 

Tried OS in RAM, wasn't pleased. Vocal harmonics for female "crooners" on soundtracks in "A Beautiful mind" developed harmonic dissonance, overall sound while detailed seemed blunted compared to stock Euphony goodness. Think I'll go the Optane SSD route for boot drive.

Please throw this input in the bit bucket. A pair of  12AT7's went bad in the pre amp, suspect they declined/ skewed my listening results over the past few days. Will report back after I've adjusted to their replacements.

[AnotherSpin]

While testing new Dev builds (0816 and 0823) with and without ramroot enabled I downloaded resent NAA from Miska and it works nicely as a benchmark. 

[RickyV]

4 hours ago, davide256 said:

Please throw this input in the bit bucket. A pair of  12AT7's went bad in the pre amp, suspect they declined/ skewed my listening results over the past few days. Will report back after I've adjusted to their replacements.

 

Do you know this site: https://www.tubeworld.com/12at7.htm

[davide256]

6 hours ago, RickyV said:

 

Do you know this site: https://www.tubeworld.com/12at7.htm

Normally shop at Brent Jessee, NOS Tube site in Turkey, occasional eBay purchases. Like the Telefunken 12AT7's but they don't last. Looks like

they do have some they aren't out of sight for price, thanks!

[davide256]

Is there a way to use Euphony Stylus server to feed a separate Stylus endpoint?

[dctom]

I have been playing from HQplayer server to Euphony end point using my NAS library ok.

I would like to try and  use the NAS with stylus as a comparison but have been unable to get Euphony Stylus to connect to the NAS  - anyone managed this? Have been skimming the thread but have not seen an answer.

[austinpop]

1 hour ago, davide256 said:

Is there a way to use Euphony Stylus server to feed a separate Stylus endpoint?

 

Yes.  You run "Stylus" on the server machine, and "StylusEP" on the endpoint machine.

 

Caveat: I have no direct experience with this, but look back a few posts - someone just reported success with this configuration.

[RickyV]

4 hours ago, davide256 said:

Is there a way to use Euphony Stylus server to feed a separate Stylus endpoint?

 

I have no experience with the endpoint license yet but it the direction I am going.

https://euphony-audio.com/buy-euphony-audio-transport/

 

On 8/22/2019 at 10:47 PM, austinpop said:

 

Please specify your use case. Are you running this as a StylusEP endpoint? Or is it a standalone server running Stylus? The process "stylus" runs both the music server and the overall web UI, so you see it running even in an endpoint machine. If a music server, then you want to give stylus some dedicated CPUs. If an endpoint, you can lump it with the default.

 

You could try and compare these (remember each physical core has 2 logical CPUs, i.e. HW threads):

• 0-3 gstp 4-7 < -- this may be good for endpoint (physical core 0-1 for default, core 2-3 for gstp, i.e. the player part of Stylus
• 0-1 stylus 2-3 gstp 4-7 < -- this may be good for standalone  (core 0 for default, core 1 for stylus, core 2-3 for gstp)

 

Beyond this, feel free to experiment.

 

This relates to the issue in the NUC7i7 BIOS with the existing kernel. On the NUC7i7, the max CPU setting does not seem to "take" beyond the base frequency. Whenever Željko updates the kernel, this will then get fixed.

 

For me isolating cores is a success, stylus server. I think it sounds sharper, better defined. 

In an attempt to see if there is one core more favorable then the others to play stylus is not conclusive yet.

I also tried these configurations 2-3 stylus 0-1 gstp 4-7 and 0-1 gstp 2-5 stylus 6-7 were 2-3 stylus 0-1 gstp 4-7 sounded less, I think.

 

thanks

[HeeBroG]

On 8/26/2019 at 12:08 AM, austinpop said:

 

Hi Geoff,

 

The above are OSes. What music software do you run on:

1. the server
2. the NUC endpoint?

 

 

This isn't my experience at all with StylusEP. Are you loading music files from a very slow device - like a USB stick or a USB 2.0 drive? Also, what network speed are you running? (1Gbps, or 100Mbps, or 10Mbps)?

