AudioLinux and NUC Troubleshooting and Tuning

[greenleo]

10 hours ago, davide256 said:

Did not observe much difference between HDPlex 19v vs LPS1.2 12V powering NUC7PJYH connected to DDC, but when using an ISO Regen between NUC and DDC with 5v USB replace enabled, the difference between PS used for ISO Regen is  glaring

I suppose the LPS-1.2 was the better PS in the context, right?

[davide256]

Just now, greenleo said:

I suppose the LPS-1.2 was the better PS in the context, right?

yes

[ray-dude]

Thank you @mansr for the correction/redirect, and thank you @vortecjr (and Google translate) for the link to the blog post (wow, that clears up a lot of things!)   Time to brush up on my Italian and revisit my notes from today.  Thanks again!

[bibo01]

1 hour ago, vortecjr said:

There is a very good write up in Italian (http://marcoc1712.it/?p=458) that explains the relationships of these settings in SqueezeLite. I prefer using ms settings because the duration of the buffer is consistent at all sample rates. Using bytes varies the buffer duration as the sample rate changes. At the end of the day the object of the game is to avoid buffer under runs or a buffer over runs. Having a large buffer increases the latency and having a large period makes the processor work more because it has to fill the bucket more often for any given buffer size.  

 

BTW This is all very easy to change on the Rendu series with a press of a button. On the Rendu series in Settings / SqueezeLIte if you just press Save you get SqueezeLite's default of 40 ms buffer and period of 4. Barrows has done some listening tests recently and prefers a 200 ms buffer and period count of 2. You can change these values at the risk of introducing dropouts and erratic playback behavior. Also, these values have limits as discussed in the write up. BTW these are just buffer settings between SqueezeLite and ALSA and not ALSA and your DAC...that is a whole other world of buffer fun which is DAC dependent.

 

The link vortecjr has provide is by Marco, developer of SqueezeLite R2 who is present at NextHardware.

He has also developed a simple tool to change buffer, period,... and test results.

[misterspense]

Are you guys using the R2 version of Squeezelite, or the 1.9 version? Is there also a sound quality difference between them, or are they more related to the settings used, and the standard settings R2 and 1.9 come with?

[ray-dude]

I'm running SqueezeLite R2 1.8.4, but only because that was the first option on the AudioLinux install guide.  I haven't compared sound quality, but from the docs it looks like the functionality is aligned between R2 and the community version, but with different flags to enable.

 

squeezelite-R2

Lightweight headless squeezebox client emulator with 'native' DSD support (thanks to Daphile).

This is a modified version of squeezelite by Adrian Smith (Triode). At the moment of writing (October 2015), original code is here: https://code.google.com/p/squeezelite/, master branch here is a clone.

This version was originally meant to inspect pcm header to detect the real samplerate, depth and endianess, in order to override the wrong information coming from the server when transcoding or upsampling.

October, 4 2015 R2 features has been incorporated in Daphile, March, 10 2016 in Audiolinux.

Since March, 15 2016 it's included in the squeezebox community version of squeezelite, mantained by Ralph Irving.

Download page: https://github.com/marcoc1712/squeezelite-R2/releases

[austinpop]

1 hour ago, misterspense said:

Are you guys using the R2 version of Squeezelite, or the 1.9 version? Is there also a sound quality difference between them, or are they more related to the settings used, and the standard settings R2 and 1.9 come with?

 

I'm using the community "Ralph Irving" version. I had trouble getting R2 working, although it may have been resolvable with more effort. I also got confused with a seeming dependency on C-3PO, although that may have been a misunderstanding.

 

Piero now has links to both.

[BigAlMc]

@ray-dude & @austinpop,

 

Awesome work guys and great discovery.

 

At the very real risk of pushing my luck it would be great if we could have a simple 'how to' guide for the technically incompetent (like me) showing how to set buffer size for:

 

Squeezelite endpoint

Roon bridge endpoint

 

And ideally in both the 4gb and 8gb flavours that are likely most prevalent.

 

The obvious question is whether the 4gb flavour has sufficient ram spare to make a difference in SQ via this buffer setting or whether 8gb is worth the investment?

 

Either way this is terrific stuff and an excellent area of exploration. Even if I need to read it twice in order to understand half of it! ?

 

Cheers,

Alan

 

[afrancois]

23 hours ago, BigAlMc said:

 

Two topics and not sure if they are related.

 

Working on my new i7DNBE based Roon endpoint in the Plato X7 fanless case. Running 4GB RAM, no wifi or bluetooth as the board doesnt support them. Using AL headless in Extreme mode with Ram root enabled.

 

A. Everytime I restarted the NUC endpoint I need to reselect and enable it in Roon. Any ideas why it's not automatically recognising it?

