Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

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On 3/13/2021 at 9:40 AM, di-fi said:

Hi davide256,

 

Yes , I have the same issue on both native USB ports. Right now am testing the Realtek USB (PEXUSB311AC3). It does not resolve the bit depth problem, but soundwise it's an improvement.

 

I can confirm that the clicks unfortunately are part of the Schiit dac design. So I always hear them, and got used to ignoring them. 

_From Schiit website: It’s totally normal for Bifrost, Gungnir, and Yggdrasil DACs to click (mechanically, from the chassis) during normal operation. That’s the muting relay, doing its job. It clicks whenever the SPDIF datastream is interrupted._

 

To get to what's causing this Euphony distortion when changing 16 bit to 24 bit songs,  I have to pin down on what causes this and at AudiophileStyle I am looking for help with that. Johnseye recently mentioned in this thread a problem ''Stylus either not playing song after song consecutively in the queue or just have a general difficulty playing songs at all?'' and it got solved and it was no hardware issue. It made me realize that maybe there is something in common with my problem?

 

There are so many factors at play that I feel a bit lost. But I can not keep listening to Euphony with random distortion. When listening to music random I have to sometimes run to find a phone or tablet to restart the app (and track will continue to play as usual), or my family members have to run for the volume control. Specially at higher volume this noise is quite awful/unbearable.

 

It seems a test with the old Schiit usb card will give me an answer, but it takes me 1-2 hours to open and close with a multitude of screws so I do not like opening the Yggy myself (but I can) I could also change player software, but I have to install a new one and compromise on Euphony quality. On the USB chain I compared with different cables and/or lengths and with or without IsoRegen.

 

I am open to any solution. It would be great to understand what is going on.

 

Thanks!

Paul

 

 

I have the same exact issue. Was not able to replicate it with Zejko though. I also did not have the issue using GentooPlayer or other audio OSes. Apparently the Yggy with Unison does not jive well with Euphony. For me, the issue has become more and more rare. I stream from Tidal. The issue has also rarely occurred when switching from Local to streamed tracks or vice versa. Typically, I keep my remote nearby and bounce the Stylus service.. the song will typically pickup from where it left off. It doesn't happen with HQPlayer.

 

Onboard USB ports, USB PCI-E card etc don't make a difference either (which was shocking). I really like Euphony. The SQ has had better synergy than other OSes i've tried with this system so I simply put up with it :). Also, I am connecting directly to the DAC and have tried 3 USB cables: Schiit Pyst, Lush^2 and Sablon 2020.

 

Cheers

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1 hour ago, di-fi said:

do you mean not enough difference but nevertheless you got some advantage as described in your audio profile? You still seem to use the Startech? Did you try to power the Startech through the onboard connector?

Kind of off topic for the thread. But with the Sablon 2020, onboard USB sounds a lot better than it used to. It is listenable. Soundstage is a noticably smaller, edges rounder, more noise, probably more jitter too but it is highly listenable...it really depends on my mood. I mostly switch to on onboard USB to experiment but I rarely switch back to it. This is with the DAC-UP2 ports only. The Startech is substantially better overall...(I need to update my system profile with that info. No I do not have the onboard connector installed. It works via motherboard power. I believe it is only supplemental power for this card.

 

As for the Starech not making a difference, I meant the issue we are experiencing will also occur with the Startech card in use. So, the issue seems to be with the Yggy/Euphony compatibility.

 

1 hour ago, di-fi said:

Did you try other USB cards? Why not a JCAT Femto USB (other than $). I am very interested in improving the ‘USB out’ until I can eliminate the ISO regen and also use one cable between streamer and DAC (considering my setup ideally for maximum half the price of a JCAT).

No, this was a temporary solution until I felt the need to upgrade to the JCAT Femto USB XE. Not really super inclined to spend the extra money as this Startech card in stock form sounds really good to me... better than I was expecting and going CPU direct it does offer better performance than the onboard ports. I have no ISO Regen or Phoenix and the system sounds remarkable to me directly to the DAC. Who knows, perhaps an ISO regen, Phoenix, or JCAT have the potential to improve the system further.

