I use a single machine with an i7 7700 and this gear including a CUDA GPU, all running Windows 10 in a neighboring room. I run Roon Server and HQP and a monitoring program called Cam on that machine. I can run all filters except xtr at DSD 512; xtr-2s is fine.
I think you’ve isolated the issue (well done), but I don’t know why my i7 7700 is ok and the sonicT isn’t. Looking back over the linked thread I see I was reporting getting some pops with CUDA off. I would think that separating HQP from Roon would be enough without CUDA.
Many thanks and very interesting. I don’t know what GPU is inside the sonicT i7 and if/how CUDA can be enabled with the sonicT i7. I don’t even know what CUDA is but will mention this to Sonore.
Yes indeed. Today’s experimenting confirms this.
Sonore also confirmed they’re going to investigate and will try whatever they can to get both working on the same machine with DSD512.
I’ve had enough of troubleshooting for a while now. If I get another call about popping noises I’m disabling HQP and forcing the old man back to DSD512 up-sampling. Everything appears good though.
CUDA is an NVIDIA protocol that shares processing with the GPU. HQ Player supports CUDA if you have an NVIDIA CUDA capable GPU. Roon doesn’t support CUDA atm but has generally lower processing requirements.
Noted, I’ve passed this onto Sonore to look at. I’m sure Jesus will communicate with Jussi in the background to look at what can be done (if anything). The next model sonicT i9 (guessing) will probably come with a nice GPU now (guessing again).
Thanks for your help ! My question to you about single vs 2-box solution is what got me to try the latter (yes I’m patting myself on the back there ).
There was also some setting in Roon to adjust how aggressively it is scanning content in the background. But I would assume this doesn’t affect Tidal, or does it?
Background audio analysis was completed months ago and is set to throttle and there was nothing being imported into library in the background. Roon DSP was off.
So Roon was running as lean as possible in terms of background activities, for both USB drive and Tidal playback. Roon can’t run any leaner (in terms of settings for me to adjust)
Do you mean why Tidal streaming has such a large impact?
Dad’s initial observation was only Tidal streaming was being affected with pops. But yesterday he confirned (and I noted somewhere above) that the pops is not just limited to Tidal - USB drive playback is just as affected.
And popping gets more intense/frequent when browsing and searching Roon while HQP is simultaneously upsampling to DSD512- probably caused by Roon’s spikes/bursts in CPU usage, I’m guessing.
As noted above - separating RoonServer and HQP Embedded to separate machines solved the issue completely. But Jesus will look at how to get both working on the same machine, when he gets a sonicT i7 to play with.
The sonicTransporter i7 has plenty of power for this. It’s a prioritization issue of some kind. Jussi has an update that i’ll be release later today with some tweaks.
Also make sure you have Settings → Library → Background Audio Analysis Speed in Roon set to Throttled
I had a customer last week with this set to 8 core and he was getting dropouts playing a 44.1 track with no up-sampling!
Setting this to 8 core does use up all the CPU power of the i7!!!
“Background audio analysis was completed months ago and is set to throttle and there was nothing being imported into library in the background. Roon DSP was off.
So Roon was running as lean as possible in terms of background activities, for both USB drive and Tidal playback. Roon can’t run any leaner (in terms of settings for me to adjust)”
You can select the same filter for both if you like, then it is just like before.
This is a feature that has been requested every now and then. Thinking behind this is that RedBook and other (48k) 1x content requires fairly steep filter in general because there’s not really much “slack” between 20 kHz and Nyquist, while hires content (depending on one’s view) can trade some of bandwidth for slower roll-off filter.
For example slow roll-off poly-sinc-mqa (or the more MQA’ish poly-sinc-mqa-mp (*)) works fairly well for ordinary hires content, while for ordinary RedBook one could use a somewhat steeper poly-sinc-short. This also allows mixing linear-phase and minimum-phase filter between hires and non-hires content.
*) Even though the filters have “MQA” in their name, they are still much steeper than what MQA delivers. They are just tuned with MQA content in mind.
I tested specifically that track, with my fanless server (i5-7600T), to locally connected Holo Spring DAC, Roon running on Mac Mini. Volume turned up high. No pops…
One possibility is also that Roon running on Linux and output to HQPlayer is doing something funny in this case. I wonder how much Roon has been testing that. @brian?
Yes no pops with the 2-box solution here either (HQP Embedded on sonicT i7 and RoonServer on 2010 iMac).
The pops I’m referring to are HQP Embedded + RoonServer both running on the same sonicT i7. Andrew said there were some changes today that should help but it doesn’t appear so.
The 2-box solution (sonicT i7 + iMac) has been working flawlessly with DSD512 (even xtr 2s filters) since I had the idea to try it.
I was just hoping it could all be done on the sonicT i7, as @agillis says it should be able to do easily.
).