 

B. I can't seem to get the power down low enough for either the LPS1.2 or my SPS-500 to work with it. The LPS1.2 flashes red as soon as I connect it. The SPS-500 (on 19V and I thought it handled like 3amps) doesn't provide enough juice for the NUC on button to do anything.

 

I've put the power settings down to 10w and burst of 12w. I've disabled all the USB slots apart from the two being used for the USB flash and connecting to the DAC. I've even switched off 3 or the cores so that only 1 core is running and switched off hyperthreading and performance boost.

 

The LPS1.2 I can understand but I thought the SPS-500 was a decent plan B as it has more power but my i7DNBE thinks otherwise. 

 

Unsure what else to try disabling in order to get it working on a cleaner PSU.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Also, as per the picture below. Should I be disabling all these HDMI endpoints that are showing up on the NUC?

 

Cheers,

Alan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm using an AL NUC7i7DNHE as a server, so I don't need any audio devices enabled on the NUC.

While I had disabled audio over HDMI in the BIOS. HQPlayer and Roon continued recognizing the audio card.

The solution was to blacklist the device. Another credit to the Intel BIOS efficiency :-(

 

I created a file /etc/modprob.d/noHDMIaudio.conf

The file contains:

blacklist snd_hda_codec_hdmi
blacklist snd_hda_intel
blacklist snd_hda_codec
 

 

[LTG2010]

I"m using squeezelite-r2 with roon as control. Tried all the buffer settings both in roon & sl, but I also get the skipping and sometimes freezing. I'm wondering if the other version is a better match or is it only truly compatible with LMS?

[BigAlMc]

Thanks @afrancois

 

I've spent the morning pottering and am admitting defeat. The i7DNBE is not willing to boot with either the LPS1.2 or the SPS-500.

 

I've switched off everything possible and disconnected everything possible and no dice. It just doesn't seem to like either.

 

Am thinking I'm gonna need to buy a new PSU (Sean Jacobs, HD Plex etc) but that's really annoying when I have a collection of PSU's at hand!

 

Cheers,

Alan

[rickca]

10 hours ago, bibo01 said:

He has also developed a simple tool to change buffer, period,... and test results.

Can you provide a link to this tool, please?

[seeteeyou]

18 minutes ago, BigAlMc said:

Am thinking I'm gonna need to buy a new PSU (Sean Jacobs, HD Plex etc) but that's really annoying when I have a collection of PSU's at hand!

 

Look at the bright side, Extreme 2 mode of AL won't work with LPS-1.2 (12V × 1.1A = 13.2W) even if you're able to boot it up. OTOH, Dr. Jacobs' DC3 flagship PSU could provide 32W (i.e. 24V / 1.5A) so that should be OK

 

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/30376-a-novel-way-to-massively-improve-the-sq-of-computer-audio-streaming/?page=476&tab=comments#comment-902422

On 12/4/2018 at 11:21 AM, mourip said:

I turned on AL extreme mode for my ramroot setup. My NUC has no internal drives and in extreme mode is not even warm to the touch.

 

Wow. This is what folks have been talking about. Very clear, analogue sound with a deep realistic sound stage.

 

In addition, the output of DC3 came with a low impedance connector instead of that DC power connector from LPS-1.2 with high impedance

 

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/30376-a-novel-way-to-massively-improve-the-sq-of-computer-audio-streaming/?page=398&tab=comments#comment-887271

On 10/19/2018 at 3:07 PM, romaz said:

This is a commercial class NUC board and as you stated, it accepts 12-24V but what is more important to me and what I didn't realize until you brought it up is that this is one of only a few Intel NUC boards that can be powered via a 2x2 Molex connector which is a better alternative to the high impedance 5.5mm x 2.5mm barrel connectors that most NUCs and small audio endpoints use.

 

[MrUnderhill]

On 12/8/2018 at 12:44 AM, greenleo said:

Thank you.  I have the JC, just haven't switched the case yet.  I always switch the headless back to standard mode when not playing music for "green" reason?

Hi GL,

 

I have now switched to the Akasa Newton JC Fanless Low Profile Case. I did NOT video it, as I was concerned it would be an exercise in hubris! I did take some photos.

 

The process was painless. Having grounded myself I:

• Opened the Akasa case and took off the front;
• Opened the NUC case and photographed the interior;
• Carefully removed all the cables;
• Removed the two retaining motherboard screws;
• Flexed the case away from the connectors;
• The motherboard came loose easily;
• I placed the mobo onto the upturned NUC base using the screw heads as a platform;
• I undid the two screws securing the fan and removed it;
• This revealed a further screw retaining the black housing;
• In the centre of the housing is a hole through which is a further screw;
• Removing the three screws allows you to remove the black housing;
• This reveals the paste covered CPU;
• I cleaned off the paste from the CPU;
• I took the mobo and lined it up to the new case to practice putting it on;
• I used Mastergel thermal paste, rather than the supplied white liquid;
• I squirted a small lump of thermal paste onto the centre of the small cleaned CPU;
• I placed the mobo onto the four screw pillars, NOT sliding the mobo around;
• I now used the four new screws and copper washers to carefully secure the mobo;
• As we are not using an HDD I attached none of the replacement cables;
• I now did up the new case and tested the NUC - success!