 

1 hour ago, di-fi said:

am using a tiny Curious USB and a short Lush^2. If I can not improve onboard USB I can always install 16Gb Optane on a PCIe adapter....

Nice cables. I really enjoyed my Lush^2.

 

I noticed a gain in going CPU direct with Optane. Euphony detected the storage immediately when I moved it from M.2 slot to PCIE adapter. Euphony also had no issues detecting the Xilinx SFN8522 NIC.

 

Cheers

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40 minutes ago, di-fi said:

yes that was my experience also, distortion in both cases. Well, now there are 3 Euphony users who experience(d) this distortion problem. But your situation seems more random. Zjelko did not confirm how many more he needs to reinvestigate. I hope to find a solution soon.

Ok my short off topic reply: Considering the quality of your setup and both the USB you are currently using, based on my experience, it is more than likely the ISOregen will improve as also will the JCAT. The % of improvement depending on the Sablon USB of course. At first sight it doesn’t look like it but JCAT being less expensive if you compare with ISOregen + lps 1.2 + decent dc cable + second USB cable. I would choose JCAT ;-). Oops forgot Lps for JCAT (needs more power than for example lps 1.2 can deliver I think) if you want to have it all...it never ends.

Thanks for all your feedback!

Paul

 

Yeah I have built a 2 rail MPAudio ALS-HPULN with two 5V outputs. It is configured to provide up to 3A at 5V. That should be sufficient. Also have DIY Mundorf silver/gold JSSG360'd cable I can use to hook it all up. Some decent AC power cords to choose from as well...just need to let my curiosity get the best of me and try the JCAT one of these days 😄. For now, i'm busy listening to sweet sweet music.

 

Back on topic: I hope so as well, otherwise Euphony is amazing as-is. I've also tried adjust DAC delay to 1000ms. For some odd reason I believe this may have helped reduce the occurrence of the issue. I will be trying 1500ms next:

 

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13 minutes ago, Exocer said:

Back on topic: I hope so as well, otherwise Euphony is amazing as-is. I've also tried adjust DAC delay to 1000ms. For some odd reason I believe this may have helped reduce the occurrence of the issue. I will be trying 1500ms next:

Yeah that didn't work... Nor did the highest delay setting...

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1 hour ago, di-fi said:

Well thanks for trying! For a year I had 0 ms DAC delay as only setting. Since this distortion happened instantly at the change of tracks I have been wondering what information exchange is happening between Euphony and the DAC and how much time needed when it will change to the next track. So I thought I should change this. I just looked it up, I am currently also at 1000ms! I tried lower settings but I did not notice any change. If I could only ‘force’ Euphony or Yggdrasil to either play 16 bit or 24 bit, my problem may be solved because it does not seem to read that it should adapt the bit depth for the following track. For example in WIN 10 & JRiver I can play all tracks at a fixed bit depth to (Topping d10s) office dac.

Yeah. I'd like to force bit depth as well although it would be nice to leave everything to play at original settings. Also, the music I do hear when I experience the issue is a bit faster than it should be. Do you hear this as well?

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5 minutes ago, di-fi said:

So now we have two Schiit Yggdrasil users and one Schiit Gungnir user who experienced major distortion problems (although random) related to 'wrong' bitdepth after change of tracks while using the recent Unison USB card. According to Schiit the Unison card will only work with WIN 10, no earlier version. I do not know how Linux interacts with hardware & drivers, but I wonder if there could be a Schiit Unison driver problem (update for Linux?)  or incompatibility with the Euphony software.

I will test the correction Željko applied today and I should change to the older Schiit USB card for comparison (without todays correction) and I think I have enough information to get in touch with Schiit @Jason Stoddard and @Baldr.

Zejko applied the fix for me earlier but I was again able to replicate the issue immediately. He will likely follow up with me in the next few days as I have shown him how to replicate the issue. Cheers

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3 hours ago, di-fi said:

If you can help me understand: the fix eliminates gapless and Željko said that now buffer will be only one track at a time. So no more complete albums or playlist will be send to buffer, is that right?

