A toast to PGGB, a heady brew of math and magic

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

17 minutes ago, sig8 said:

I will get another 2-32GB stick, it will be 96GB for now. I have a 500GB SSD on hand. I will be using this machine for playback as well, running HQPe on Audiolinux, that is what I do right now. NVMe v/s SSD is for the speed of conversion or it affects the sound quality for those who rum HQP on the hard disk?

For the purpose of PGGB, the NVME is for speed of conversion. Think of virtual memory as a extension of physical memory, so faster NVME will help with faster conversion. (Edit: main thing to note is the SSD needs to be internal, windows will not use external drives for virtual memory and correctly so as they are too slow for paging)

From a SQ perspective, my playback server is Audio Linux too and I use 4TB Intel NVME and  8 TB Sabrent Rocket NVME for storing gargle-blasted albums and am happy with them.

 

My workstation which is a intel i9 based with 64GB of RAM is my gargle-blasting machine and has two 2TB Samsung NVME sticks.

[sig8]

18 minutes ago, Zaphod Beeblebrox said:

For the purpose of PGGB, the NVME is for speed of conversion. Think of virtual memory as a extension of physical memory, so faster NVME will help with faster conversion. (Edit: main thing to note is the SSD needs to be internal, windows will not use external drives for virtual memory and correctly so as they are too slow for paging)

From a SQ perspective, my playback server is Audio Linux too and I use 4TB Intel NVME and  8 TB Sabrent Rocket NVME for storing gargle-blasted albums and am happy with them.

 

My workstation which is a intel i9 based with 64GB of RAM is my gargle-blasting machine and has two 2TB Samsung NVME sticks.

How much RAM on your AL machine? You play from flash drive or RAM ROOT? If not using playback computer for upsampling in HQPe, then maybe a NUC can be used for playback?

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

11 minutes ago, sig8 said:

How much RAM on your AL machine? You play from flash drive or RAM ROOT? If not using playback computer for upsampling in HQPe, then maybe a NUC can be used for playback?

64GB on my AL server, built by @lmitche and in RAM Root. 64GB is a overkill 16GB would have been plenty for playback and for Roon.  But my requirements were different. I use HQPe + NAA for playback of gargle-blasted library and Roon->HQPe->NAA for streamed music.

 

Having moved from a NUC, I would say, a high powered low latency, low noise server direct to my DAC is better than using my previous i7 NUC.. Also if you were to enable compression, the higher horse power will come in handy during playback.

 

Edit: Answering your question, even if not using HQPe for upsampling, and just using it for pass through, I felt moving to the AL AMD server was better in comparison to a NUC when playing back gargle-blasted tracks.

[sig8]

11 minutes ago, Zaphod Beeblebrox said:

64GB on my AL server, built by @lmitche and in RAM Root. 64GB is a overkill 16GB would have been plenty for playback and for Roon.  But my requirements were different. I use HQPe + NAA for playback of gargle-blasted library and Roon->HQPe->NAA for streamed music.

 

Having moved from a NUC, I would say, a high powered low latency, low noise server direct to my DAC is better than using my previous i7 NUC.. Also if you were to enable compression, the higher horse power will come in handy during playback.

 

Edit: Answering your question, even if not using HQPe for upsampling, and just using it for pass through, I felt moving to the AL AMD server was better in comparison to a NUC when playing back gargle-blasted tracks.

Thanks. So we are looking at two high powered machines, got one for now. Let me give it a try and we will see.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

3 minutes ago, sig8 said:

Thanks. So we are looking at two high powered machines, got one for now. Let me give it a try and we will see.

If you can run Windows on your current playback server and boot AL in RAM ROOT from a stick, then you can make it work. If you already have a NUC, you could try that and compare results for playback.

[sig8]

14 minutes ago, Zaphod Beeblebrox said:

If you can run Windows on your current playback server and boot AL in RAM ROOT from a stick, then you can make it work. If you already have a NUC, you could try that and compare results for playback.

That's the plan for now.

[happybob]

On 5/28/2021 at 5:53 AM, Zaphod Beeblebrox said:

With 16GB of RAM you will have to limit it to CDs and 256M taps.  Big Sur is not a requirement, I suggested it for future proofing reasons. Mojave or Catalina will be OK too. RAM is what PGGB requires most, and on a Mac, unlike wWindows it is not possible to change virtual memory/swap space. If you can go up to 32GB for Hires and 40-64GB for DSD. You can do DSD at 32GB but may have to limit it to 512M taps if you run out of memory.

