Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[Nenon]

@Johnseye

What CPU are you using? Also, are you using the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard?

It would be really good to hear your report with a single server solution / Euphony powered by SR7 rails. 

[Nenon]

I believe the SR7 is unobtainable at this point. New orders are no longer accepted.

There are other good supplies on the market that are easy to get. But they don't have the 10A rating.

https://thelinearsolution.com/reference1.html - 6A

http://www.custom-hifi-cables.co.uk/home/power-supplies/dc3-power-supply - 5A

 

What I am wondering (and just posted in the other thread) is if we can use multiple rails of the above mentioned power supplies (or others) to independently power up each EPS pin by a separate DC rail:

1 hour ago, Nenon said:

 

I have mostly played with low powered CPUs / motherboard, but following the latest trends, I am curious to try a combination like that with the i9-9900K CPU. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I am assuming that the EPS connector is where the most power is consumed on those motherboards. Two questions about that:

1. How many amps do we need to sufficiently power up a CPU with TDP of 95 Watts for Euphony? Romaz - are you using a 10A SR7 rail? Have you tried a 6A rail? 

2. Can we power up the EPS connectors with multiple independent DC rails on this motherboard? The keyword is "independent", because if each +12V on the connector is in parallel with the others, we are essentially paralleling multiple power supplies, and we know by experiments with paralleling multiple LPS2.1's that unless they are closely matched, this is far than ideal (if it even works). 

 

I am tempted to buy one of these gaming ASRock Z390 motherboards and trace the power distribution, but with so many layers on the PCB it would be a crazy task.

[Nenon]

I just read on their web site something about 12V @10A. So yes, that might be a good option.

SJ DC3 is higher on my list but limited to 5A. I've heard people comparing the SJ DC3 with Paul Hynes and ranking it higher than the SR4 but lower than the SR7. That's what the Statement uses (on their 6W TDP Pentium N4200).

Perhaps several 5A SJ rails might do a good job powering a 95W TDP CPU?

[Nenon]

1 minute ago, Balázs said:

 

All of us who aren't lucky enough to own an SR7 should try a quality power cord with the PSU. I connected an AudioQuest Dragon HC 1.5m to my HDPlex 400 (that drives my dual box Euphony source). It's worked magic on the SQ. 

 

+1

Yep, this cable does miracles everywhere you plug it. Computer linear power supplies seem to benefit quite a bit from good power cords in my system. The AQ Hurricane is another alternative that works excellent - still expensive but not as much as the Dragon. They also scale with the power supply - I bet a SR7 with a Dragon would sound even better. 

[Nenon]

In my system Euphony sounds better when loaded from my Optane card compared to loading from a USB Drive. But the trial version does not let you install the image on your SSD or Optane card. I think this is a bad decision on Euphony’s side, because you cannot test the full potential of Euphony. However, it’s not difficult to install the image to your Optane card or hard drive/SSD from the command line. Here is a quick guide for those who want to try it. Important: All the data on your Optane card would be deleted. Make sure you know what you are doing. 

 

You would need to load a version of Linux on your server. You would also need to have root access to that Linux installation. In my case, I already have AudioLinux on a USB drive, so that's what I am using as an example below. Ssh to your server (username: audiolinux  /  password: audiolinux). Exit the Menu (CTRL+C). Type 'su'. When prompted for password, type audiolinux0. You now have root access.

1. Find the device name of your Optane card by examining the output of the  ‘fdisk -l’ command. In my case, it is /dev/nvme0n1.
2. Download the Euphony image: Run ‘wget http://euphonyimage-798b.kxcdn.com/euphony20190522v3.img.gz'. Find the most recent link from the Euphony web site. 
3. Install the image. First, run ‘ls’ to find the file name of the image. In my case, it is euphony20190522v3.img.gz. Run the following command: ‘gunzip -c euphony20190522v3.img.gz | dd of=/dev/nvme0n1’. Adjust the command with the correct image file name and device name (from #1 above) if needed.

Reboot and boot from your Optane card. Enjoy!

[Nenon]

2 hours ago, TheAttorney said:

 

It's not unusual for a trial version of any app not to have the full set of features enabled, and in this case I don't think it matters much because...

 

It's early days in my Optane vs USB stick comparisons, but one thing I can say right now is that any improvements with Optane are tiny compared to getting a top quality power supply, and small compared to, say, getting good quality cabling in your system. Therefore you can get a sufficiently good idea of what Euphony is capable of, even if booting from USB. Yes, Optane boot may be better still, but so are dozens of other tweaks that can be made to yor NUC.

  

BTW, once booting from Optane, I ran a simple test: With Euphony caching (and 100% buffer) enabled,  I loaded a few albums from my USB stick into the Euphony play queue, then started playing. Then removed the USB stick from the NUC. I heard no difference in SQ whether or not the USB stick was in place. Which means that a USB stick is a perfectly viable long term solution to store your music files, as long as your collection is small enough to fit (and with 4 x USB slots in a typical NUC, that means 2TB is easily achievable, and even 4TB at a much higher price).

