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Hqplayer: best NAA with best sound quality


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1 hour ago, Miska said:

There tend to be couple of challenges with ARM based platforms.

 

One is that they lack capability to describe their own hardware structure and connections. So Linux kernel needs a so called device tree file that describes this. This needs to be done by each hardware vendor who designs some kind of board around an ARM SoC. They know how things are connected together.
 

 

He he, defining the device tree is itself opaque I’ve found with different tools used in different places. 

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Different hardware vendors have different quality level and response time of their Linux kernel support.

 

This leads to the second problem, which is that many times the available supported kernel is pretty old. In worst case which is also rather usual is that the kernel matches the Android kernel which is ancient. This means having kernel version 3.14 (from year 2014 - 2016), while Linux kernel is at the moment on version 5.6.

 

And you need to invoke black magic to update the firmware to boot the latest version of Armbian. You might need to know the timing on X.X version of the board you have etc etc. 

1 hour ago, Miska said:

Custom room treatments for headphone users.

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32 minutes ago, jabbr said:


Oh yes! There are a bazillion little boards whose support is all over the place — sometimes you need to 3D print a case etc etc etc. Or try to figure out how to update firmware that is from 1963 ...
 

In other cases such as RaspberryPi, there is large enough community that you can mostly burn an SD card, plop it in and go.

 

Intel is unquestionably more standard.

 

Yep I was indeed talking about DIY being more of a pain with ARM (pain in the ARM?). When I had a CuBox, Miska's NAA version made specifically for it worked very nicely, but Armbian, Debian, etc., all had irritating quirks. With an Intel-based minicomputer (one of the ASUS VivoMini series), I could use Miska's NAA, or run the daemon on Debian, Ubuntu, AudioLinux, or pretty much anything else I wanted.

One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. - Einstein

Computer, Audirvana -> optical Ethernet to Fitlet3 -> Fibbr Alpha Optical USB -> iFi NEO iDSD DAC -> Apollon Audio 1ET400A Mini (Purifi based) -> Vandersteen 3A Signature.

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2 minutes ago, luisma said:

That said the best SQ I got was with older generation small mini pcs. 2014 - 2017, celerons mainly, these celerons are completely compatible with Windows, Linux, etc. of course I would not use (me personally) Windows with it, you could even get Pentium's and i3 to i7 if you want to use these as NUC's, will do PCM 384 with HQP and all its filters, these will have USB 3.0 to connect a DAC etc. the chassis will support fanless mode (most come with a fan in the bottom that could be removed, at least I do) the i5 and i7 fan cannot be removed.


Yes! The Celerons baked into an ASRock mATX board will set you back $70 or so and have a couple of PCIe slots to put NICs and USB cards into. You can power via an LPS into a picoATX PSU. 

Custom room treatments for headphone users.

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1 minute ago, jabbr said:

r so and have a couple of PCIe sl

That is actually nice, the mini PCs have no slots for PCI cards which is a plus, Chris was talking about using the new JCAT USB card, which provides indeed some advantages on the endpoint.

 

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On 4/13/2020 at 3:24 AM, Miska said:

This is what I use mostly:

https://up-shop.org/home/339-up-gws01w4g-memory32g-emmc-boardwo-vesa-plate.html

It also works for USB input side.

 

I may soon add also one more ARM-based board that also works for USB inputs.

 

 

I went with Jussi's recommendation here very early, when he first recommended this and have been very very happy.

 

Fanless and well supported (by Jussi).

 

With 5Vdc input, can just power with a 5V powerbank for any critical listening - not for anything to do with 'low noise' but to avoid any mains/AC power RF / ground /leakage current issues.

 

 

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Some people on the forum believe that hardware implementation for NAA must be fast and powerful enough. After following such advice I ended up with NUC7i7DNBE in a fanless Akasa Plato box powered with a Paul Hynes LPSU. I am very satisfied with the result. By some reason more powerful computing correlates with better - more natural and organic sound. 

 

In this DIY scenario, I also had an opportunity to try different NAA software solution what would be impossible with closed NAA box. Compared three different versions of the NAA endpoint image. Free, designed by Miska, as well as purchased from Euphony and Audiolinux. For this time settled on Miska's NAA image. For one reason or another, it gives the best sound, probably because it paired with HQPlayer desktop server on mac mini.

