Ropiee vs DietPi USBridge Signature pops and clicks (Solved)

My current (and hopefully final!) system setup is: Qobuz/local files>USBridge Signature (Shanti PS)>USB to RME ADI2 Dac fs>XLR>KRK S8.4 Subwoofer>XLR>NCore NC122MP>Mark Audio Pluvia 11 full range single driver speakers.

I have recently gone back to the USBridge Signature having experimented with a Wiim Pro unit for a couple of years. I initially installed Ropiee XL (Allo USBridge version) on the USBridge, but was plagued with random pops and clicks typically every 30 or so. These were not loud, but distracting. I tried adjusting various settings within Roon, but nothing made any difference.

I therefore replaced Ropiee with DietPi only to find that this too served up the same pops and clicks with the default settings. The Allo Web UI within DietPi permits a number of adjustments so I set about seeing whether any of these would help. The one that finally solved the issue is ‘CPU Governor’. This can be set to: on demand (default); conservative; power save and performance. Using the performance setting all pops and clicks are gone.

The issue therefore seems to be some kind of throttling of the cpu which can be adjusted within DietPi, but not Ropieee.

I would be interested to hear Harry’s thoughts on this.

I had this issue many years ago, and your post jogged my memory. The issue for me was not the OS, but the PSU not quite up to the job.

That’s not the case. Yeah, you cannot configure throttling in RoPieee (with reason), but RoPieee uses the performance governor by default.

Are you willing to do some (more) experiments?

Hi Harry, thanks for responding. If it’s not cpu management what are your thoughts on the origins of the issue? Happy to experiment further, but please don’t assume any computing knowledge on my part!

I should have included in my initial post that I am running Roon Rock on a 7i3 NUC.