Have you checked intel power gadget? How much wattage is the cpu drawing?
If I leave the package power limit at auto in the bios I have problems with some filters. If you have the cooling capacity try increasing the wattage.
I also don’t use turbo. I used to have a 5ghz overclock but the voltage to make it stable at 5 was a bit high… 4.9 on all cores is where I’m at now. cpu voltage I believe is set to 1.255 and line load calibration is set to turbo. I believe package power limit is now at 135. It still clocks down at idle and lower cpu tasks. Temps are very stable on air with a Noctua NH-D15.
Still, not convinced I can do as good a job with the other solutions that the Dirac Live is doing. Its the only solution I feel comfortable going beyond Schroeder. And I have the SHD laying around next to the Roon Server anyways doing the desktop system.
I didn’t consciously follow an upgrade path for my Audiostore Prestige. I was on SonicorbiterOS v2.7 and noticed I wasn’t getting latest versions of HQPe after several attempted updates - I was keen to get sinc-L after it came out last year. I had a hunch that upgrading to v2.8 would help as indeed it did as I got the latest HQPe version when I upgraded last October. Since then new versions of HQPe have appeared in v2.8 very shortly after Jussi released them.
You save a lot of power and get quite a bit better performance by using turbo. Since then all your cores (including idle ones) are not blasting at full speed all the time…
My i5-8400 works in Ext2 ASDM7EC DSD256, but in Ext3, it’s a little slow… heavy charged on two cores.
The switch to EXT3 DSD7 256+fs is not bad and relieves the cpu. If I want to keep an EC modulator, it’s back to DSD128… or PCM (rather good in SincMx).
DSD 256+fs vs EC ??
Everything goes through my RME Adi-2 (DSD direct on the RME and volume control on HQP).
rather than checking Multicore DSP, change the setting so that it is just grey. I think that means that HQP will distribute the load across available cores automatically;
try using ADSM5EC instead of 7EC. I find this modulator works better with my Lampizator DAC in any case and it’s lighter on the processors.
With these two settings, and running HQP on an M1 Mac Mini (8GB memory), I upsample to DSD256 from redbook on 1x with polysinc-Mx (it also works with ext3), and I use ext2 for Nx. No stuttering whatsoever.
Thanks for your answer. Actually, I checked ADSM5EC, and most probably its computation req. is the same as the 7EC, I saw the same CPU usage.
Right now I’m using Ext3 + 7EC on 1x and xtr-mp on Nx again with 7EC. However, I see %50 CPU usage with Ext3 + 7EC on Nx and I think it shouldn’t be any freezing. I don’t know the M1’s and HQP’s multi-thread CPU utilization but I see high usage only for 4 cores, not on all cores.
What are your ideas about ext2, xtr-xx, and polysinc-Mx? I think xtr-mp has a really warm and relaxed sound.
Interesting.
I am trying to find out if this applies to ESS ES903Pro as well.
If this is the case, converting to DSD in hqplayer would be the best solution, as it skips another processing level in the DAC chip, but DSD processing is so much more computationally expensive than PCM one!
I wanted to try the sinc and sinc-M filters (in the path of Chord M-Scaler), but they do not work for DSD, at least not for me. So I am sending PCM 384 kHz to the DAC, which is an ES9038Pro. Otherwise I can use the Chord Mojo as DAC only and send 768 kHz PCM to it.
Let’s keep experimenting…
Any suggestion is welcome!
I have a Holo Audio Spring I. It has a separate DSD section and a NOS setting, so I upsample everything to DSD 256 (ext2, ASDM7EC) in HQP on a server in the next room and send it via an NAA to the DAC, which does as little as possible.
I took my DAC to a friend’s place for a demo and he was quite impressed. I told him he should listen to it at my place, where it does even less.
Use HQP to send it the highest upsampled PCM or DSD rate it can handle and play around with the modulators and filters till you hear something you like. Read the posts in this thread for selections that others like with their gear.
I see that the K5pro accepts DSD up to DSD512. You say you have a high-end PC. Okay. I would try setting HQPlayer’s output to SDM (which is DSD), and try the ext2 filter and ADSM5 modulator to start with. If you have no stuttering, you can try ext3 and/or ADSM7. See what combinations you like. You may well ask “why not DSD512?”. At present, there is no cpu capable to upsample to 512 using the EC family modulators. And you have to use the EC modulators because they are much better sounding than the non-EC ones.
After listening to ext3 some more, I still think sinc-m is the best. The upper Mids get a bit muddy on my system with ext3, yet sinc-m has clarity and extreme depth across the whole spectrum.
