Breaks in audio

Adding convolution does increase the power requirements. Does the PC have an Nvidia card for Cuda offloading?

Yes it does but not very powerful, well relatively un-powerful, a 970. I would like to upgrade but canā€™t find a monitor I want, another story. Perhaps it is worth trying. Here are my current settings.

actually, it looks like you are not activating the Cuda offloading, the box is unchecked. have you tried checking it and see if that makes a difference?

Thanks yes, it was unchecked when I took the screenshot. I just checked it, renabled the filters and started playing. Very soon after, a break in the music.

I tried another set of filters but I also get the same issue.

I have an i7 9700k and a 1070ti, cpu is liquid cooled as well. In upsampling to DSD 256 with the EC versions, I need to use Cuda upsampling or the results get choppy. Although, I am not overclocking my CPU.

Thats interesting, a good bench mark. Whats strange to me though, as mentioned above, is why am I having issues now but not previously? Anyway, I have stepped down to ASDM5EC (from 7EC) and renabled the filters (or should I go for ASDM7?). Lets see if I get any breaks.

Well, the EC versions really sound good to me. Soā€¦

You said it worked when you turned off the convolution filters? Hmm.

Any recent Windows update? I donā€™t have those, running Enterprise LTSC, but sometimes a pending update can cause all sorts of weirdness.

Its always updating, lots of updates all year. So could be something in there, I had a look in the update history, although I am not sure what to look for.

Its playing still, no breaks yet.

Alternatively, I could ask Thierry (at Home Audio Fidelity) to generate filters at a lower rate, say 176kHz, instead of 352kHz. Perhaps that would reduce the load?? But, would it effect quality? Or if my switches had flow control, or higher bandwidth would that help? So many optionsā€¦

Yes it mentions both things needed by HQPlayer:

So the switch should be just fine. Then another question is whether the NICs at HQPlayer side computer have it enabled, but usually they do if you have something typical and have not touched related settings.

It could be, but unlikely for 96k source content. Much more likely with something like DSD sources.

Are you using CUDA offload to Nvidia GPU or are you running purely on CPU?

Thanks for checking, I obviously didnt know what I was looking for. I will try and check my main machine.

Mostly without, but currently have it greyed (with nvidia 970).

Its playing currently with the filters enabled using ASDM5EC rather than 7EC.

So the convolution for your HAF filters would run on the GPU. I would try turning it off for testing, because 970 is not the most powerful GPUā€¦ Older GPU generations didnā€™t have great multi-tasking capabilities, so some graphics tasks could starve the audio processing. Especially heavier graphics like Roon.

Ok, thanks. I have it turned off now. Is it better to go with ASDM5EC or ADSM7?

Given that the breaks are present with ADSM7EC, but appear to be associated with the use of HAF filters, if/when I upgrade graphics card (a 3080 would be nice!!), I can offload the convolution duties to the GPU?

If you can do ASDM5EC, just use it, it gives better performance than ASDM7.

Yes, if CUDA offload is set to grayed, then just convolution and few other things are offload. If you set it to checked, then everything possible is run on GPU.

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Could you run the had filters on the Roon core instead?

I am not sure, I suspect I would need to have them regenerated by HAF, I donā€™t think I can use ā€˜as-isā€™, as the current set use two left and two right filters and I donā€™t think I can use with Roon in that format. Plus the Core on my i7 NUC is quite a bit less powerful than the desktop i7 9700 although I wouldnt have the ā€˜sendā€™ the signal across the network I suppose.

Probably not worth the hassle to test.

As I am continueing to work from home, I had a chance to experiment. I ticked the cuda offload, just to see what would happen. My graphics card is 5+ years old but seems ok so far. I have gone back to ASDM7EC to test. 5 hours and no break ups yet.

I have kept an eye on how the graphics card is doing. You can see my graphics card sits at around 65c, with 30% fan speed and a load between 0% and 40%

So this seems to work or am I missing something? Is just enough stuff being offloaded to the card allowing the CPU to get on with the rest?

The 970 was a great old card, I had a 970 ti, I loved until it died two years ago, :frowning: Started spewing pixels, obviously was video memory, but no real way of changing it on these cards.

Yeah, mine has done very well I think. I have been waiting for a decent HDR monitor with all the stuff you need for the new consoles but there is nothing in the size I want that is not very expensive. So, without a new monitor, no real need to upgrade graphics card. But, when I do upgrade the card, I will need a new monitor so double whammy money wise. Oh wellā€¦1st world problem.

Yeah, I pulled the trigger last year with a BenQ EX3203R.