 

Using advice on the thread I altered my BIOS settings:

BIOS Settings - tapatrick

 

On powerup the temperature built to 41C. I left the unit running overnight and it is currently 35C. I suspect this may be due to my valve pre-amp being off, it lives under the NUC.

 

 

The black and silver wires just pull off, and are not re-attached.

 

The extracted mobo sitting on the NUC base for fan removal.

 

Fan & housing removed.

 

Need to clean off the old paste.

 

Clean and shiny.

 

New paste dollop on CPU, placed into the new case and screwed back up. Tested on my desk and then placed back in situ:

 

As it's Christmas!

 

Welcome to the jungle.

 

Shaky Cam 2.

[BigAlMc]

25 minutes ago, seeteeyou said:

Look at the bright side, Extreme 2 mode of AL won't work with LPS-1.2 (12V × 1.1A = 13.2W) even if you're able to boot it up. OTOH, Dr. Jacobs' DC3 flagship PSU could provide 32W (i.e. 24V / 1.5A) so that should be OK

 

Yeah - I guess getting the opportunity to try a Sean Jacobs PSU would be nice. The one he did for the Zenith SE is outstanding.

 

Also I was stealing the LPS1.2 from my TX-USBUltra so this way I get to do direct comparisons with different configs before deciding what items make it into Big Als garage sale ?

 

Cheers,

Alan

[davide256]

14 hours ago, austinpop said:

So I have been scratching my head about this SQ boost running squeezelite with large input stream (from LMS) and output stream (to USB device, i.e. DAC) buffers. After all, think about these points:

1. In ramroot mode, the OS (i.e. the / filesystem) is loaded into a RAM disk (/dev/zram0)
2. The squeezelite executable (the exe for you Windows types) is now living on the RAM disk at location /usr/bin/squeezelite, i.e. also on zram0
3. When you "run" it, you create a new process, with its own virtual address space, and the loader starts loading pages from the file... which is already in memory!
4. Once you start streaming the music, it looks like squeezelite has an input_stream buffer (receive from LMS/Roon) and an output_stream buffer (send to USB device, i.e. DAC/DDC)
5. These buffers are also in memory. All that -b does is preallocate a large buffer from the get go.

So what is different about the default case (no -b) with the large buffer case? Why does the latter sound better? In both cases, all I/O is from memory already, or from the network.

.......

Conclusions?

 

Well, there's still no explanation. Why does "large buffers" sound better? In all these cases, everything (OS, executables, runtime input and output buffers) is in memory. So what gives?

 

Well, one answer - from the user/listener perspective is: who cares!? If it sounds good, use it and enjoy!

 

From the designer's perspective, it's a head scratcher. Could it be that the things listed below result in lower "noise?"

• preloading the file in the first few seconds of playback quiesces the IRQ rate and IRQ processing during the rest of the track?
• by preloading in a big gulp from the network, squeezelite is making system calls (socket send(), recv(), select() etc) at a much lower rate?
• Even without large buffers, this workload runs at an astonishingly low CPU util. Here's one example in the RoonBridge case:
  
  and this is in the large buffer case:
  

Ultimately I didn't find anything I can point to, that would suggest better SQ. Clearly, something about the system operation in the large buffer case sounds better.

 

 

Think of this possibly as an exercise in thermodynamics?  Where the goal is to reduce heat noise/ electrical activity during processing of audio data?

I continue to wonder how an audio renderer  would sound supercooled...

 

BTW, does Roon have any way you found to increase player/renderer track buffer used?

[tapatrick]

48 minutes ago, MrUnderhill said:

Welcome to the jungle.

Thanks M!

that looks really tidy compared to my mess ?

 

Like your core set up,  mine is also is running around 37 degrees too with music playing in extreme mode after an hour. The only thing I did differently from your breakdown is I did wiggle the board in order to spread the thermal paste, carefully not to allow it to go on any circuits, only the heat sink. 

 

Interesting that my NUC endpoint runs at same temperature 36-37 degrees. I thought the core might run hotter as it’s doing more. 

[rickca]

Deleted

 

[greenleo]

AudioLinux LAN Network Bridge Walk through:

Skill Level: intermediate who can edit and create file

 

Physical Connection:

Control PC (Server) has 2 LAN ports, LAN1 is connected to the router and LAN2 is connected to 

the Audio PC (Endpoint)

 

Scenario of this walk through:

Headless Audio PC running NAA and  Control PC running HQP.

