HQplayer 4 and Mac-mini M1

[Miska]

4 hours ago, Bushikai said:

Anyone try Hqplayer 4 with the new Mac mini M1, DSD256?

 

Yes, works fine from RedBook to DSD256 with poly-sinc-ext2 and ASDM7EC. And from higher rates with -2s filters and ASDM7EC. See the HQPlayer thread for more details.

 

[Miska]

13 minutes ago, Bushikai said:

Any update son the Mac mini? will it work without problems on DSD256?

 

My earlier statement still applies the same.

 

[Miska]

1 minute ago, jkenton said:

Is the fan noise objectionable?

 

Not in my opinion if the machine is not very close to your listening position. If you go about 50 cm behind the Mac Mini you can hear the fan. Two meters front of Mac Mini you would need a very quiet room to hear it. At least my unit (you never know if every fan they install is the same (ie. what kind of manufacturing tolerances the fans have).

 

4 minutes ago, jkenton said:

Is the internal power supply polluting the sound quality?

 

I don't know yet, I have not measured any DACs directly connected to it. At my office I have Mac Mini on the office desk while in the device rack 2 meters front of the desk has NAA and Holo Spring DAC. So I've been just playing to the NAA. In which case the PSU cannot pollute the sound.

 

[Miska]

On 2/7/2021 at 3:14 PM, giordy60 said:

is there any user who with a mac mini M1 (+ NAA) and a dac holo audio or denefrips has tried the upsampling in pcm 1.411-1.536 mhz?

 

Yes...

[Miska]

20 minutes ago, giordy60 said:

so it works, has no micro-interruptions?

 

 

Yes it should work fine, of course depending on filters etc.

 

[Miska]

For HQPlayer 8 GB should be enough, but I've heard rumors that 8 GB models tend to wear out the flash storage fairly quickly due to extensive swapping.

 

[Miska]

8 hours ago, pis99 said:

Yes, 7ec-sin_L does work in M1 as I listen to mostly original DSD files. If you want to do 44.1 to 7ec-sin-L, you can achieve this with another upsampling of 44.1 to 64 DSD(eg. Roon) before feeding HQplayer. 

 

sinc-L (or any of the other oversampling filters) is not used for DSD sources...

 

Doing any upsampling in Roon before HQPlayer would make HQPlayer's upsampling moot. Especially if you upsample to DSD in Roon you would have notable performance degradation.

 

[Miska]

There are two rate conversion options and number of integrators for DSD-to-DSD conversions in "DSD Sources" dialog. Load-wise these are not much different.

 

[Miska]

8 hours ago, camott said:

So I ran some HQPlayer performance tests on my i9-9980HK MacBook Pro 16 using the null output. 24/192 → 1536 with gauss-xla could not quite do 1x processing speed with no multicore DSP (2 cores). With multicore DSP set it used 4 cores and was able to process almost 2x speed.

 

Multicore DSP should be set to grayed (auto) which usually gives best overall performance in playback cases.

 

8 hours ago, camott said:

Given that the M1 single core is about 25% faster than my 9th gen Intel i9

 

Where does this figure come from? At least it is not the case comparing my M1 Mac Mini to my iMac with i9-9900K, where single core of 9900K is about 2x faster than single performance core on M1, under HQPlayer loads.

 

[Miska]

9 minutes ago, camott said:

What I don't understand is why auto multicore uses 2 additional cores than forced multicore.

 

Auto is "smart mode" while forced is "dumb mode". In most cases, auto should give best results. But the dumb mode is there just in case.

 

9 minutes ago, camott said:

Regarding performance of M1 core vs i9 9th gen - this was based purely on various benchmarks I have seen comparing M1 vs i9-9980HK, be it cinebench or geek bench or whatever. They all suggest that the M1 is slightly faster in single core tests. But they also give similar results for your i9-9900K. So not entirely sure why your real world tests with HQPlayer suggest otherwise - I suppose those other benchmarks are testing more than pure cpu which is what HQPlayer is all about (vs memory bus etc)? One thing I will note is that your i9-9900K has a baseline frequency of 3.6Ghz whereas my i9-9980HK for above tests has a base frequency of 2.4Ghz.