 

 

Yes, StylusEP does not preallocate large buffers like squeezelite, that I've used extensively, as you know. That notwithstanding, to my ears StylusEP sounds better than SL with large buffers, without the annoying glitchiness that plagues the SL configuration.

 

 

Ultimately, it's what you hear in your system that counts, so fair enough. But I'm puzzled by the behavior you mentioned, as it's not my experience at all, and suggests you may have some configuration issues.

 

Thanks Rajiv,

 

I am using AL/LMS on my Macmini server and Euphony/SQL on my NUC; the latter on trial.

I was previously using AL/SQL on my NUC as well.

I would like to properly trial Euphony Stylus EP but it makes LMS slow and unresponsive.

My music is on a USB 3.1 HDD attached to my Macmini.

I am not sure how to check my network speed but my Macmini is directly connected to my NUC via an ethernet cable (legacy of the "bridge"connection)😁

The NUC however works fine and just like AL/SQL when I use Euphony/SQL.

As stated previously, I ultimately plan to use Euphony Stylus on a single machine but my Uptone LPS 1.2 won't power the NUC with the USB drive attached. I'm still waiting for my PHSR7 to return.😪

 

Thanks again for taking the time to help. 

 

Cheers,

 

G

[TheAttorney]

On 8/22/2019 at 9:47 PM, austinpop said:

You could try and compare these (remember each physical core has 2 logical CPUs, i.e. HW threads):

• 0-1 stylus 2-3 gstp 4-7 < -- this may be good for standalone  (core 0 for default, core 1 for stylus, core 2-3 for gstp)

Beyond this, feel free to experiment.

 

I did try that, plus a few variations, on my 7i7DN standalone Stylus server when you posted this, but I couldn't decide if the subtle differences I was hearing were real or imaginary. So I stopped trying.

 

But yesterday, when I was looking at the temp/CPU graphs, it seemed to me that, when just playing music (with no DSP), Stylus was putting least load onto the CPU, gstp was more load, but "everything else" was the biggest load. So I allocated more cores to "everything else":

 

    0-3 stylus 4-5 gstp 6-7

 

And this gave me a (literally) clear improvement in SQ (in short, a reduction of smearing), and I'm now a believer. Of course, there may be further variants, but nothing obviously improved on this and I soon got bored with trying.

 

This was with turbo and HW on. One unwanted side effect of these changes is that any change from the default 0-7 seemed to increase core temperature. E.g. with default, Core 0 typically fluctuated between 58-65C. With above new setting, Core 0 jumped to 68-75C, whereas Cores 3 and 4 stayed lower. Now, the strange thing is that allocating even more cores to "everything else" did not reduce that highest temperature and, in general, isolating cores did not always correlate to what I was expecting in terms of CPU load and temperature.

 

My amateur conclusion to the above is that core isolation, especially with turbo/HW, is more complicated than one might think. I'm guessing that the CPU is at least partly overriding the isolation request in order to stop itself from overheating or to run more efficiently.

 

But irrespective of whether that is true or not, I feel the above new setting is very worthwhile for me.

 

[davide256]

I'm back to running Euphony in RAM, maybe a slight improvement in dynamics but  not the improvement difference you get with AL when you switch to RAM.

Did a rerun compare of 1TB HD Seagate media  vs  1TB class 10 SDXC media, SDXC still wins out for clarity, treble/bass sharpness. I have a 32gb optane stick

arriving today, I plan to retest once that arrives.

My hope is that Optane SSD using Euphony cache option will improve  sound and eliminate media type sound quality differences. Not using the cache option

currently because USB stick cache  is slower than either storage media, sounds worse enabled

[TheAttorney]

16 hours ago, davide256 said:

 

Did a rerun compare of 1TB HD Seagate media  vs  1TB class 10 SDXC media, SDXC still wins out for clarity, treble/bass sharpness. I have a 32gb optane stick arriving today, I plan to retest once that arrives.

My hope is that Optane SSD using Euphony cache option will improve  sound and eliminate media type sound quality differences.