Here is the explanation:

 

"The fix tries to prolong the time during which player switches from one song to the next as I expect that DAC does not handle that fast change very well. This is done by preventing automatic loading of the next track into the player during play of the first one. When you switch between songs back and forth it defeats the purpose because then both tracks are downloaded and buffered and change happens much more quickly."

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1 hour ago, al2813 said:

I am running a singxer SU-1 as an innetrface between my Euphony box (JCAT USB card) and the spdif in of my DAC. Before that I had a WAVEIO card delivering the same functionality. In both cases the distortion is appearing very randomly. In fact I was "blaming" my DAC until I tried the CD player which had no such issue. 

 

I will do some more testing this week. The issue is very rare on my side 

Thanks for the report al2813. Which DAC did you experience this issue with?

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31 minutes ago, di-fi said:

The fix I had applied seems to work. I can not get distortion.  I do not think I lost buffer function either (maybe I misunderstood that I would loose buffer & loosing gapless). 

 

Great to hear. It did not work for me today and Zeljko and I worked together earlier to try various solutions. We even set the track delay to 5 seconds. The delay itself worked but the issue would return as soon as the track began. He is taking this in-house to search for kernel level adjustment. There do not appear to be Unison/Yggdrasil related configurations in the wild just yet.

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2 minutes ago, di-fi said:

That's not so great. Do you mean you (both) are convinced it is a specific configuration needed for Unison?

Correct.

 

Did you say your solution worked? What did you change?

 

Thanks

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On 3/18/2021 at 6:47 PM, al2813 said:

it’s a TDA1541. I have also a PCM1794 DAC (both are DIY but very professionally built) which seems not to have the issue although again I need to do more rigorous testing and add my RPI source to the mix. Again as it appeared very little I did not investigate any further. Only reading the thread today made me think there could be a link. 

 

This is a very good data point. Happy to see that it the issue is not limited to Schiit Unison USB DACs. Will let Zeljko know.

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19 hours ago, ASRMichael said:

Hi

 

Does anyone have this image? If so can I have a copy? Euphony could only offer the latest or 20201102. Looking for 20210108

 

I don’t want the latest but do want the feature to turn off network 

20210108

I had this image but then had to re-image my laptop so all I can do now is rollback to this version. Would have to mail you a copy of the rolled back OS on a flash drive. 😁

 

Should I rollback??

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18 minutes ago, BCRich said:

How would this work on a 16 Core System? Also for some reason gstp does not show up in my config, it had in the past. Could a Bios setting affect it?

Curious about this as well.

 

On 4/9/2021 at 3:24 AM, flkin said:

0 systemd 1 nfm 2 dhcpcd 2 dbus-daemon 2 haveged 2 lvmetad 2 avahi-daemon 2 gstp 3-5 stylus 6-7

 

Is this what it would look like for an 8 core CPU with hyperthreading?

 

0-1 systemd 2-3 nfm 4-5 dhcpcd 4-5 dbus-daemon 4-5 haveged 4-5 lvmetad 4-5 avahi-daemon 4-5 gstp 6-11 stylus 12-15

 

I will probably try this once I break in some other new parts in my system. Don't want to change too many variables at once.

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5 hours ago, flkin said:

Just double the core allocations I suppose. But I think it’s important to check the listed running services. It might not be the same for non-AMD devices. Mine is AMD. 

Yes, thanks. That is exactly what I was intending to do. It sounds good with the line I past several posts back.

.

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33 minutes ago, NanoSword said:

Today I started to experiment using  PGGB with Euphony .  I feel it is interesting tool for upsampling but I have some issue euphone is shortens the song especially long song . I need to figure out  the reason for shortens the song.

 

PGGB brings benefit to the sound  I feel the timing is more accurate more natural sound  with black background and reduce some of the harshness with better bass and amazing vocal . 

Which DAC? Did you try playing the file with HQPlayer (no shaping/upsample)instead of Stylus?