 

I'm wondering how much difference in sound quality (subjective I know) to 16FS with a Dave DAC is there between 256M taps and maximum number of taps (if I had a machine with 128GB RAM) for 44K/16 originals? I have a MBPro with 16GB of Ram, although will be upgrading this year to the coming new M2 MBPro with 64GB RAM, but most of what I'd upsample is 44K. 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

37 minutes ago, happybob said:

I'm wondering how much difference in sound quality (subjective I know) to 16FS with a Dave DAC is there between 256M taps and maximum number of taps (if I had a machine with 128GB RAM) for 44K/16 originals? I have a MBPro with 16GB of Ram, although will be upgrading this year to the coming new M2 MBPro with 64GB RAM, but most of what I'd upsample is 44K. 

If you are going to upgrade to 64GB and doing mostly PCM (44.1k, 2FS or 4FS), unless the track length exceeds 50 minutes, you will likely not be limited by 64GB of RAM.

 

Regarding how much better a track will sound between 256M taps to the max limit, that is tough question as it not only depends on how much more taps but also on the recording itself. At 256M you will (and I think you are) already hearing a significant improvement. I hope  ()can chime in as his impressions may be more relevant to classical music and align with your music preference.

[kelvinwsy]

I hear sonic improvements using the max 8192 M setting for number of taps 16fs .. 

[davide256]

14 minutes ago, Zaphod Beeblebrox said:

If you are going to upgrade to 64GB and doing mostly PCM (44.1k, 2FS or 4FS), unless the track length exceeds 50 minutes, you will likely not be limited by 64GB of RAM.

 

Regarding how much better a track will sound between 256M taps to the max limit, that is tough question as it not only depends on how much more taps but also on the recording itself. At 256M you will (and I think you are) already hearing a significant improvement. I hope  @austinpop can chime in as his impressions may be more relevant to classical music and align with your music preference.

Does more taps = bigger file size?

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Just now, kelvinwsy said:

I hear sonic improvements using the max 8192 M setting for number of taps 16fs .. 

Setting 8192 M taps does not guarantee those many taps being used, you can see how many taps are used in the output file . I have highlighted it for one of my albums

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

5 minutes ago, davide256 said:

Does more taps = bigger file size?

No. As a rule of thumb, every 11 minute 25 seconds of a stereo track at 16FS and 32 bits takes up about 4GB of space (which is the maximum size for 32 bit wav files). So, on an average typical CDs that are 40 - 45 minutes long will take about 16GB of space at 16FS 32 bits. At 8FS 32 bits that is 8GB and at 8FS 24 bits it will be 6GB.

 

 

[kelvinwsy]

I noticed this too .. having only 48gb RAM limits the taps I get to 170-195

 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

1 minute ago, kelvinwsy said:

I noticed this too .. having only 48gb RAM limits the taps I get to 170-195

 

The limit is not related to RAM, it is a function of how long the tracks are. 

This FAQ article may be of help: PGGB - FAQ (remastero.com)

[kelvinwsy]

Ohh so my 44.1 khz tracks of say up to slightly over 4minutes is generating the max number of taps already? So i am seeing those numbers 149-170 up to just less than 200M taps?

[davide256]

 

 

9 minutes ago, Zaphod Beeblebrox said:

The limit is not related to RAM, it is a function of how long the tracks are. 

This FAQ article may be of help: PGGB - FAQ (remastero.com)

would adding Optane memory help processing?

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

1 minute ago, kelvinwsy said:

Ohh so my 44.1 khz tracks of say up to slightly over 4minutes is generating the max number of taps already? So i am seeing those numbers 149-170 up to just less than 200M taps?

Exactly, you are correct. The RAM only limits you on the the maximum taps your machine can process but unless you have DSDs or your tracks are an hour long, , it is going to be very rare to hit 1024M or more.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

1 minute ago, davide256 said:

 

 

would adding Optane memory help processing?

Not unless you can get 128GB  or more for virtual memory. Though I am not sure of the size and costs of optane vs just investing in more RAM.

[austinpop]

As ZB has pointed out, the Max Taps setting in the GUI is only an upper bound, and only kicks in when your track length reaches the relevant threshold. Refer to the table in the website:

 

 

 

If the GUI is suggesting a max setting of 256M due to your RAM size, then note that this has no impact if your track lengths are under 6:03 (at 705.6kHz) and 5:33 (at 768kHz). For tracks under these lengths, the filter length will be some value less than 256M that corresponds to the track length. Here's another table to illustrate. So if your track is only 5 mins long, it'll only use a 212M tap filter (at 705.6kHz).

