I recently purchased an UP Gateway x5-z8350 and installed the latest NAA image naa-513-x6ramfs.img.
I hadn’t used hqplayer for years as I could never get a SOtM-SMS-200 to work. But my old HQP desktop still had its configuration options. This time around I was getting drop outs @ DSD64 and 768PCM so I tried dropping the sample rates down until stable. Finally stable at max 192PCM with my chosen filters.
However each time I changed an HQP desktop or roon parameter, there was no subsequent sound, the roon waveform would not advance, and I had to reburn the image on the USB stick to get sound again.
This cannot possibly be normal behaviour. What am I doing wrong? In addition as there is no access to the headless UP gateway how can I reset/reboot it other than pulling the power cord out?
What kind of DAC do you have and how is it connected? Can you also describe your network setup a bit?
Which version of HQPlayer do you have and what kind of hardware is it running on? Are you able to test the playback with DAC connected directly to the HQPlayer computer?
I have the same hardware running the same OS image 24/7 and it has been working without issues or reboots for several months in row. In practice as long as there has been time between NAA OS releases. There are quite a few other people doing the same. So something else is going wrong.
Pulling the power cord is perfectly fine with that OS image.
Note that if the USB stick gets disconnected at any point such way that the device is on, or if the device is powered up with the USB stick disconnected, at least the BIOS version I have ends up forgetting it should be booting from the USB stick…
Connecting display and keyboard to the UP Gateway could be useful for troubleshooting to see any potential reasons why things stop working.
As you can see there are two switches. The hifi is in the family living room and shares space with the TV and other devices so I have tried to isolate the hifi on its own English Electric switch. All ethernet connections are CAT 6.
I started out trying to get the DAC of the Primare SC15 mk2 working on its USB connection marked PC/MAC but got no sound at all. I re-booted and reset and restarted everything several times. Eventually I could see the SC15 recognised in hqplayer but it sounded bad. This is my preference but maybe it needs a Primare driver not supported by that image?
I had a Gustard X16 DAC so I connected that via USB instead and got a good sound but a lot of drop outs on the sinc-L filter I prefer from the last time I tried to get hqplayer working 2 years or so ago. So I started dropping the sample rate back to 192 until it was stable. Each time I dropped the sample rate I found I had to reburn the image to get a sound.
I assume I am doing something wrong as the NAA is essentially unusable in this way.
That looks normal. But can you please enable log file from HQPlayer settings, and when the issue happens that you feel you need to reflash the image check the log file, or send it to me?
Because the ramfs image you are using has nothing ever written to the storage. When it is booted up, it runs solely from RAM and the OS image on the boot media is only accessed in read-only mode and decompressed into RAM during boot. So I cannot understand why it would need to be reflashed.
sinc-L is certainly among the heaviest ones, so I would suggest to set for example poly-sinc-ext2 as filter for testing until you know that everything is working without dropouts and such. If there are too many potential places for the problem it is much harder to locate.
I would also suggest to play just some local files using standalone HQPlayer, without Roon, for testing purposes. IOW, so that the setup is as simple and as minimal as possible. And only then if it works, change only one thing at a time and see when it breaks…
I had the log file enabled right from the start yesterday and today. In fact the logs go back to 2nd October 2020 as I have been trying unsuccessfully for well over 5 years to get a SOtM-SMS-200 to work prior to this and must have enabled logging at that time.
I don’t really know what to look for. But I can see that both the Primare and the Gustard are discovered in the logs starting 2025/01/28 15:51:53 and that when I couldn’t get a sound I was randomly revolving the volume dial in hqplayer. That is all captured in the logs with long sequences of volume changes.
You will see also that I have already tried playing directly from hqplayer (taking roon out of the equation). No sound. I also tried just re-booting the UP Gateway (pulling the power cord). No sound. The only way I could get sound was to to reflash the NAA after each configuration change.
Where can I send the logs? I’m sure you can make much more sense of them than I can.
It is not random. It is triggered by a config change either in hqplayer or roon. When it first happened I just tried switching on/off, rebooting, restarting all items in the audio chain. Using HQP on its own, everything looks normal. I can see the timer on a track progressing. Just no sound. Eventually I just got low level distorted white noise on the speakers after plugging and unplugging the NAA countless times and assumed that I had corrupted the USB stick. I then reflashed using balena etcher, rebooted the NAA, and I got sound. After each subsequent configuration change I found I had to reflash the NAA image
There has been progress of sorts in that I seem to be able to test now without continually reflashing the image file. I don’t know what changed. However, I can reduce but not eliminate the drop outs.
I am now playing directly from hqplayer but even with zero up-sampling and a basic poly-snc-ext filter and NS1 shaper I am getting a dropout every minute or so. I had to set no filter, no shaping and no upsampling to stop the dropouts which ofcourse defeats the purpose.
Are there basic incompatabities with my Gustard X16 and Primare SC15mk2?
To be honest it all feels a bit like my troubles with the SOtM-SMS-200. The big difference being that after a dropout the NAA skips forward and keeps playing whereas the SOtM would just stop.
Can you describe your HQPlayer computer?
Which cpu is it running? (Type and generation … like Intel i7 14700 …) and how much ram is installed?
Seems very strange you had troubles with SOtM sms200, I’m running it since 3 years ago (when I bought HQP) and I never had issues. Is it running the last fw 0.5.7? The same before when I used it with UPNP and Squeezelite … it’s around 7 years old …
I finally gave up with the SOtM-SMS-200 after over 5 years trying. For years I had a SOtM USB card in a self-build fanless PC. Worked fine until the PC died, probably from over-heating. The SOtM-SMS-200 was a replacement but it coincided with a house move, new ISP, and I could never get it to operate stably. Would cut out after a few tracks but instead of recovering like the NAA, it just crashed and I had to reboot which was always a trial getting the enhasu accessible again. I only persisted because I remember how good the SOtM card sounded. But come to think of it that card had an optional external battery pack and that didn’t last long either.
HQPlayer is running on an i7 laptop with 32 megs of ram and a CAT 6 connection. But I don’t think that was ever the issue. Over the years I noticed that others gave up on unstable SOtM’s. Build quality will be luck of the draw with small niche manufacturers. I bought mine second hand from someone who probably had the same issues with the unit and was glad to unload it. Buyer beware.
So, eventually I started trying different NAA images both ram and non-ram. I had no idea that the nomenclature meant anything about the operation as I just googled how to install an NAA and the instructions happened to be for a ram version.
So when I flashed the prior ram version 502 I got the same drop-out symptoms. I then flashed the non-ram version prior to that, 461. Now hqplayer is stable with roon on PCM up to 768k, a filter of linc-L and an LNS15 shaper. I haven’t tried DSD yet or upgrading the non-ram 461 to the current non-ram 513 version.
Not sure I actually like these extreme sample rates. Classical sounds ok. It’s a bit smooth for my taste especially with pop/rock. Just lacks a certain byte. I’ll continue to experiment.
Is there any reason I can get the non-ram image to work stably but not the ram image?
Just to be clear, I can get naa-461-x64.7z to work but not naa-513-x64ramfs.7z.
