Never managed to catch him live. Stupidly missed a “Pleasure Principle” (or was it Replicas?) 30th anniversary gig. Hard to believe the 40th anniversaries are with us now.
.sjb
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Hey John,
So did you end up keeping up the Ciunas ISO-HUB past the 30 day return period, sitting between NUC NAA and Singxer?
Or you kept your ultraRendu as NAA feeding your Singxer, after your warbling issue went away with the 10/100 switch?
The latter Sean.
Better SQ and I like the AirPlay and Spotify options available also.
.sjb
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Great stuff John. Agreed, those other output modes of the Rendu’s are handy sometimes.
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@jussi_laako - I am new to HQPlayer and UpSampling. I would like to understand if Mac Mini M1 8GB / 16GB (or the new M2) can be used for HQPlayer to perform CPU intensive operations like upsampling to DSD512 ?
Apologies if this has been answered already. Please let me know.
It works up to DSD256 with the advanced EC modulators. And possibly to DSD512 with simpler ones. To allow more filters, I would go with the maximum core count M2Pro model.
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By the time you update ram, and if you want 10gbe Ethernet, I feel your better off with a studio M1max over any mini.
What absolutely sucks with Apple crap is you cannot update drive space or ram once you buy it. %#^ *$! Apple! 
But I have one that hosts a large 8 disk zfs pool, roon, plex, hqplayer, and mail with spam sieve. I still find the hackintosh a much better and more pleasurable experience than the Studio. I also still have a old core i9 9900k on Ubuntu that I use for hqplayer and some backup zfs stuff.
The M1 max studio will do DSD 512 with a good number of filters if you use AMSDM7EC 512+fs.
Keep in mind I’m going for DSD512.
- It will not do non 2s xtr.
- It doesn’t like gauss xla
- It does ASDM5 EC most of the time.
- It does ASDM7 with a lot of filters.
- It’s doesn’t like ASDM EC7.
- Don’t even attempt ECv2.
I have lots of success with all sinc filters @512 48k w/AMSDM7EC 512+fs (with the exception of the sinc-L filter, which just doesn’t work).
My go to still seems to be sinc-Lm and sinc-Mx, Mx is sketchy sometimes.
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The drive space I only understand from physical size point of view.
But for RAM I think I know the reason. I believe it is so called “stacked configuration” like you’ve had on mobile phones for ages. We did that at Nokia already in early 2000 at least, for example on our last N9 product. Essentially you have both the SoC and RAM built into one package. This is why on Apple hardware your RAM bandwidth doubles every time you double number of performance cores. Each has it’s own memory bus and it’s own local piece of RAM. Similar to multi-socket Intel/AMD, but all crammed into 1/100th of the size package.
I’m writing this on MacBook Pro with M1Max that I use for HQPlayer macOS version development, pretty powerful, totally silent and doesn’t even warm up much. Still I know that Studio with M1Ultra beats crap out of this one.
But you need to remember that these are all essentially ultra-mobile CPUs, that should be compared to Intel’s U-series CPUs. And then you can truly appreciate how powerful these are compared to the competition.
This is because of the single-core performance for running modulators. Not so much about filters.
This is running perfectly fine, with 10 band headphone EQ, and the little spikes on efficiency cores are Opera browser I’m using to write this response:
This is not trading too much battery use time either. If I click up open the battery indicator, it say “No Apps Using Significant Energy”.
Sure, not anything like you would get on i9-13900KS or Ryzen 9 7950X. But also the power consumption is less than 1/10th.
So if you’d look for a laptop to run DSD256 on travel with all bells and whistles and not drain your battery instantly, this is the solution.
For the purpose I have iFi xDSD Gryphon to go together with this laptop - and with my ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 Windows/Linux laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 and Nvidia RTX GPU.
It should work (as well as sinc-Ll) on recent HQPlayer versions also on Windows as long as you have Nvidia GPU with 12+ GB of RAM. Just to be sure, you need 16+ GB of GPU RAM. I didn’t find any reason why it wouldn’t work on Linux. But Windows has some stupid 32-bit sourced limitations all over.
On the Mac studio w/m1 max sinc-LI works. Sinc-L it’s not happy. Probably because of the modular. If I drop back the modulator sinc-L will work. But I was trying to compare this using the same settings I’m used to using with the i9 w/ an old titan X.
But even then I can’t do what I do on the i9 as I can’t use the 7EC V2 on the M1 max due to, as you said, single core performance issues.
To do this properly with DSD output, you need at least 12 performance cores, preferably 16.
But much better on Linux (or Windows) with a powerful Nvidia GPU and 16+ GB of GPU RAM.
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