  

My bottom line is that USB drives can be improved upon, but for the purpose of evaluation, there are much more important considerations.

  

 

 

I just wanted to show people how to transfer their TRIAL installation to an Optane drive. The main reason in my case was not sound quality. A friend of mine has a 3TB music collection, which Euphony running from a USB drive could not handle. Euphony was going offline every few minutes, the database was constantly locked. etc. I did it for him to speed up the OS to OS storage access and decided to share with the community here. 

 

As for the sound quality advantage, it seems like your comment is targeted towards NUCs. Mine is not. I have tried Euphony from a USB drive and from Optane on several different motherboards. The results vary from motherboard to motherboard. There were motherboards on which I could not hear any audible difference and there are also motherboards, where you clearly hear it from the first note. I think it's quite wrong to assume that it makes very little difference on all computers... that is not my experience at least. 

 

Not to digress too much, but this is similar to the JCAT network card. If the network is only used for management (i.e. you are not streaming music over the network), the JCAT NIC still makes a difference on some motherboards, while I have tried motherboards where I could not find any audible difference in comparison to using the onboard NIC. Similarly, you can test this by unplugging the network cable while playing - you can hear improvement on some motherboards and not on others. Just saying - things are not as black or white as it may look. In other words YMMV. 

[Nenon]

4 hours ago, sukyung said:

I have a question.
> When using the euphony stylus
> Is only usb output possible?
> I have a pink faun spdif bridge
> I want to use it.

 

You should be able to use your PinkFaun bridge card as an output, but can you try it and confirm? I am considering getting an I2S bridge card with ultra OCXO clock to try and would really like to know what your results with the SPDIF card are. 

Under --> Settings --> Music Service you will see something like this: "Sound card options: (1 card)". In this case there is 1 card you can use for playback. If it says 0 cards that means Euphony does not recognize your card. 

 

[Nenon]

Just installed the new version of Euphony. It has some bug fixes. Some have been bothering me a lot recently, so I am glad to see them fixed. There is also a 'Stress CPU (to "break-in" your CPU, power cables/supply)' option under Expert Settings. Interesting... 

[Nenon]

46 minutes ago, Chopin75 said:

I am in euphony V3 trial but it appears the HQplayer for upsampling has very low volume. Has anyone noted this issue?

 

is there expert setting onV3 trial too? 

 

I don't use HQplayer, but the trial version runs with volume control enabled by default. If you haven't disabled the volume control, please take a look at that setting. In my (non-Hqplayer) system, it is under Settings --> Music service --> Sound card options --> Stylus settings --> Volume control. 

[Nenon]

Open a support ticket with Euphony - https://euphony-audio.com/hesk/ 

[Nenon]

@EliteDJ - what processor are you using on your server?

[Nenon]

2 hours ago, EliteDJ said:

Intel 2nd gen i5 which I'm going to upgrade to a 3rd gen i7 3770s 65watt output.  I'm using parts that I have sitting around.

  

 

 

You would not be able to get the PinkFaun SPDIF card to work on the i5 or the i7 with Euphony. But it sounds very good on other CPU architectures. 

[Nenon]

1 minute ago, EliteDJ said:

so... a new AMD would be a better option?

 

 

Yes.

[Nenon]

5 hours ago, EliteDJ said:

Just Picked up an ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero AM4 AMD X370, same as is used in the Pink Faun 2.16x Music Server which looks to be a BEAST!!!  I'm thinking that they may be using Euphony as their OS of choice but that's a guess.  Anyone know the AMD processor that might reside in the Pink Faun 2.16x Music Server.  I'm thinking that it may need to be max 95 Watt TDP because the case they use looks alot like a customized HDPLEX H5 Gen2 which supports processors up to that rating.  Hopefully I'm on the right track.

 

They were using AMD Ryzen 1700X in the 2.16 before. Not sure what's in the 2.16x. I would go with the gen 3, though. I would do the Ryzen 7 3700x or even the Ryzen 9 3900x if you can handle the power and cooling requirements. 

 

[Nenon]

S/PDIF is a real time stream, and the original word clock is embedded in the signal. As such the source that generates the signal (i.e. your PinkFaun S/PDIF Bridge Card in this case) must have a clock. Those PinkFaun cards do have a low jitter clock in their stock version, but they also offer two OCXO clocks as upgrade options. Upgrading the clock is plug and play - you literally plug a daughter card with the OCXO clock in a connector and secure it. The bridge card would recognize the clock and start using it automatically. I believe the cheaper of the two clocks is an off the shelf Connor-Winfield OCXO that costs less than $100 and is not considered to be exceptional. The Linear Solution uses the same clocks. The more expensive, 'Ultra OCXO', clock is a custom solution and has much better specs. You can try the stock card first and upgrade to the Ultra OCXO clock later. I personally would skip the middle model.

