Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[Chopin75]

3 minutes ago, aangen said:

The I3 processor in the PTS is typically doing less than 3% utilization on all four cores while streaming Qobuz through Roon.

So many people think an I7 is the minimum useful processor, yet there are many who believe the I7 is noisier. 

It is so easy with Euphony to see processor utilization. I own and use the box, I know what I am talking about.

 

I am sad to see I3 isn't up to task nonsense again and again.

That is one of the brilliant things about Euphony, it does not heavily task the system.

I should point out that my experience is for single box non-streaming/roon purpose, so yah it appears for streaming the PTS should be adequate, at least theoretically, esp if there is no upsampling/PCM-->DSD etc. Now, numerous users notice huge dynamic improvement with higher power CPU, as well as improvement in depth/sound stage. I have not done a head to head comparison of same PC using different CPU. But I think it really depends on what you are doing with euphony. DSD 256 takes lots more CPU power, as I can see a spike of CPU usage when loading and playing a large DSD file (e.g 1 GB)  and takes a bit of RAM as well. (if using Ramroot and buffer track). 24/96 usually is not taking much power at all. I imagine streaming takes even less CPU and RAM. 

If in doubt do go to discuss this CPU issue on the mother thread ..."A novel way to......"    

[Chopin75]

4 minutes ago, Lukasluis said:

I have trottled my Nuc8i7 to 800 MHz and disabled Hyperthreading. I dialed the CPU frequency so that my Digital setup sounds nearly as good as my Analog setup. YMMV

Try original DSD recordings , and wow.... the analogue feel can be stunning!  Can feel like a vinyl with increased dynamics and clarity, but there are lots of crappy DSD recordings out there too....

[Chopin75]

50 minutes ago, ASRMichael said:

Hi, I’ve tried this. 
 

My one box, JCAT, Pink Faun USB, Sean Jacobs 7 rail LPS. Running Stylus

 

I also have NUC with OXCO clocks & 2 LPS. 
 

I tried running both Roon & Stylus on the NUC, (doing hard work) sending to my one box server running Stylus EP. 
 

I really thought “it must be better” but It wasn’t. I preferred my one box server. Don’t ask why! I just go with my ears! 
 

If looking for advice, then my opinion is to put all your hard earned cash into one box server, starting with a very good LPS. 
 

Note I have two full versions of Euphony which helped me experiment until I found the best sq. 

46 minutes ago, drjimwillie said:

That is exactly what I’m doing, putting all my hard earned cash in one place.😅

 

I was also trying to figure out how to use Roon without the sound penalty.

 

I guess one variable here is that my Roon server would be xenon caps pipeline, with a good PSU. Who knows if it’ll make a difference? If the theory is that the other computer should be faster and a better quality system then it might help?.
 

I really value your judgment, thank you.

so you don’t use Roon?

There are a few of us who have stuck with single box with no issues, "Nenon" has experience in building an ultimate single box server (Though I think it can be an end point or whatever else you want as well). Basically he puts all the juice in a single box that just runs on Euphony OS,  he uses optane SSD M.2 drive and APacer ECC RAM etc....  great internal wires etc....... 

I guess you can use 2 ultimate machines to do Roon--> Stylus endpoint. I am not sure if the worsening of sound with 2 boxes is the need to connect the 2 boxes and this is where the degradation comes from. 

Nowadays using RAMroot and even buffer Queue, eliminating a large SSD drive, loading files to Ecache in a single box may be adequate enough to reduce most of the background noise when SW/HW is working even in the same single box. Remember, Euphony is originally designed for single box use. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Chopin75]

56 minutes ago, ASRMichael said:

Good point, I’ve had similar thoughts, however, think about how much you could spend on 2 boxes?. Could the same amount of money be better spent on a single box!!! 
 

Will it ever end?!  “Nenon’s quote”’
 

Me personally It needs to stop sometime, so what’s next? Awaiting Nenon’s new Xeon build+JCAT new ethernet card with OXCO clock! Hopefully I’m done! 

