Left / Right Delay with HQPlayer

Hello @jussi_laako ,

Unfortunately, I have a big problem with my HQPlayer 5. After setting up my Mac Mini M4 with great excitement today, I started Roon and HQPlayer. However, when playing music, I noticed a strange phenomenon: first, the left channel starts playing, and then, with a fraction of a second delay, the right channel begins. This creates a very odd “holo” effect.

Strangely, this only happens with DSD upsampling. Here are my settings:

Do you have any experience with this issue or perhaps a tip for me? When I use my DAC (Cyan 2) without HQPlayer, everything works perfectly fine.

Thank you for your help and best regards,

Dominik

It seems to be some effect related to M4. One other person has reported the same problem on M4 too. Are you on latest HQPlayer 5.9.0 release?

I just recently got M4 myself, so I have not yet tested much there. But certainly it doesn’t happen with M1/M2/M3.

Please try with ASDM7EC-light modulator to see if it makes any difference for you?

By the way, which Holo Audio DAC is it?

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Hello @jussi_laako

Thank you for your quick response :slight_smile:

My DAC is a Cyan 2.

I’ll take some time tomorrow to calmly test whether the Light Modulator is affected as well. So far, I’ve only tested ECv3 and Super.

It might be a good idea to connect my Pi Endpoint and test it with that too. Do you think that would be useful or can I skip it? :sweat_smile:

Thanks for your help and have a nice evening.

Dominik

I just got my new Mac Mini M4 into use and I can reproduce this problem… I’m working on a fix/workaround for this. Some kind of Xcode bug that affects only M4…

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Hello Jussi,

Awesome, thank you so much for your quick help. Fingers crossed that you’ll find the bug quickly.

Best regards,

Dominik

Now there’s a 5.9.0.1 hotfix for arm64 macOS. Fixes the case at least for me. I need to later figure out why it happens… A bit of mystery that it happens only on one CPU model.

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Hello Jussi,

This is really awesome, thank you so much for your work. The fix works for me as well. Thanks for the quick help. Now I’m excited to see what the M4 is capable of :smiley:

Best regards,

Dominik

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Dominik,

That’s great news! Be interested to hear what rate/filters/modulators work for you.

Jussi,

Happy holidays! What version of the M4 are you using and what settings are you able to achieve?

Thanks for all the help you provide on the forums.

Nick

I have the cheapest Mac Mini M4 base model, that I got to work around the Apple Xcode’s problem with M4.

I think I’ve only tried:
1x = poly-sinc-gauss-long
Nx = poly-sinc-gauss-hires-lp
Modulator = ASDM7EC-light

Now the Mac Mini M4 is back in it’s box. But I will set it up later somewhere.

@jussi_laako Hi Jussi,

I am running HQPlayer Embedded 5.10.1 on Ubuntu 24.04 on NUC 14 Pro (with and without eGPU. When I use ASDM7EC and ASDM7ECv2, the left and right channels become asynchronous. But they sound normal i.e. synchronous if I use ASDM7. I have tried different configuration combinations e.g., different Rate Limit, 48K DSD and 44.1K and the problem persists. Could you please give me any pointers?

HQPlayer Embedded version: hqplayerd_5.10.1-31intel_amd64.deb
CUDA version: 12.7
libgmpris version: libgmpris_2.2.1-12_amd64.deb

NAA: ifi Zen Stream

nvidia-smi

sudo tail -30 /tmp/hqplayer

Have you tried the regular, non-intel build for comparison?

So far nobody else has ever reported such on Intel hardware and the algorithms you are using have been in use for years…

Your GPU is rather old model, so I wouldn’t entirely trust it to work correctly (has happened before with Nvidia regarding old CPU models), so it is important to check with the CUDA offload disabled too.

Is this with stock Ubuntu kernel 6.8.0 or with my custom one?

Hi Jussi,

I have unplug my egpu. Still the async left and right problem persists.
I have also reinstall hqplayerd with
hqplayerd_5.10.1-31_amd64.deb

uname -a

hqplayerd hqplayer hqplayer

sudo systemctl status hqplayerd

top

And you get it with that one too?

Does it also happen if you skip the Zen Stream and plug DAC directly to your computer?
What kind of DAC is it?

Edit: I see you are using the S/PDIF output of Zen Stream. That is something I have never tested, only the USB output.

Yes, I got it with hqplayerd_5.10.1-31_amd64.deb

Today I connected the hqplayerd directly to my DAC (I used WooAudio WA7 because of its small size). The problem persists (left channel a bit earlier than right).

$ sudo tail -f /tmp/hqplayerd.log

$ sudo systemctl status hqplayerd

$ top

$ hqplayerd hqplayer hqplayer

What is this? What are you trying to do?

And you don’t have anything under matrix/convolution/speaker configuration?

What is this? What are you trying to do?

Nothing. just wanted to show you the information as much as I have. I found this command on the threads

And you don’t have anything under matrix/convolution/speaker configuration?

I didn’t change anything. Here are the screen shots

Matrix

Convolution

Speaker

PCM and SDM using ASDM7 work fine. But all the other modulators e.g. ASDM7EC, ASDM7EC-V2, ASDM7EC-ul have the async issue.

But you don’t want to run a second copy as normal user while the service is already running. That mostly looks like setting web interface credentials for the first time, but missing the “-s” argument.

But overall would be interesting to know what is different in your system that such thing happens.

Can you try disabling CUDA (you’d need to edit hqplayerd.xml and restart the service)?

What does your “uname -a” tell?

You could also try to boot up HQPlayer OS and see if you can reproduce the issue there. This would help ruling out OS related things.

I followed your instruction and edited hqplayerd.xml file by changed cuda=“0”.

After reboot still no luck.

$ uname -a
Linux hqplayer 6.8.0-51-lowlatency #52.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Dec 7 23:21:04 UTC 2024 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Seems to go into the mystery category… Please check you have latest BIOS version installed. Only suggestion I have left is to try booting HQPlayer OS from USB memory stick and see if you have same problem that way.