 

As for the DACs - many DACs do not reclock the S/PDIF signal. Audio Note for instance does not.The clock is very important in this case. Your S/PDIF cable is also important and could make a difference. But given the clock quality depends on clean power, you want to make sure you use a good quality LPS for this card. Vibration control also matters in this case as it impacts the performance of the clock. 

 

I suggest we continue this discussion in the PinkFaun thread as we are OT here. 

[Nenon]

Euphony is not exposing the root password, so they can keep it a closed system.

Open a ticket with them - https://euphony-audio.com/hesk/ 

[Nenon]

Alternatively, if you don't want to wait for their support, download a new image from their web site and reinstall Euphony.  I had something similar happening to me once, and I think I created a new USB drive. 

[Nenon]

50 minutes ago, jcn3 said:

@lwr -- according to the manual, it should be audiouser/euphony.

 

Thank you for that info. Very useful. I did not think that was there before, but I am not so sure anymore. 

I guess they protect the root password. 

[Nenon]

Here is the change log:

20190912
- Critical fix for starting Album playback
- Added custom field: User tags (add comma delimited tags to better organize your library)

Sounds like a bug fix with the Album playback, which I noticed as well. It does not sound like there was anything added to contribute to sound quality.

[Nenon]

To clarify my earlier point - 20190910 is the release that contributes to sound quality enhancements and the one that requires a restart as some libraries have changed; 20190912 is an Album playbug bug fix and user tags added (should not have any changes in sound quality).

20190912
- Critical fix for starting Album playback
- Added custom field: User tags (add comma delimited tags to better organize your library)
20190910
- Dynamic DSD native playback kernel support for DACs not supported by default
- Expert settings - ramroot
- Fixed random queue playback
- Folders with songs from different albums treated as albums. Album name: "Folder: [folder-name]"
- Improved stream params display when playing via HQPlayer
- Added 'work' field for Qobuz song info
- Added sorting by 'date added' for local library
- Added iostat, ifstat display (click on release-number/reg.-status text)
- Fixed auto-family HQPlayer field change
- Better detection of supported rates for internal cards
- Hidden settings sections irrelevant for current music service
- Fixed bug with similar album paths (one path is substring of another)
- Queue songs looked up before playback in cache and in original location

 

[Nenon]

5 hours ago, flkin said:

Does anyone know if there is anyway the Euphony OS can be installed into an internal SSD drive (from the USB drive) that already contains music files without deleting the music files?

 

Euphony help indicates you need a new internal drive for the installation which suggests that all data on the drive would be deleted.

 

The short answer is no, you cannot. 

 

Theoretically, if your SSD is partitioned in a certain way (very unlikely), it might be possible to do with some Linux commands, but you would be better off moving your music or getting a smaller drive dedicated to Euphony. 

 

[Nenon]

2 hours ago, mantis07 said:

Hi Guys, I've been following this thread and decided to try out Euphony. I downloaded the trial and installed it on a spare PC. It sounded really good so I decided to get a 7i7DNFE and I purchased a Euphony license. So, on my first install attempt for the new NUC I downloaded Euphony trial and the write to USB failed at around 80%.  I tried again on the same stick and it failed again. The installer actually killed my Sandisk  USB stick(now it's read only) so I had to use another stick - same thing - another dead stick. Finally it worked on the 3rd stick. What I didn't realize is that when the Euphony install program failed and I tried again it was actually writing to my internal drives!!! While I was trying to download Euphony I decided to turn on my NAS and 20TB ESata box(attached to Win10 machine used to download Euphony) to copy some music to the NAS. I then realized my 1TB internal got repartitioned with 4 Linux partitions - I guess on the 2nd or 3rd download/write attempt failure the install program grabbed my ESATA storage and killed it. Unfortunately I was using Win10 software RAID0  -drive #3 of a total of four drives got Linux partitioned rendering the array useless. The Euphony install program only showed my Sandisk USB stick during the write - it NEVER showed the other mentioned drives but it sure did a number on them. Fortunately I had the majority of 35000 albums backed up but lost about 5000... and dozens of hours of recovery. Euphony support wasn't much help with this and said it was impossible that it happened using their installer... 

 

So today as my library was slowly restoring I decided to try the NUC wired vs wireless. I had it set to wireless for about a day and it worked great. Today I tried wired and then tried going back to wireless. Well when I went wireless Euphony all of the sudden showed that it was unregistered/over trial and showed someone else's info that lives in China. What??? I was super frustrated at this point. I write to Euphony about the issue and am told I need to choose what I want for my already paid for license - wired or wireless. I was totally unaware I would have to make a choice. Has this come up for anyone else?? Why would I need to chose an unsupported option when I paid $300. Makes no sense to me. Any advice or suggestions?

