Good evening,
I have beem enjoying Roon with HQ Player for a while:
up to a couple of weeks before with a Mac Book Pro (10.12.; late 2010) - HQ Player (with Room correction filters (Acourate) - upsampled to 192 Khz using Polysinc) - NAA - mRendu - Lynx Hilo - setup. (a Synology NAS is directly attached to my router next door, I am either listening to the music files of the NAS or to Tidal).
No issues at all.
I have a WLAN bridge very close to my Mac (about 10 cm), the router is next door.
Lynx is now offering an upgrade with an Audinate Dante card (LT-Dante).
I installed that and I experienced quite an impressive improvement with Dante (even in comparison with mRendu and a Re-Clocker/USB-Isolation-Device behind that (AFI-USB made by Artistic Fidelity).
I have no problems at all when I load tracks from my NAS (via WLAN) directly into the HQ Player, even with low latencies (Dante Virtual Sound Card) of 4-6 ms.
But when I use Roon with HQ Player I have lots of dropouts.
I deactivated “Audio Analysis Tools” already (that helped a little bit).
I can see the latencies with Audinate Dante Controller “life” (no changes), I made a life monitoring of my WLAN connection to my Mac Book Pro (constantly excellent connection). I chose higher latencies of the Dante Virtual Card (10 ms) - no changes (lots of dropouts).
When I use the DSP Engine + convolution provided by Roon 1.3 I don`t have dropouts but I prefer HQ Player sound quality a little bit more (even though I appreciate the progresses in Roon 1.3 very much!!)
So do you have an idea why I have those dropouts?
I fear it must be due to my “weak” old Mac Book Pro - if so, would be any Mac with Core i5 generation with 2 cores/4 threads be sufficient or would I need to upgrade to a Quad Core Mac?
Hi @Christian_Kirsch ---- Thank you for the report and my apologies for the troubles here. Can you provide me with the exact specs of your MacBook Pro?
Furthermore, based on your report it seems that all was well with this configuration at one point (“I have beem enjoying Roon with HQ Player for a while”), besides the upgrade to the Audinate Dante card (LT-Dante) was anything else changed? Did you notice this behavior AFTER the upgrade?
thanks a lot for your reply:
My Mac Book Pro Specs:
Mac OS Sierra (10.12.3)
13``, mid 2010
2,4 Ghz, Core 2 duo
8 GB RAM
SSD start volume
My setup before worked well (Roon - HQPlayer (Polysinc, 192 Khz, NS9 + convolution) - via NAA to mRendu. No dopouts.
This is my setup now:
HQ Player is set to Dante Virtual Card (latency 6 ms, mRendu has been removed, don`t need that anymore), other settings same as before.
My Mac Book Pro is directly attached via an Ethernet Cat6 cable to my Lynx Hilo (LT-Dante card).
If this setup would cause too much strain/stress for my Mac Book Pro I would expect longer latencies shown by the Dante controller statistics (this is the controller software provided by Audinate, I use it only for monitoring purposes) but they keep showing the same values (well below 6 ms).
On the other hand there seem to be more dropouts with other HQ Player filters (e.g. Polysinc-mp-short) so I suppose my Mac Book Pro has too little horse powers.
Hi @Christian_Kirsch ----- Thank you for the follow up and taking the time to provide me with the requested information. Both are very appreciated!
Moving forward, it is very possible that the MBP maybe struggling to host your core and HQplayer on it, based on the specs of that device. Do you have another machine you can temporarily test this configuration with? I’d be curious to see how things behavior on a stronger computer. Let me know.
-Eric
FYI: Before anything, make sure to make a back up of your database