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2 hours ago, maxst67 said:

Is there the new version of Euphony 20210421 other he tried it? Impressions? I'm nailed to 102 and before updating I would like to understand if it's similar to 108 or it's just an update of 117

I just upgraded from 108 to 421 (I downgraded from 117 back to 108) and I think the current version sounds great.

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Hey guys,

Where do I start with IRQ stuff? No GSTP visible in the IRQs. Working with 8 physical and 16 virtual cores, i9 9900K.

 

Here is how I have CPU Isolation configured: 0-1 systemd 2-3 nfm 2-3 stylus 4-5 dhcpcd 4-5 dbus-daemon 4-5 haveged 4-5 lvmetad 4-5 avahi-daemon 4-5 gstp 6-15 (This is sounding mighty good)

 

It isn't clear to me how to adjust IRQs. Can take this to PM if needed but interested in squeezing out more SQ if I can :)

 

Edit: Cleaned up the post because I got help from @ASRMichael (Thanks bud)

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1 minute ago, mrkoven said:

Anyone have advice on moving from trial/USB to full version? I clicked through the complete install steps but it seems to be still booting from USB, have no idea if it actually copied anything to the internal SSD 

You should have selected your NVME as the target of the installation.

 

Try removing the USB drive and rebooting.

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4 hours ago, maxst67 said:

Anyone comment on SQ of the latest version 0716? 🤗

I happen to enjoy 0716 very much. I've rolled back twice before and this is definitely not one of those times 😃. Give it a try and report back your impressions.

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44 minutes ago, maxst67 said:

Do you mean compared to version 102? I haven't tried it yet because eventually going back to version 102 is not so immediate, so I'm probing the ground a bit but at this point I know I'll do it 😍

Good question. I am comparing to version 20210614. Unfortunately I don't remember what v102 sounds like at this point. 

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36 minutes ago, dc-audiogeek said:

I don’t know what Z did to the special sauce of Euphony Stylus, but v4 is a serious sonic improvement over v3.x. Version 3.x sometimes struggled with complex passages in which a lot of things were going on, while v4 makes mincemeat of complex passages of music. Instrument separation and placement in v4 are outstanding. 

 

The sound overall feels more organic, which was a major concern for some people on his thread that preferred earlier versions of 3.x. Music is more tangible and holographic through Stylus v4. 

 

I’m loving it so far. It’s going to be even better once we’re allowed to properly install it directly onto hardware instead of on USB drives.

I completely agree! Euphony 4 sounds phenomenally good, even from the USB stick.

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1 hour ago, sunny_time_99 said:

Hi, image is loading without Problems. My cm6631a is connected, but not playing. Looks like there are some nice Features on V4... if it might run. My Streamer based on a Single code AMD G-T44R that sounds fantastic until now seems to have not enough Power for V4. V3 is realy good. Hope the amound of Bugs are getting lower ..

 

Found a xmos based dac. Uts running with it, but the sq is far away from V3 until now. The deepth seems to be much over the top. Sounds strange. I let it run the night and guve it a chance tomorrow again.

 

Regards

 

Sunny

I couldn’t get it running without ramroot at first. Worth trying that.

 

Also, if you go to Expert settings and switch your update channel to Beta, there is already an update. Thanks for that tip @BCRich. You’ll need to perform a full install first. No internal ssd full install option yet.

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FYI - I tried swapping to the alternate kernel earlier, was able to do so but now I can’t swap back from rt11 to rt21. Luckily rt11 still sounds really good. May do a complete reinstall to see if this solves the problem.

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There are some CPU profiles available. Just erase the name of you CPU and the list will appear:

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5 hours ago, Exocer said:

FYI - I tried swapping to the alternate kernel earlier, was able to do so but now I can’t swap back from rt11 to rt21. Luckily rt11 still sounds really good. May do a complete reinstall to see if this solves the problem.

Circling back to this. Zeljko is aware and suggested I re-flash the USB drive to return to the rt21 kernel since have not thoroughly tested Kernel swapping at this point. He will work on fixing this in the future. rt11 sounds really good though. The most prominent aspect in addition to what was mentioned is the improvements in decay. Wow :)