 

Thanks

Tony

 

The Euphony license is based on the hardware address (i.e. MAC address) of the NIC you are using. As a licence owner you can change it to between computers - so in your case it can be based on your WiFi or NIC. Just send them a support ticket with the registration challenge, and  they can deactivate the old license and activate a new one. I guess for some reason they cannot support both in a single license... must be some kind of limitation of their licensing model. Also, WiFi is part of the Expert settings, and as such, it is not officially supported. 

[Nenon]

29 minutes ago, mdzaki said:

hi there

 

after adding a usb ethernet adaptor to my nuc in order to bridge the ethernet ports and connect one directly to my brinkmann nyquist dac my registered euphony version that was purchased some days ago became unregistered and several attempt to register using the code that was sent by mail ends up with an invalid code...please advice 

 

Zaki

 

When you register Euphony, it takes the MAC address of the NIC and generate a footprint code based on that. If you then disable the NIC, the license would not work. Have you disabled the original NIC you used when you registered Euphony. 

[Nenon]

Probably something happened as part of that. Contact Euphony - they can issue a new license and revoke the old one. 

[Nenon]

Hi Felipe,

 

If you are the same person who contributes a lot to the jplay forum, I have read many of your posts there. Thank you for sharing so much of your experience. And if I recall correctly, in one of your posts you mentioned that every time you try to share something useful on this forum you get attacked by sharks (well, not exactly what you said) who has a different vision. I will try to be extra careful with my comments. 

Actually, when it comes to open minded people here on this forum, I am as open minded as it gets. I would try everything as long as it does not pass the border with complete stupidity. I have played with Windows and AO but never the exact combination you have mentioned. That's going on my list of things to to try one day. 

 

But I wanted to say what I think about your "dynamics" limit with Euphony:

3 hours ago, FelipeRolim said:

But what struck me most, and I haven't noticed in any other tests I've done, either with free or paid operating systems, is that Euphony limits the music dynamics. The system loses articulation and cannot reach high levels of sound intensity, as required, for example, in Hugh Masekela's Stimela songs and Harry Belafonte's Mama Look a Boo Boo. It sets a clear limit, as if the amplifier clipped, which doesn't exist with Windows and even with AudioLinux. I was intrigued, because never, in an operating system test, did this feature catch my ears. I can't vouch because I don't know the specifics of the project and intend to use the 30 day free trial to exhaust any possibility of improvement of Euphony, but the feeling I got after hours of listening was that in an attempt to "tame" the typical Linux sound that I critique, reducing glare and highlighting in the early harmonics, the developers eventually inserted some algorithm or hit that, while making the overall sound more palpable, limited the articulation, the dynamics.

 

Euphony works best with very powerful CPUs and fast RAM. The faster the CPU, the more dynamic the sound is. You can clearly hear a difference in dynamics by enabling the Intel Turbo Boost in my Core i9 9900K CPU (vs. disabling it), or even when reducing the CPU frequency by a couple hundred Mhz. The same thing applies to my AMD Ryzen 3700X CPU based music server. Reducing the CPU frequencies reduces the dynamics.

Euphony is using a low latency kernel... I don't think they have "inserted some algorithm" to change the sound. I just think they picked a Linux kernel that sounds good and applied the typical low latency kernel optimizations... but that's just a speculation on my side. However, what is not a speculation is that those types of Linux distributions (if done right) can squeeze a lot more of the hardware resources you have available and process data with significantly lower latency (compared to Windows that is... I do that for living and have a first hand experience). Look at the high performance trading industry, and you would never see people using Windows servers for anything critical. Now, that does not say anything about how one OS sounds compared to the other, but it takes me to the next point, which is why I believe you have limited dynamics with Euphony.

Looking at the system listed in your profile - it seems like you are using an Intel Core i7-4750T. That's a 6-year old CPU that only works with DDR3 RAM, and it is not exactly a fast CPU by today's standards. From my experience, Euphony really started to shine when I tried the top of the line consumer grade CPUs like the Intel i9 9900K and AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with no frequency limiting. I did mention that, but as soon as you start limiting the frequencies, you start losing dynamics. 

I have always looked at the digital source as a complex chain starting from the player, OS, hardware, power supplies, cables, interface with the DAC, the DAC architecture, etc. etc. You change one of these elements, and you have to rethink the entire chain.

You have a highly optimized Windows-based system. It's so well optimized over the years that there is probably no significant improvement you can make by changing a single element of the system. You switched the OS to Euphony, and it sounded worse. No surprise there. If I put tractor tires on Ferrari, it would not perform better. Neither would a truck with Lamborghini tires. If you really want to hear the full potential of Euphony, you should try it with a much faster CPU.