Greetings,
My honeymoon with the new Mac Mini SSD has hit a glitch—DSD. No issues with PCM upsampling (30-50x !!) but DSD is another story…max of 1.7 with DSD 512 with occ ALOT of stuttering but OK upsampling to 128/256 (most of the time). Native DSD 256 files simply will not play for more than 2-5 sec before the “this file is loading slowly” error.
My setup: 2012 Mac Mini i7 quad with 16GB RAM and 512 SSD directly connected to a Time Capsule Base Station then ethernet from mac to microrendu then oyanaide USB cable to iFi MicroDSD then audioquest analog cables to amp.
Why such a huge dec inprocessing power with Native DSD 256 and upsampling above DSD 256 compared to max PCM or DSD 64/128? Figured the mac mini would have the oomph for this.
See screenshots for pics of Roon set-up.
Thoughts? I can live with PCM but was hoping to max out my iFi and DSD 512 sounds great when it will play!
Thanks
Doug
Because you also are applying all sorts of DSP – including 12 bands of parametric EQ! – that is the simple reason. Too much heavy lifting going from DSD256 to 11.2896 MHz PCM for processing and back to DSD256. Pare down your DSP workload or reduce your sampling rate expectations.
AJ
Ha! Thanks, Andrew! U r correct! Things do improve considerably when I disable each of those DSP functions other than the upsampling…everthing works but still some occ stuttering with DSD 512. Surprised how much hit it takes with Parametric EQ and speaker correction! It makes sense though. Turn those off and we just up to 7-9x even with DSD 256 upsampling, but 512 still dec down to 1.7-1.8 even with all other DSP features disabled. Will keep playing with it and may try HQplayer upsampling to see if that is anymore stable though it gave me fits previously!
Doug
If you want so many things in the path your processor needs to be the very fastest and capable. For HQP on mini you face similar needs. Only way to gain more with HQP I’m told is a CUDA capable GFX card to assist in the load, and that means a windows box I think