 

Those benchmarks are not applicable to HQPlayer workloads. Actually I have not seen any synthetic benchmark that would be directly applicable to HQPlayer. Even more so when you mix in realtime processing and modulator loads like ASDM7EC. That is why I added kind of benchmarking functionality to HQPlayer with null outputs.

 

15 minutes ago, camott said:

Can your M1 do 192 -> 1536 PCM with guass-xla??

 

My only 1.5M capable DAC is Spring 2 which is at different location than my M1 Mac Mini. If Spring 3 will still have that 1.5M capability, I will test with it once I get one (hopefully within a month or so).

 

[Miska]

11 minutes ago, camott said:

@Miska one further question for you. guass-xla takes slightly longer to process 1x 44.1 -> 1.411 than it does for Nx 192 > 1.536 in my benchmark tests.

 

Because in former case the conversion ratio is higher while both produce practically same output rate.

 

11 minutes ago, camott said:

i.e. 1x has heavier load. Why is this? I had thought that the same filter for 1x was a lot faster than Nx (and thus why you have separate 1x vs Nx settings). But in this case the pattern doesn't hold. Is this particular to gauss filters or ???

 

That is not the reason for separate filters. But the reason is that for hires material you may want different kind of filter.

 

[Miska]

1 minute ago, camott said:

Ok thanks. I guess I was confused because often it seems like people use ext3 for 1x and ext2 for Nx, which I assumed was for performance reasons. Or maybe it's different for PCM -> DSD.

 

ext3 is steeper while ext2 is gentler. And for PCM -> DSD it is indeed different for the two stage cases in terms of CPU load too.

 

Hires generally has more frequency space at top end for gentler filters. Also ADC side anti-alias filters are typically gentler for hires rates.

 

[Miska]

2 hours ago, camott said:

So bear with me ... but would the same ext3/ext2 argument apply to gauss-long and gauss-xla filters as well? one might want gauss-xla extra long/steep filter for 1x but could get away with gauss-long for Nx?

 

Yes, excatly. That is what I'm having right now on one of my servers.

 

[Miska]

37 minutes ago, camott said:

Ok. And do you use gauss-long for Nx because it sounds better with the shorter filter or because of performance issues with PCM -> DSD SDM process with gauss-xla? (or put another way, is there a sonic cost for using an unnecessarily long/steep filter on hi-res?).

 

I generally don't select algorithms because of performance issues, I always select based on sound and objective characteristics.

 

Performance issues are usually solved by using fast enough hardware. If something doesn't work -> buy more powerful hardware.

 

[Miska]

M1 is best compared to other ultra-mobile CPU offerings, like Intel's U-series Core CPUs (used on various NUC models too).

 

No doubt Apple will have a bigger desktop scale CPU at some point. I just hope they can do it without cutting a lot on the CPU clock speeds. So a single core would need to be at least as fast as M1's performance cores. Otherwise EC modulators at DSD256 speeds are not possible.

 

 

[Miska]

23 hours ago, caesee said:

I try to add a minidsp usb streamer to a m1 mac mini,Every time I set input device as usb streamer but change to default after i close settings windows

 

Does it still work anyway?

 

[Miska]

5 hours ago, BrownMagic said:

I tried Sinc MX at 1.5M using my 2018 Macbook Pro. 2.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7. I tried all buffer settings (10 to 250 ms) but still the music was stuttering. It would play for 10 seconds and then pause for a second and then continue. Like it was buffering. I had the same problem even at 786 but slightly better. The NAA is a mini pc running HQP on Linux. Using Roon as the front end. Any settings to be changed on Roon?

 

Can someone confirm if my macbook pro is just under powered for this filter? Or is there some other problem. Using a May Dac 's USB connection. 

 

Leave "Buffer time" as default.

 

Not visible in the picture, but is "Multicore DSP" set to grayed (auto) setting?

 

[Miska]

2 hours ago, BrownMagic said:

@Miskai have a bigger problem. HQP won’t open. It just freezes with the Colorfull ball rotating on the Mac. I’ve tried restarting the computer. The dac and the NAA device. But still no luck. Also tried a reinstall of HQP but still the same.