 

Track Length (mins)	Sample rate (in kHz)	Taps to cover track (million)
1	705.6	42
2	705.6	85
5	705.6	212
10	705.6	423

 

On the other hand, for a 10 min long track, PGGB will limit the filter length to 256M due to the limited RAM available. If you had more RAM, it would have constructed a filter of 423M length.

 

I hope this clarifies things?

[austinpop]

3 hours ago, happybob said:

I'm wondering how much difference in sound quality (subjective I know) to 16FS with a Dave DAC is there between 256M taps and maximum number of taps (if I had a machine with 128GB RAM) for 44K/16 originals? 

 

There is certainly a difference. As I pointed out in my last post, the magnitude of difference will be greater if the track length is greater. Take the example of a 10 min track. It would have processed at 423M taps if you had had more RAM, but instead processed at 256M due to your limited RAM. The difference between a 423M and 256M taps filter would be quite minor. But if you had a 48 min track, which would have processed at 2048M taps with adequate RAM, whereas it processed at 256M taps on your system, the sonic delta between the 2048M tap-processed file and the 256M tap-processed file would be noticeable.

 

So keep that in mind - a lot depends on track length. 

 

If your favored genres are manifested as primarily 16/44.1 with average track lengths of 5 mins, you may not ever need more than 16GB to be perfectly content with PGGB. But if you listen to classical or other genres where long track lengths are common, investing in more RAM is very worthwhile.

[happybob]

22 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

There is certainly a difference. As I pointed out in my last post, the magnitude of difference will be greater if the track length is greater. Take the example of a 10 min track. It would have processed at 423M taps if you had had more RAM, but instead processed at 256M due to your limited RAM. The difference between a 423M and 256M taps filter would be quite minor. But if you had a 48 min track, which would have processed at 2048M taps with adequate RAM, whereas it processed at 256M taps on your system, the sonic delta between the 2048M tap-processed file and the 256M tap-processed file would be noticeable.

 

So keep that in mind - a lot depends on track length. 

 

If your favored genres are manifested as primarily 16/44.1 with average track lengths of 5 mins, you may not ever need more than 16GB to be perfectly content with PGGB. But if you listen to classical or other genres where long track lengths are common, investing in more RAM is very worthwhile.

Thanks for this info. I listen to a very wide variety of music, much is shorter tracks but I do listen to quite a bit of classical and so that'd be an issue. I'd like to avoid doing multiple rounds of upsampling my library - so what I might do is to only process the albums with shorter tracks and then wait for those longer ones till I get my new system (will likely be the coming MBPro with **rumored** 64GB of RAM and M2 chip). I don't really want to have yet another computer just for processing PGGB files at least not at this point.

[davide256]

Pity this doesn't run on VMWare... be nice to just rent some virtual machines, supply library and download the converted albums in a week.

[ray-dude]

FWIW, before the Mac version was available, I was running PGGB in the free (for home use) version of VMware on my Mac Pro.  Worked like a charm.  That being said, I'm happy to be rid of Windows and running it natively on OS X now.

[austinpop]

1 hour ago, happybob said:

I'd like to avoid doing multiple rounds of upsampling my library - so what I might do is to only process the albums with shorter tracks and then wait for those longer ones till I get my new system

 

As someone who just redid almost 300 albums because I switched from 32-bit to 24-bit files (for using the SRC-DX bridge with my DAVE), redoing the upsampling is not that big a deal. If you wait for a *rumored* machine, you're just depriving yourself. Even at a cap of 256M taps, PGGB makes a massive improvement over the native file!

 

BTW - during the initial development, I must have redone my albums 4-5 times as ZB made incremental improvements. I did not regret it one iota.

[bobfa]

20 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

As someone who just redid almost 300 albums because I switched from 32-bit to 24-bit files (for using the SRC-DX bridge with my DAVE), redoing the upsampling is not that big a deal. If you wait for a *rumored* machine, you're just depriving yourself. Even at a cap of 256M taps, PGGB makes a massive improvement over the native file!

 

BTW - during the initial development, I must have redone my albums 4-5 times as ZB made incremental improvements. I did not regret it one iota.

I am in the process of running about 500 albums to 24bit.   Just letting things crank!.  I wish my mother board did 128gb of RAM.  I may just build another PC.  I have about 4TB of music files that I could re-master.   I have not started on the classical yet, or the DSDs....  All I need is the RAM and a Motherboard that will take my CPU.    The old machine is sunk cost....