Not sure what would be more cost effective. For 2 box u need double of almost everything, so may cost more overall. Eg LPS and USB cable etc

[Chopin75]

2 hours ago, drjimwillie said:

Euphony playing Stylus, in a one box system directly to the DAC Is a special sauce I want to try. 
 

To do it I’m going to change the way I’ve been playing music for years, which is with HQ player.

 

Eventhough it will be high powered I’m still thinking about it as an endpoint. 
 

I think people that continue to use HQplayer might want a two box system. Especially in the future if they think they are going to be able to use the EC modulators to DSD512.  Who knows what the future will bring, but you might not be able to passively cool it.  Regardless, you would not want that much noise/activity in the machine connected to your DAC. 
 

and you would want that DAC connected machine to play Stylus. 

I did try HQplayer embedded in the Euphony OS, even upsampled to DSD512, no overheating issue. I am not sure If I would get the best sound from single box though.

[Chopin75]

3 hours ago, cat6man said:

 

futzed around with trial and error and eventually got it to play in trial registration mode.

however, when i put it into ramroot, i lose the ability to play music on my attached usb drive (sda1).

sda1 shows up as a 7TB drive but apparently is not loaded for music purposes.

 

what am i missing?

 

next step is to compare with audiolinux

Did you choose the option to copy entire app to RAM? That would disallow playing music from your own drive I believe. Also I am not sure if the RAMroot can be done properly with the trial version. Perhaps others know better? 

[Chopin75]

Does anyone still have stability issue running Stylus on euphony?  Now and then a Get a warning about "application cannot find path...or something like that, recommend to reboot.." but even if I reboot, the same message will appear again soon. Also if I quickly click on a track and switch to another track while the track is playing, or even click to replay the track  it kind of freezes. It will play but no sound will come out. Then. need to restart the app and then it will play fine. I have loaded Euphony on Optane M2 drive thinking the shorter latency will give more stability but not really. I am running RAMroot, with the music in the Optane drive itself. 

[Chopin75]

14 hours ago, adamaley said:

@Chopin75 I had similar issues. I was using the  Copy APP Config to RAM option alongside Stylus and/or Ramroot. Disable the Copy App Config option (it may require going out of Ramroot and a reboot then turn it off before enabling Ramroot then another reboot) and try again.

Actually I have not been using Copy App Config, but still has this issue. More so with larger files. Despite me having 32 G RAM!! So not a RAM issue. 

[Chopin75]

6 minutes ago, cat6man said:

 

thanks, i've ordered 128gb usb sticks that should be here tomorrow.

 

in the meantime, i've removed by HDD drive and replaced it with a 16gb usb stick holding the tracks i most utilize for SQ evaluation.  this way, i can at least begin to make SQ evaluations.

 

i've also entered expert options and set:

1.  ramroot enabled

2.  set the buffer to 2GB (i've got 8GB of NUC ram, and zram shows 2.4GB free)

 

any recommendations for any of the other expert parameters (e.g. cpu isolation)?

 

lastly, if i need a bigger usb stick to load my HDD library, will that become a problem when i want to run ramroot with my full 6TB music library?

Any reason why u limit Buffer to 2 GB Ram only? Rather than default, which I think is to 50% of entire RAM

[Chopin75]

On 8/11/2020 at 2:05 PM, edwardsean said:

Thanks Dave, 

There are a few things to consider here, one is that you're comparing a SDCard, SSD connected locally and the HD was connected over network. Did you try connecting a HD directly to the NUC and were the results the same?

 

Also, in your second post you mentioned you moved to RAM mode. I assume you mean RamRoot. However, in your tests were you caching to an Optane drive and buffering 100% song to RAM before playback. 

 

This is the use case that I'm trying to test. The question is: if audio files sound different played directly from SDCard, SSD, or HD, does this difference hold when the files are no longer being played directly but from cache/RAM?

