Trying to play DSD256 5.0 album on Nucleus+

Clearly, Roon does contribute to the burden of the processor and the local network as it does its housework but the latter should not be a limiting factor with what I would consider “normal” in my neighborhood. CPU resources, otoh, vary substantially from situation to situation and I have described how they affect performance in my review of the Nucleus+.

Please clarify the configuration difference between this “played normal” scenario and the “same problem” scenario in your first post here. Are you implying the same NUC7i7DNHE could not do this when using only one network interface, but can now do it if using two network interfaces (bridged?) ? How is the second network interface added to the NUC (I’m not aware it came with two LAN ports)?

If you have determined 100Mbps Ethernet is a problem, could you just change the switch to a 1000Mbps switch?

Please also post a signal path when it’s “played normal”.

The signal path in both cases was the same. The only difference was that in the first case the content from the Internet was actively downloaded simultaneously with the playback of the file from the NAS.
My NUC has two ethernet cards: one is integrated in main board and connected to ethernet DAC (roon endpoint); another is usb ethernet card (adapter) 100 Mbps and connected to wifi router/internet. There is the DHCP server in NUC for the first card to isolate roon endpoint from local network created by wifi router.
I can replace the 100 Mbps usb ethernet adapter with a 1000 Mbps usb ethernet adapter but I don’t want to do this for some reason. I believe that active downloads from the Internet should be suspended when playing content from a local network if you do not cache content playback on the system disk as in the case of playing content from the Internet. Or, best of all, do content caching when playing from a local network as well as from the Internet. It would be logical and correct.

You have an unusual network topology, and I believe you’re not running ROCK, plus you are not trying to convert DSD256 5.0 to PCM 5.0, making your setup totally not comparable to the OP’s.

What’s your processing speed when DSD256 5.0 mapped to stereo playback worked? If you’re not downmixing I guess my previous suggestion of disabling Native DSD processing becomes irrelevant to your case, and you’re not running into a CPU performance problem being discussed in this thread and the previous thread.

I would suspect USB being a problem. I would suggest you remove the USB Ethernet, connect the NUC integrated 1000Mbps to the router, and connect your endpoint to the router. Turn off the NUC DHCP server. See if this works.

If you prefer that Roon not perform any downmixing, you should use “Channel Mapping Only”. Roon will simply drop any channels that can’t be mapped to speakers instead of playing them.
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Multichannel

I am not familiar with multichannel music, but doesn’t this Channel Mapping from 5.0 to 2.0 drop the singer’s voice if it’s mixed like a movie (where all voices are in the center channel)?

Of course, all this works in this mode. But at the same time, the advantage of using a separate isolated subnet for the endpoint (as I noted earlier) is lost. It also works in the mode that I use now (which I mentioned earlier). The problem is the uncontrolled use of the Internet by Roon Core (downloading content from the Internet) during playback of audio files, including playback of audio files from the local network (from NAS), which should be a priority for the Roon (in this case downloads from the Internet should occur in the background at a limited speed or make caching of the playback content from the NAS to the system disk as I wrote earlier). These are actually my suggestions for improving Roon software.

These are actually my suggestions for improving Roon software.

Then you should put the suggestions in a post in the Feature Request section.

1 Like

Sure. I use “Channel Mapping” with my multichannel system but, with a stereo output from multichannel sources, “Downmixing” is essential in order not to lose any of the musical content. Of course, like any processing, “Downmixing” will add to the CPU overhead. No work done is without a cost.

Good point but, I think, there are two solutions: One is an option to have Roon stop doing “other stuff” (like downloading content from the Internet and/or library update/maintenance) during active playback. The other is to get a faster/better processor than the Nucleus+!