 

Prerequisite: Headless already running

 

Steps:

1. Boot fresh lxqt 3.0x image.  Launch terminal.
   
    
2. ip a (to find the interface)
   
   {explanation: my server has 3 LAN interface. 
   enp6s0f1 has an IP assigned, 192.168.173 in this case.
   This is the interface that is connected to the router.
   enp6s0f0 is another LAN interface.
   eno1 is the onboard LAN interface
   You need to identify you interfaces as well.  Should be easy for a two LAN interface system}
    
3. su 
4. systemctl disable NetworkManager
5. systemctl enable systemd-networkd
   
    
6. Click the file manager as root
   
   click computer -> File System -> etc -> systemd -> network
   right-click to open en.network
    
7. Update /etc/systemd/network/en.network to the following and save. 
   (you may need to change eno1 to your own interface)
   
    
8. Create 5 files in the same folder:
   bridge0.netdev, bridge0.network, enp6s0f0.network, enp6s0f1.network, eno1.network with the following contents.(again eno1, enp6s0f0 and enp6s0f1 should be changed according to your local interfaces)
   
    
9. Reboot (setup of network bridge completed)
   
    
10. Option check: launch terminal and type networkctl
    
    
    {Explanation: don't worry if you can't read the yellow words.  
    The important things are: bridge0 are now routable and configured
    and two LAN interface in the control PC are configured}
     
11. Launch HQP from the start here folder.  In the settings, choose NetworkAudioAdapter and choose your device.  Enjoy.
    
    The screen capture below serves as an example.
    

PS

1. How to use HQP is outside the scope of this walk through.

2. If you can't choose the device, something is wrong.  Please try the walk through again.  You may check the physical connection between the Control PC and the Audio PC as well.  However, Hardware trouble shooting is outside the scope of this walk through.

 

 

[greenleo]

1 hour ago, MrUnderhill said:

 Flexed the case away from the connectors

Thank you M, especially for the photos.  Flexed means bending, correct?  Which side did you do the flexing, the front side or the back side?

 

L.

[greenleo]

On 11/30/2018 at 1:28 AM, look&listen said:

Maybe @greenleo repost AF install & setup guide here?? Nice for start of thread 

Hi L&L,

 

I've just posted a Network bridge walk through.  The words server and endpoint were mentioned as well.  Hope this helps the CAers here.

 

Regards.

[austinpop]

2 hours ago, BigAlMc said:

Thanks @afrancois

 

I've spent the morning pottering and am admitting defeat. The i7DNBE is not willing to boot with either the LPS1.2 or the SPS-500.

 

I've switched off everything possible and disconnected everything possible and no dice. It just doesn't seem to like either.

 

Am thinking I'm gonna need to buy a new PSU (Sean Jacobs, HD Plex etc) but that's really annoying when I have a collection of PSU's at hand!

 

Cheers,

Alan

 

Thats weird. I used an sPS-500 set at 19v to first boot my NUC7i7DNBE before I made any BIOS changes.

 

When I get a chance, I’ll confirm it still works. 

 

What actually happens when you turn the NUC on? I’m assuming your sPS is truly on - you know that drill with the long press of the power button?

[austinpop]

1 hour ago, davide256 said:

 

BTW, does Roon have any way you found to increase player/renderer track buffer used?

 

Not that I could find. But I haven’t looked very hard. Maybe RAATServer has a man page?

[BigAlMc]

5 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

Thats weird. I used an sPS-500 set at 19v to first boot my NUC7i7DNBE before I made any BIOS changes.

 

When I get a chance, I’ll confirm it still works. 

 

What actually happens when you turn the NUC on? I’m assuming your sPS is truly on - you know that drill with the long press of the power button?

 

Hey Rajiv,

 

Interesting blend of helpful and insulting there my friend ?

 

Yes. The SPS-500 was on but thanks for that. Note to self, tone down the dumb questions a bit!

 

I was actually wondering if the DC barrel converter could be the issue. Inverting polarity or suchlike. I fished it out my box of cables and parts and am not sure of its exact provenance.

 

Because on paper the SPS-500 should defo have the power for a board that Intel specs as 15watt tdp.

 

Might try to find another DC barrel converter to rule that out before I commit to buying a PSU that costs the same as the NUC I'm pairing it with.

 

Cheers,

Alan

[BigAlMc]

25 minutes ago, austinpop said:

What actually happens when you turn the NUC on?

 

Missed answering this.

 

The LPS1.2 flashes red from the second I connect it to the NUC.

 

The power button on the NUC does absolutely nothing with the SPS-500 connected.

 

Cheers,

Alan