HQPlayer4 EC modulator tips and techniques

[jabbr]

7 hours ago, craighartley said:

Depends slightly on which filter you use though: it won't do DSD256 with EC modulators using Closed-Form 16M.

 

My Xeon W-2245 handles Closed-form fine with EC ... There are a number of differences between the different chips -- for example the Xeon W and i9-9900*X* have AVX512 but the i9-9900K doesn't ... and the i9-9900K boosts higher so those are tradeoffs.

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49 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Ahhhh. Just like audio :~)

 

Yes although I am looking for something that the i9-9900K or KS can handle that the W 2245 can't. Similar to the W2245 would be the i9-10900X -- which also has AVX512 but I'm guessing that W2245 is better (2 less cores and slighly higher speeds)

 

I think HQP with EC filters is a terrific benchmark!

[jabbr]

9 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Absolutely. 

 

I'm trying to figure out which proc to go with for this Asus build and really can't decide. One important thing is that the proc is available to people who want to build the same thing that I write about. Sure I could get a KS from one of the three sellers on Amazon, but nobody else could get one once those are gone. 

 

The i9-9900K is widely available, the W-2245 seems to be available albeit from business oriented sources, and the i9-10900x seems to be available. 

 

I don't think you can go wrong with either for most people -- though the i9-10900K is right around the corner, so could also be considered.

 

If you want pure number crunching goodness the W-2245 is what I just selected. I also wanted the extra PCIe lanes because my network card is PCe 4.0 x 16 (though the motherboard is only PCIe 3.0 but good enough). I have also wanted to have the capability of doing 6-8 channels.

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3 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I'd say it's between these two for what I should select. 

 

 

Good choices -- realize that you are looking at the i9-10900X, not the K ... and I looked at that vs the W-2245, I didn't need the extra 2 cores 10 vs 8 and the base clock speed of the W-2245 is 3.9 Ghz which is better, so that was my deciding factor.

 

I do prefer socket 2066 vs 1151 (more PCIe lanes)

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Just now, barrows said:

Thanks Ted, I'll check it out.  I really want to run Linux/Sonic Transporter/Roon on this, as I familiar with that set up, and I really want to have nothing to do with Windows here, not sure how that would/could work out on a Dell.

Mine came with Ubuntu 18.04 preloaded (though I immediately reloaded a fresh 18.04 because I don’t like OEM kernels). You need to look for and start with the base option that provides Ubuntu. I priced out building my own and Dell came in cheaper — even though I cut my hourly rate down to $0 in an effort to win the bid 😊

[jabbr]

The ASDM7EC with either xtr-lp or xtr-mp at DSD256 sounds really fantastic

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23 minutes ago, StreamFidelity said:

2.1.4 Hyperthreading

 

If the HQPlayer loads complex filters, it will occupy all cores with 100%. To prevent the system from freezing, hyperthreading should be activated. 16 logical processors are then made available. As a result, the computing load can be better distributed.

This is entirely opposite to what I’ve found. What so-called complex filters are you using and what evidence do you can that they load all 8 cores at 100%? — aside from multichannel, and/or startup that is, HQP generally loads a single core per channel at a high rate with the EC modulators. 

 

Here are the speeds my cores are running at, at the moment: 

jon@jon-w2245:~$ ./cpuspeeds.sh
Processor:  0  Mhz:  3900.000
Processor:  1  Mhz:  1200.286
Processor:  2  Mhz:  1200.061
Processor:  3  Mhz:  1596.051
Processor:  4  Mhz:  3900.000
Processor:  5  Mhz:  1381.722
Processor:  6  Mhz:  4499.999
Processor:  7  Mhz:  1200.048
Processor:  8  Mhz:  3904.632
Processor:  9  Mhz:  1201.346
Processor:  10  Mhz:  1201.246
Processor:  11  Mhz:  1510.476
Processor:  12  Mhz:  3900.118
Processor:  13  Mhz:  1360.446
Processor:  14  Mhz:  4499.598
Processor:  15  Mhz:  1200.049
CPU model:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-2245 CPU @ 3.90GHz
1 CPU,  8 physical cores per CPU, total 16 logical CPU units

There are 2 cores running HQPlayer ASDM7EC ... these cores are running at 3.9 Ghz (so 4 "Processors") and a third core is running another program at 4.5 Ghz / 50% ... the rest of the cores are sitting idle at 1.2 Ghz.