If u run Ramroot the RAM quality becomes most important. If u run ramroot on a poor Cheap commercial RAM the RAMROOT sucks! I have not noticed much difference In SQ when switching from SSD SATA drive To optane. Optane does

run faster with loading files. Maybe running at Ramroot diminishes the differences. But I did not

do A/B comparison as the optane is internally mounted that is a pain to take out again. It took 2 wks to burn in so I cannot remember clearly what was like before. However it does not require external

PS so that would save u a 5V LPS

[Chopin75]

1 hour ago, cat6man said:

 

i picked 2GB because that was what zram showed was free.

if i can go beyond that without problem, i shall.

also, are you saying that leaving that entry blank is using 1/2 of the ram (or 4GB) by default?

That is what the Euphony guy told me, that about 50% is reserved for Music file loaded for RAM (if I remember correctly) . However, unless u have huge music files 2 GB is probably enough. There may be some advantages in SQ if u occupy less RAM for music. I have 32 GB ram so i can run 100% buffer for huge files of 4 G. And also can run buffer queue which means I can load entire large album  (DSD usually) into the buffer. And run ramroot at the same time. U would need high Quality RAM for this kind of stuff. RAM quality may actually be more important than HD or SSD quality esp with RAmroot

[Chopin75]

41 minutes ago, edwardsean said:

I have huge files myself, and with only 8GB of industrial grade RAM, I run out all the time. I have 32GB of regular consumer grade RAM, which I don't use. It was the sacrifice I made to use the Apacer RAM.

 

What high quality RAM are you running that you were able get 32Gb? 

[Chopin75]

42 minutes ago, edwardsean said:

I have huge files myself, and with only 8GB of industrial grade RAM, I run out all the time. I have 32GB of regular consumer grade RAM, which I don't use. It was the sacrifice I made to use the Apacer RAM.

 

What high quality RAM are you running that you were able get 32Gb? 

I probably had the same Apacer ones u had, from the batch order by Nenon? I ended up using 32 GB 4x 8 GB. I think 16 GB was ok with DSD 256 but would

not do DSD 512 files well. In any case having more RAM

so u won’t need to fill it up

with music all the time seems to help, of course to counterbalance the potential Noise from large RAM itself. But with these high quality RAM there does not appear to be degradation in SQ with more

RAM, which apparently was the case

with inferior Commercial RAM. 

[Chopin75]

3 hours ago, davide256 said:

Anyone running Stylus endpoint on a Mac mini? If so, thoughts on which used Mac mini to use? (Euphony says OSX supported, newer models run Catalina?)

I'd like to give Stylus server + Stylus endpoint a shot but don't want the USB endpoint to be a NUC, wasnt that impressed with the difference using 2 NUCs vs

1 in the past.

Be careful

using Mac. Latest Macs do not support USB boot, unless there are new changes, mainly due to T2 chip

for security. 2018 mini and macbooks are affected

[Chopin75]

Been while since I use Euphony so now I realize I. can do Quboz stream direct (actually pre-loaded onto RAM) from Euphony Stylus. Now There is also a You-tube stream but I am unable to make it work,  is it supposed to work ? 

[Chopin75]

20 hours ago, ASRMichael said:

Yes mine appears to work. 

I got that screen too but cannot get it to play. Maybe I need the 5G ethernet to connect to the server ? 

[Chopin75]

Also now for some reason the pops come back on DSD mode using stylus. It used to come only with changing from DSD to PCM (or vice versa) but now it happens even when changing track as one track finishes to the next on same album. ? some bugs 

[Chopin75]

Not sure if I posted this before, but my DSD playback is now giving pops again within same album, via nativeDSD on stylus. Anyone has this issue still ? 

[Chopin75]

5 hours ago, flkin said:

Oh didn’t notice this part of the update. Thanks for bringing it up! 😄👍🏻
 

For sure this helps isolates all upstream devices from the sound. 
 

This software method is good but I would imagine some hardware design with some toggle to physically switch network connection on and off would be better still.

Well, I just tried after the latest update, the entire Euphony is offline, and it is supposed to switch back on after a set amount of time ? The default is 206, so it means 206 min ?  It is really the same as pulling out my ethernet cable.  Not very practical, but maybe a bit better than pulling out the ethernet cable, and it reboots back after that set time, which I suppose is a bit more convenient than rebooting yourself but then u need to time when you want the reboot. Time the time for the album. or set of tracks loaded to finish, and so the Euphony reboots after the tracks are done? If it can be automatically reboot once all the tracks are finished (e.g via consume) then it would be much more helpful. 

