Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[ted_b]

Bob,

In that thread you mention your wish to look at "other OS variants".  Do you, or anyone else, have a feeling for how many supported Linux audio-specific OS's are out there, aside from Euphony and AudioLinux? 

 

As you continue your evaluation of Euphony I am interested to know if you uncover many tuneable parameters, something users of Audiolinux seem to appreciate.

[ted_b]

10 minutes ago, austinpop said:

If you just want to know what the current frequency is, (Kenneth),

[ted_b]

1 hour ago, lmitche said:

Here roonserver to roonbridge plays dxd files perfectly over wifi. I've never tried roonserver to squeezelite let alone dop, but its hard to believe wifi is to blame.

 

If you install the iw package and run $iw dev [wifi device name] station dump you can see the signal strength and speed of the wifi link.

I may be misreading this, but are you saying you are trying Euphony and got it to work with wifi (being that this is a Euphony setup thread, I am possibly mis-assuming).

[ted_b]

21 minutes ago, Monge said:

I also tried upsampling via HQPlayer embedded In Stylus. Nice integration.

If Stylus is an enhanced version of MPD then does this mean Euphony built an integration step to use Stylus as a front end to HQPe, or can I do this with MPD too (say, in AL)?

[ted_b]

10 hours ago, austinpop said:

Just wanted to update this thread on some interesting Euphony/Stylus features coming down the pike.

 

@romaz and I have had detailed interactions with Željko Vranić, the lead developer of Euphony. He and their team have been very receptive to our ideas and recommendations. You've already seen the rollout of the outcome of some of these discussions in the latest release, in the form of the support for bridging, and the addition of expert parameters for Squeezelite command line options, and for setting CPU frequency.

 

Very soon, the expert options will be expanded to allow ethtool command line options. This would enable overriding auto negotiation of speed, and setting 100Mbps for an Ethernet interface.

 

As many of you have found, the Stylus player in Euphony has significantly superior SQ to Roon. Of course, functionally, Stylus does not match the sophistication of Roon's library management and UI. For many of us, Roon library management has become a non-negotiable, as there is just nothing like it out there. As currently implemented, Stylus is a monolithic, standalone player, that does not have a remote interface. We asked Željko whether they could make Stylus an endpoint that could work with Roon.

 

Well, to our delight, it looks like they have done it. We've tested a prototype endpoint implementation of Stylus - let's call it StylusEP for now. The final released name is TBD. Like squeezelite, StylusEP looks like a Squeezebox to Roon.  This enables both distributed configurations (Roon core on server, Stylus EP on endpoint), as well as standalone (Roon core + StylusEP).

 

In terms of SQ, Roon core + StylusEP approaches, but doesn't quite match the SQ of Stylus. Since there is no control of what Roon Core does internally, the team couldn't implement 100% buffering, for example, the way standalone Stylus does. Still - the SQ of the prototype Roon core + StylusEP I tested was head and shoulders better than standard Roon, and even better sounding than Roon core + Squeezelite with large buffers. It also did not suffer the glitches that have plagued those of us who've tried to live with Roon + squeezelite. 

 

The team needs to do some more testing, but I've been told that they hope to ship this in a GA release by the end of the month.

 

This is pretty exciting stuff!

 

 

Great work, as always.  Does this portend a possible Roon->HQP solution on Euphony, since Stylus player is already able to talk to HQP, or am I getting this too kludgy?  Or does this already exist, without Stylus involved?

[ted_b]

Rajiv,

Thanks for this!  Although this stuff is absurdly over my head technically, I still find it fascinating.  The unearthing of previously unknown or poorly understood causes of noise are fascinating to me.  We begin this computer audio journey with so little real information, enjoy our sq for awhile, make some changes and voila!  The hint of until-now unheard magic flows from our speakers, and we are hooked.  Confident that more gremlins (often unmeasurable at the time) eliminated means closer to the audio truth.  And these discoveries seem to come in ebbs and flows, with right now a very opportune time...thanks to the likes of you, Romaz, Larry, Bob and all the clever other early adopters (not to mention the developers themselves).

 

I sit on the sidelines, waiting my turn, as I hope and pray my audio room gets built before I get too much older.