 

You can rename or delete file settings.xml from folder "~/.hqplayer" to reset HQPlayer settings back to defaults.

 

[Miska]

I should hide the CUDA option in recent macOS versions, because it doesn't have any effect on macOS anymore (Apple and Nvidia have discontinued support for this).

 

[Miska]

On 8/8/2021 at 5:43 PM, BrownMagic said:

@Miskais there any setting that I need to change on my mac? Everyone I ask is saying that a 2018 intel i7 should have no trouble with 1.5m pcm. So it looks a Mac OS problem. Can you suggest any changes that I need to do on my mac’s settings?

 

It all depends on your filter selection. Try first with for example regular poly-sinc-lp and see if it works. Just make sure "Multicore DSP" box is set to "grayed" (auto).

 

Since you will need to either use 16-bit output, or a NAA to achieve 1.5M PCM from macOS, it could be a networking or NAA issue as well. If you use UP Gateway and my NAA OS image for the NAA, it should work if the network is fine. But I've already forgotten what kind of NAA you had.

 

[Miska]

4 hours ago, BrownMagic said:

I have the problem in all filter settings. 1.5m wont work. I use an intel celeron mele pc stick as an NAA. It runs linux and has ur NAA image that runs on the mele pc itself. No usb stick or anything.

 

If the hardware has not been verified to work with 1.5M rates, it may not necessarily work. Has someone else reported that piece of hardware to work?

 

4 hours ago, BrownMagic said:

What do u mean by UP gateway? Is that a setting on the Mac? Also when you say network is fine, I am on a 1gbps line. The macbook pro is on wifi but I sit right next to the router. NAA is conneted via ethernet cable. Can you please advise. Thanks

 

It is piece of hardware, but as system doesn't seem to be available anymore (seems to have been removed within last few days). Only as boards.

 

Question is more does 802.3x Flow Control work on your network. And depending on age of your Mac and the wireless access point, you may encounter problems, especially at 2.8 GHz WiFi band.

 

[Miska]

3 minutes ago, oldfirm said:

I am on the cusp of purchasing a Mac Mini M1  16Gb , just for the exclusive processing of HQPlayer- ROON core is currently  firmly established exclusively  on a laptop (Ryzen 5 3500U cpu)

I was hoping I would get a definitive answer from this thread , but I'm getting mixed messages.

Its not an insignificant amount of money for the MMM1 and I am uncertain that a "bang for the Buck" will be provided.

Any thoughts gentlemen?

 

Maybe wait for Apple to provide M1 Pro or M1 Max on Mac Mini?

[Miska]

1 hour ago, camott said:

So now that there are functional linux kernels for the M1, maybe one day @Miskawill build HQP Embedded/OS for the M1 ... :| I know it's early days yet but would be cool to have HQP Embedded take advantage of the M1.

 

I'm fine when Ubuntu, Fedora or Debian ships with official M1 support. My guess is that Debian will be first and Fedora last to support M1.

 

[Miska]

2 hours ago, Schafheide said:

I am a newbie regarding HQPlayer.

Will this setup work (I only listen to files on my NAS) -

NAS - WiFi - Mac Mini M1 16GB (HQPlayer installed) - USB - Singxer SU-6 DDC - i2s - Holo May KTE - BHSE - Stax SR-009S.

 

At least without the Singxer it works. I'm not familiar with that Singxer device.

 

[Miska]

On 11/26/2021 at 3:39 AM, bobflood said:

Jussi,  Quick question: When I start-up HQP on my Mini M1, I get a message that network QoS if unavailable. It disappears after 3 or 4 seconds. Is this normal behavior or is something amiss? I don't seem to be having any playback issues but I just wanted to be sure.

 

Edit: OK, I didn't read carefully enough. On macOS it may be due to system permissions, but if it fails and the requested permissions have been granted, there's nothing much more one can do.

 

Are you on stock Windows 10 or Windows 11?

 

If you use something like Audiophile Optimizer or Fidelizer, those can break HQPlayer in such ways.

 

If you are on some (unsupported) Windows Server edition, you may need to install additional OS components so that you have all the required parts installed.

 

Without QoS support HQPlayer cannot control network I/O priorities and you may encounter bandwidth issues with NAAs and such.