 

My default position is Euphony Stylus booted from 32 Optane M.2 card, and redbook music files on a 256GB USB stick directly plugged into one of my NUC's USB slots. With 100% buffer, caching, turbo, HW and recent core isolation. And I'm very happy with the sound. BTW, caching doesn't always appear to be immediate when adding  new files to the playlist, and Stylus gets tempremental  when I try to add several albums in very quick succession. But it gets there eventually

 

I again removed the USB stick whilst music was playing from cache (there's about 20GB available for cache on a 32 GB Optane, which holds several redbook music files). And I again couldn't reliably tell if there was a SQ change when removing the USB stick, so even if there is a slight SQ impact, I'm prepared to accept that in exchange for an incredibly simple and low cost filestore solution for my NUC server.

 

I also tried ramroot from the trial Euphony on a different USB stick, but didn't get very far.

Firstly, on a brief initial comparison, ramroot did seem a bit better than boot from USB stick, but it wasn't sounding obviously better than my memory of the boot-from-Optane default. At this stage, it was too short a test and too many variables for anything to be conclusive, but then I ran into a problem:

 

Having activated ramroot, I then hit the disable button and rebooted. After ages, it still came up in ramroot, even though the info in the ramroot field and button seemed to acknowledge that I had indeed disabled it. So I retried and the same thing happened. As I don't have a monitor to connect to my NUC server, I can't follow the boot process for any clues, so I soon got bored with this and gave up. It doesn't help that my trial ramroot was created onto the only spare USB stick I had, which is several years old and probably contributing to the painfully slow boot up time.

 

Maybe the Euphony team could consider why I wasn't able to disable ramroot?

In the meantime I'll just wait for this function to be fully released, so that it can go straight to my Optane drive.

 

 

[Holzohr]

3 hours ago, TheAttorney said:

I also tried ramroot from the trial Euphony on a different USB stick, but didn't get very far.

Firstly, on a brief initial comparison, ramroot did seem a bit better than boot from USB stick, but it wasn't sounding obviously better than my memory of the boot-from-Optane default. At this stage, it was too short a test and too many variables for anything to be conclusive, but then I ran into a problem:

 

Having activated ramroot, I then hit the disable button and rebooted. After ages, it still came up in ramroot, even though the info in the ramroot field and button seemed to acknowledge that I had indeed disabled it. So I retried and the same thing happened. As I don't have a monitor to connect to my NUC server, I can't follow the boot process for any clues, so I soon got bored with this and gave up. It doesn't help that my trial ramroot was created onto the only spare USB stick I had, which is several years old and probably contributing to the painfully slow boot up time.

 

 

I had a similar problem with my USB stick after disabling ramroot and rebooting. The reboot didn't work or I was not that patient. I even re-flashed the USB stick with the Euphony-ramroot image but then I remembered that I already had some issues with this USB stick before when it got too hot. And the stick was very hot when I removed it from my NUC. Well, for now I use the stick for the NUC (as endpoint) only to boot Euphony to RAM. Then I remove the stick.

[davide256]

32 minutes ago, Holzohr said:

 

I had a similar problem with my USB stick after disabling ramroot and rebooting. The reboot didn't work or I was not that patient. I even re-flashed the USB stick with the Euphony-ramroot image but then I remembered that I already had some issues with this USB stick before when it got too hot. And the stick was very hot when I removed it from my NUC. Well, for now I use the stick for the NUC (as endpoint) only to boot Euphony to RAM. Then I remove the stick.

Ditto. I rebooted after disabling RAM as I wanted to do the Optane install in normal mode,  system never finished initializing. Advanced IP Scanner shows  Euphony stuck in an

intermediate state (hostname Euphony11) which I see also with the non RAM version before it completes boot and has http available at hostname Euphony.

[TheAttorney]

There appears to be an anomaly with the Core Isolation feature:

 

It reverts to the default of No Isolation after reboot, so I need to hit the Apply button again after each reboot - worth knowing for those who don't run their servers 24/7.

[RickyV]

49 minutes ago, TheAttorney said:

There appears to be an anomaly with the Core Isolation feature:

 

It reverts to the default of No Isolation after reboot, so I need to hit the Apply button again after each reboot - worth knowing for those who don't run their servers 24/7.

 

How do you see it’s gone back to default? I have switched back and forth a few times the last two weeks with no difficulties.