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1 hour ago, sledwards said:

I am trying to install naa-411-x64 on my NUC6i5SYH. First question: Does this image work with an i5?  I try to boot from a bootable USB stick and no OS is found.  Please advise.

 

Yes it should work just fine on your NUC. Please make sure your BIOS is largely at default settings, IOW it is trying to boot using EFI and not legacy. And that USB storage is enabled as a boot device with priority over internal storage.

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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On 4/14/2020 at 12:11 AM, Jud said:

 

Yep I was indeed talking about DIY being more of a pain with ARM (pain in the ARM?). When I had a CuBox, Miska's NAA version made specifically for it worked very nicely, but Armbian, Debian, etc., all had irritating quirks. With an Intel-based minicomputer (one of the ASUS VivoMini series), I could use Miska's NAA, or run the daemon on Debian, Ubuntu, AudioLinux, or pretty much anything else I wanted.

 

Cubox working fine here. Cheers!

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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9 hours ago, sledwards said:

I am trying to install naa-411-x64 on my NUC6i5SYH. First question: Does this image work with an i5?  I try to boot from a bootable USB stick and no OS is found.  Please advise.

 

Steve

 

You can also try hqplayer-embedded-4.16.0-x64.img - it has the latest NAA image and it may sound different to your ears. The routine is the same, you burn the image to USB stick.

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12 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

 

You can also try hqplayer-embedded-4.16.0-x64.img - it has the latest NAA image and it may sound different to your ears. The routine is the same, you burn the image to USB stick.

If I already run embedded on another machine, how does booting this image know not to run NAA and not embedded?

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On 4/21/2020 at 4:58 PM, jabbr said:

Looks like those Up Gateway devices are back ordered :( 

 

Has anyone tried this device as NAA? https://mitxpc.com/products/sys-e300-8d It has fiberoptic input and allows PCIe x8 card

 

Not as NAA but I’ve been using this in one way or another for about a year now.

 

Good little device. Plus points for me were:

- 12v DC input - easy instant upgrade
- ATX power input for even better power supply upgrade potential
- PCI slot space inside the case (unlike the NUC cases)
- ECC RAM (sounds better in my book but I'm not getting into that)
- Xeon processor (again…sounds better in my book)
- Supermicro board (usually super micro boards have easily accessible clocks to upgrade. Also I think super micro boards sound good…yes, I know)
- SFP (not got around to testing this yet)
- 128GB RAM capacity (so I can load the whole of my Roon DB into memory using audiolinux...but see cautionary tale below)
- Intel network chipset (although I’ve got a JCAT network card in the PCI slot now)

 

Downsides:
- installed fans are crappy/noisy things

- Some unnecessary network sockets (currently disabled)
- I’ve found it impossible to find a replacement CPU heatsink (hence I’ve left the fans in). Difficult to find mounting hole configuration. Finding one of these would allow me to disable the fans and/or put the board into a decent fanless case, as you suggest.


Initially it ran my Roon Server using audiolinux until it crashed a number of times. I wrongly blamed the hardware (it was in fact the size of my Roon DB getting too big for Mono - .NET implementation on Linux - to manage. I’ve now learnt that big Roon installations are better under Windows and .NET). I swapped Roon Server onto an i7 NUC and it does benefit from the quicker CPU and windows. On the supermicro box I swapped the fans for quiet ones,  it now runs HQPlayer embedded feeding a pimped up Raspberry pi NAA which feeds the DAC an I2S signal. It's not powerful enough for any fancy upsampling but does the job.

 

I could go back to using USB - in which case I’d like to fit a clock-upgraded USB card - but I’ve found the Pi and using the I2S interface straight into the dac to be vastly superior to USB even though I can’t upsample beyond 384k on PCM and DSD is also limited.

 

If I can solve the replacement heatsink mount problem then I'll try sticking it in a fanless case.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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44 minutes ago, sledwards said:

If I already run embedded on another machine, how does booting this image know not to run NAA and not embedded?

 

In my case both standalone NAA and NAA contained in embedded image works ok with HQP desktop on other machine. I believe the sound differs slightly (even though NAA is identical, according to Miska), at least one could compare and decide easily. When only NAA used from embedded image, it is free. And, embedded image updated more often than standalone NAA. 

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