 

I am not really detecting lots of Change in SQ.  but I would need ABA comparison 

[Chopin75]

9 hours ago, Speedy381 said:

I've listened quite a lot since the update (s). I did think I heard a difference in the bottom end; more emphasis and more rounded perhaps.

But nothing like the change that disconnecting the network has made. Tonight I sat through a Jeffrey Foucault album on buffer and network disconnected in Expert. I  really enjoyed it, but it wasn't until I listened to a track again with network connected and wondered what had happened. I had to do the Expert disconnect again for that track and sure enough, a real change to detail, air and tone. What's that all about?

 

IT also depends on your DAC, I have   a cheap $250 DAC. and I can tell a clear difference if load all buffered tracks and then pulled out the Ethernet cable with immediate improvement. But the other $3000 DAC, well, not sure if I can hear much difference, The cheap DAC has no or poor reclocking but obviously the $3000 has a dedicated clock just for reclock at the USB input. 

[Chopin75]

On 1/24/2021 at 1:31 PM, Joerg D said:

Hello
I like Stylus because I like the sound very much. Actually I listen with Roon. But now I want to get to know Stylus better and I have some questions about how to use it.
It would be nice if you could help me.
How do I assign tags to songs and how do I create playlists and assign playlists to songs?
Does it matter whether I select in the setting that the music is loaded 100% into the memory or whether I select the function 
"Buffer queue to Ram " ?

Thanks for your help

Joerg
 

THe 100% into memory I think you mean the 100%. buffer. ? It loads a single track entirely before playback. The Buffer queue loads entire album(s) to the RAM before being played. 100% buffer appears most important, recommended to use at all times unless u have very little RAM to work on.  The   Buffer. queue I. find only. useful for huge files, like. DSD/DXD. It means while you play the entire album, there won't be further loading of files into the RAM. ssh can improve the. sound. I does make a. little difference but for small files like PCM 24/96, not really a lot of difference. It is a nice feature so u feel better psychologically, haha. BTW, you need good quality RAM chips to do anything like this as. the RAM becomes more important, esp if you run RAMroot. ON crappy RAM, the RAMroot mode sounds worse or not any better,  

[Chopin75]

So the 421 version is supposed to sound better ? Anyone having issues with DSD ? I have had pops reemerging recently with the older version.

[Chopin75]

4 minutes ago, drjimwillie said:

How do I read or write to a hard drive in Euphony?  How do I even see a hard drive in Euphony?

my motherboard is older and does not have a M2 slot. I have a 32 GB Optane M2 memory and a PCIE adapter card. I would like to see if I can use it like a hard drive to load some songs, but I am not sure where or how to look. 
 

Thank you
 

I am not sure what you mean. Are you talking about booting from an external USB vs loaded Euphony in a "hard drive" like a traditional internal solid state drive ? I put my Euphony in my 64 GB Optane M2 but it does need M2 Slot (though I think you might be able to use the Adaptor card) I load some songs in there. But not a lot of space. I just delete them when I am done. You can also load via network drive I think but I just remotely load into the Optane via file manager. Try not to occupy > 70 % of the Optane drive as beyond that might affect sound it seems. 

[Chopin75]

On 5/13/2021 at 11:41 AM, davide256 said:

Just ordered this Apacer RAM, doubt I can make use of the higher speed (3200 ) in an 8i7BEH but if it  behaves better for audio, thats what matters. Will

report on results, this is more available than the lower speed Apacer DDR4 SODIMM (2400)

 

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/908-D22.27261S.001

Is this the industrial grade? Can't tell from the link

[Chopin75]

7 hours ago, RickyV said:

 

 @TheAttorney and me are using these Apacer rams now, these are industrial grade -40 to +95 degrees c.

 

https://nl.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Apacer/D2323240S004/?qs=GBLSl2AkiruWco00G6Jb1Q%3D%3D

I see, also in Dutch, I also use industrial ones. They are the best, I think for Music server