 

I haven't even looked at my BIOS

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26 minutes ago, StreamFidelity said:

 

I consider this setting to be suboptimal. it leads to the fact that different clock frequencies are permanently assigned to the cores. This leads to a restless sound in my ears. It is better to set all cores to the same clock frequency. That is among other things the reason to optimize the BIOS. 😉

 

No, permanent settings aren't assigned to cores. That might have been the case some years ago. The Intel chips are very complex and the various boosting algorithms depend on various factors including temp but also it appears likely that the AVX512 instructions throttle the core to a degree. The new Xeon W series as well as the Skylake-*X* series have 2 of these units.

 

Um hmm its complicated and not necessarily affected by BIOS settings   This guy is very well respected and wrote this blog a few years ago on this very issue: https://lemire.me/blog/2018/08/13/the-dangers-of-avx-512-throttling-myth-or-reality/

[jabbr]

29 minutes ago, StreamFidelity said:

A complex filter is for example poly-sinc-long-lp. Its sounds very good. As you can see in the Task Manager below, all physical cores are loaded. The other eight (logical) cores prevent the system from freezing.

 

Ok look you are upsampling from 96k to 192k ... we are talking about DSD upsampling using the EC modulators in this thread ... of course certain workloads will load cores equally 

 

But on my system using HQP in PCM mode, upsampling from 96K -> 384K using poly-sinc-long-lp only uses 7% of my CPU and they are idling by at 1.2Ghz ... very relaxed

 

Wow! Going back to PCM upsampling and then back to ASDM7EC shows exactly how great these modulators sound!

[jabbr]

37 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

This looks different if you switch modulator to something like ASDM7 and run let's say poly-sinc-xtr or poly-sinc-long to DSD512 or DSD1024 on the CPU.

Certainly ... although my previous server “experiment” with 20 E5 cores could not do DSD512  and we really need to optimize highest per core performance ... in general 

[jabbr]

5 hours ago, StreamFidelity said:

 

We're probably talking at cross purposes. Independent of AVX, I can assign a fixed clock frequency to all cores. For AVX an AVX offset is also possible. For example -5, which would allow me to throttle the CPU from 4.1 - 5 = 3.6 GHz when using AVX instruction sets like HQPlayer. Of course this is not useful for EC modulators. 

 

Are you saying that you DISABLE AVX in BIOS?, or tell me which BIOS settings you are using for AVX specifically? I think that would be counterproductive but I've considered doing that as an experiment to see if the Xeon W would boost > 3.9 when running the EC modulators, that would give more evidence that the reason the boost isn't happening are the AVX512 units.

 

5 hours ago, StreamFidelity said:

 

As you can see in the HWMonitor, all 8 cores are permanently assigned 4.1GHz. What differs is the degree of utilization (in %). I appreciate this setting in the BIOS very much, because it brings more silence into the sound image compared to permanently changing clock frequencies. Just give it a try. 😉

 

My CPU cores typically run at 1.2 Ghz when unused and that is very quiet!

 

I measure individual core temps in Linux using the "sensors" program, and wrote a little script to pretty print the individual core clock rates:

https://github.com/jab-r/scripts/blob/master/cpuspeeds.sh

 

[jabbr]

1 hour ago, StreamFidelity said:

I'm not denying that. But at 1.2 GHz you could hardly run an EC modulator, could you? 😉

Yes its magic!

1 hour ago, StreamFidelity said:

 

So it depends on how the cores behave in music mode. And here I see an advantage in having all cores at the same level of 4.1 GHz for example. This is of course a question of your own ears. I tried both settings and decided to go for the more restless version. Have you tried both variations? Only then does it make sense to discuss it.

 

Oh there are too many variables for my ears to sort out. I haven't even yet compared all the combinations of filters and modulators and NAAs and DACs that I have. What I know is that my system is sounding absolutely fantastic with this new workstation I have (Xeon W) and listening to the ASDM7EC modulator at DSD256! Let me see ... does closed-form-16m sound different than xtr-mp? I don't even know yet because I am having such a great time listening! 

 

Which filters do people like best?