I’ve been playing around with upsampling and converting to DSD256… 95% of the time it works flawlessly but sometimes, the audio is slightly sped up with static/distortion… to fix, while music is playing I set from DSD256 to DSD64 which fixes it… then back to DSD256 and it’s fine after that.
The static seems to occur when upsampling standard 44.1 kHz to 192 kHz or higher, or when converting PCM to DSD. It doesn’t happen right away or even on the first track. It usually happens after playing a few tracks. I am not sure if it occurs only when streaming from Tidal or Qobuz, or if it also occurs when playing from my own library, which is on a USB hard drive connected to my NUC.
The signal path looks the same, as far as I can recall. Honestly, it is so loud and startling, I just hit the pause button ASAP to stop the noise. As for DSD, where would I look to see processing speed?
Unless I am misunderstanding what you are asking, my signal path is reflected in the screen shot I posted above. NUC --> via USB --> DAC [Topping E30 or Pro-Ject S2] --> RCA outputs split to power amp (feeding KEF LS50 Metas) and to KEF subwoofer. I am connecting the NUC via Ethernet direct to my router (an Orbi).
Where is this setting? I do not see it in Audio setup - “Also make sure have parallelize sigma delta set to on”.
And apologies for being obtuse, but I don’t know what you mean by processing speed. See attached for another screen shot of the signal path. Where is processing speed reflected?
In the signal path just above the ‘source’ there is a field that shows the processing speed. If it is above 100, this area is blank as it is way more than sufficient. AFAIK processing speed is an indicator of how far the processor is ahead of the game. Everything that is above 5 or so should be enough for a trouble free listening. That happens in my configuration NUC i5 only with a combination of DSP filtering, up-sampling and 128 DSD conversion of a MQA file.
Yours was not blank when you posted the original shot it says 52.4x if I see that right. Its above the word Source and you appear to be only doing upsampling to 192KHz not DSD 256.
you have totally ignored the request to provide the system specs of your core (CPU speed model etc, RAM) and if your setup is using wifi only - so unless you give this info its hard to suggest a course of action.
the other setting I mentioned in under the DSP settings and should be enabled for systems that struggle with low <2x processing speed.
As I also said above, the NUC is connected to my router via an ethernet cable, not WiFi.
In the screenshot above, yes I was upsampling to 192kHz, but I’ve had the same issues when upsampling to DSD. I do now see the option to Parallelize Delta-Sigma Modulator in DSD mode – it is in the “yes” position.
So what is the processing speed when doing dsd256 for example. Turn off or unplug the amps / speakers when testing so the resulting noise doesn’t hurt anything.
Interesting. The processing speed is about 2.5x to upsample to DSD512, 4.7x to upsample to DSD256, 8.5x to go to DSD128 and about 18x when upsampling to DSD64. So it may be that upsampling to DSD512 is taxing the system. It works fine for a while (like now) but at some point I will get loud static.
I guess I should stick to DSD64 or 128 if I am going to do this, correct?
While 2.5x should be in the safe zone, perhaps its not if your system is busy doing another task too. the other thing you could look at is perhaps something like a dedicated upsampling system like HQPlayer but this app can make many higher demands depending on its settings - but many swear by it.
Personally I used to upsample to DSD but pretty much now just use native rates for all things. I preferred this to the DSD upsampled results…of course YMMV
I actually have HQ Player on another system in which Roon resides on a Mac Mini. Unless I’m mistaken, though, I don’t think HQP is useable on a the same NUC as ROCK.
