It is Rock on the 7i3.
Nothing special about it that I’m aware of.
I can hear the dropouts not at every song.
At this one it is very easy to notice:
Would you like to play this song at your 7i3 with dsd512 upsampling? 
Bytheway I tested further and did following observations.
I switched rock on and played with upsampling the test song from above some times. Without problems.
Then in the settings\library I changed the number of cores for background analysis from 1 to 3.
And played the test song again. This time with dropouts.
Then changed the core number back to 1.
Plays the test song. Many times. Without dropouts:)
Then played with core numbers further. And sometimes after a change of the corenumber it played good sometimes with dropouts. The corenumber by it self did not play a role. Just the fact of changing it. So after a changing as the test song played good, I just listened to different songs. Without problems.
But… after ca. 30 minutes I played some dsd512 files without the necessary to upsample. Then played another songs with the upsampling. And drops occurs again without to change anything in the settings.
The processing speed is always stable independent of the occurrence of dropouts.
This is really a non deterministically behaviour of rock. I have the newest version. So I now tend to think rock has a bug with the handling of threads at parallelized dsd upsampling.
I am curious what you could report if you would play my test song. If you have time\fun for that please try also to change a core number at the library background analysis. Thanks!
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Try turning off Turbo Boost (although counter intuitive)
And C-states.
With turbo off the processing speed is 0.6 so its impossible to upsample.
Just for fun testet the single core upsampling. Curious. The same behaviour as in parallel mode.
Sometimes it playes flawlessly just with 1.1x processing speed. After a song without upsampling the test song plays with dropouts again. Then again a song without upsampling. After that upsampling works good again. I don’t understand rocks behaviour.
After this observations I can just commit Igors post - cpu usage is not the problem here.
I really tend to think rock has a bug at dsd upsampling in context of resources utilisation.
Can you show your full signal path?
NUC is a limited form-factor at the end. NUC kit CPU’s despite the theoretical specs are all capped. Firstly be thermal cap and few other things as well. What I have noticed for example that I/O operations may take a huge tall on CPU.
I have my music library on SSD in my NUC. When I was copying Library over network I think I could fry eggs on my fanless NUC. It was impossible to keep hand on…
So your observation with analytics on multiple cores is correct. It makes analysis faster, but takes a lot of resource from CPU.
Starting from around Feb, after the major updates I notice that “RoonAppliance” process is totally rogue. It is like a loose cannon. All of a sudden for simple streaming it can jump from 2-3%% CPU to 50+%% And this is when there’s nothing been added to the library. Overall system performance has degraded from last year versions… but this is “subjective” - I do not have solid evidence to show as i can not compare with past versions, and hence make objective analysis.
But despite this above observation, ROON alone performs totally stable…
As for CPU tweaking, indeed it may not be a resolution, what ROCK is missing is a.bit of diagnostics. I wonder for example what’s your CPU temps in DSD512. Or what frequencies during playback…
Can you try cabling the DAC directly from your Core (USB) just to see what difference it makes? And, for more predictable results, use local media for the tests.
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I have a feeling we were focusing on the wrong thing.
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Could you explain please what do you mean?
@Serguei, couple of thoughts on what you shared.
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While your path looks very straightforward, same as @Mikael_Ollars I suggest to try direct connection to DAC. Eliminating the rest of your chain may help in ‘debugging’
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I have noticed you mentiond DSD512 files. These are normally huge to my knowledge. The question is - do you add anything recently to your library? As I mentioned above NUC’s have a certain weakness/limitations in I/O operations and DB analysis can impact playback in some cases. Two things to check on this one:
a) still BIOS power settings but with out complications - just check that your NUC is at “performance” mode. nothing more
b) try switching off library analysis
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It is a veeeery last resort - do you have one or two memory chips installed? Filling in memory bank completely on intell motherboards is preferred way for maximising memory bandwith. Now, will it make any difference in your case or similar is a big question…
I think if you play with 1) and 2) and still have a “hick up” playback - we already collected a good information for ROON support. I would than go and open the ticked to let them see what happens in your system behind the scenes.
i.
I think the USB connection on DAC is not solid enough, maybe OP can download a native DSD512 demo to test out his playback chain is solid enough for DSD512 playback first before doing upsampling.
USB Connection on the DAC works fine. As mentioned above. I testet with dsd512 files too.
- yes will test that later. but my streamer is not the problem because dsd512 files are playd without problems. will try to give a feedback today. my family is not really happy if I do this tests
- no. no background analysis at the playback time.
a. also If it would work in performance mode the problem of the non-deterministic behaviour of roon will be still there .
b. I already did that. the fact that the library is switched off does not influence the occurrence of dropouts. - I have 8GB RAM as one module
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You could try maxing out the memory with 2 16gb sticks. Get a matched 32gb kit so the memory is tested to work together. When I upgraded my NUC to 32gb it was not expensive.
I download 5.1 dsd256 and Stereo DSD512 files and they play without any issues. Not the same as upsampling with the cpu doing a lot of work. Max memory could help.
Probably the Upsampling with high CPU usage bring raise in CPU temperature, if the fan can’t bring down the heat, thermal Protection geared down the CPU core frequency that causing drop in processing power, so drop out in audio stream.
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Roon write 8 gb is much more than one will ever need in rock. Or do you have other experience or info?
Thinking I read somewhere on this forum that Roon loads the music files into memory if possible when playback starts and DSD files are large. The MC DSD256 downloads are 25GB each. I really don’t know if loading files into memory is true, or if that would also be the case for upsampled files, but memory is inexpensive and worth having as far as I’m concerned.
My dsd512 files are each ca. 2GB.
I don’t believe that additional ram can help. But anyway just ordered second one 8gb ram module. Will report…
Best performance will be had by buying two similar memory modules of nice spec. That will ensure best bandwidth and perfomance and also utilising the dual channel memory architecture that Intel offers.