I was at a friends house last week helping to set up a new preamp and let him hear my T+A dac with 512. He uses a 2 zone system. The core being on a win 10 pro machine with i7-7700K processor, music is stored on an internal HDD in this machine and Tidal via satellite wifi. The second zone, upstairs goes to a win 10 pro machine with a i7-4790K processor ands connects to a ifi nano dac via USB. the 2 PC’s talk to each other thru his linksys wifi router,. Everytime we enabled DSP up sampling in roon music would play for 3 seconds then silence, then jump to next track play 3 seconds and silence then jump to next track, repeating this over and over. We tried up sampling to DSD256, DSD128, DSD64, PCM 352, PCM192, PCM96 it didn’t matter same issue occurred. Later that day we tried using Roon DSP (we normally use HQP and upsample to 512) on his core machine with my T+A attached and i7-7700k cpu again we had the same issue 3 seconds of music and silence then skip tracks. This happened at 512 and 256 and this is a machine that plays DSD512 with HQP with no issues what so ever. We also got the error message track is loading slowly quite frequently.
Obviously something is amiss. I was to distracted to notice the processing speed but both PC’s can do HQP at 512 so I don’t think CPU power is an issue. In Headroom, I enabled it and let it default at -3db (we actually tried it enabled and disabled neither helped). In sample rate conversion we definately enabled parallelize sigma delta, we played around with the up sampling rate to see if we could find when the problem stopped, it didn’t. Any idea what we could have done wrong? It is probably really easy fix, but stumped us.
BTW- he lives in nowhere land and uses satellite internet, but for the most part, 99%, we can stream tidal and upsample to DSD512 via HQP on the core machine with no issues.
My guess if you are using Wifi then this is likely to be a primary source of issues for upsampled operation. You seem to have all the other bases covered. By a couple of long enough Cat 5e/6 LAN cables and get the 2 systems hooked up via wire…not wireless. If this is just a tidal issue then satellite connection is also far from ideal.
Hi @Quadman ----- Thank you for the report and sharing your feedback with us. Both are very appreciated!
Moving forward, you mentioned during your troubleshooting that you had been receiving the, “track is loading slowly” error message quite frequently, which would indicate some sort of bottle neck occurring somewhere in the network configuration.
If possible I would definitely try testing with a hardwired connection as proposed in @wizardofoz 's post (). Furthermore, can you verify what the experience is like if you were to play one of the mentioned formats (DSD256, DSD128, DSD64, PCM 352, PCM192, PCM96) without using the DSP engine? In other words, how would does a DSD (64, 128, or 256) file behave?
Eric, unfortunately my buddy lives 600 miles away and I am now back home. As I mentioned with his core machine which connects to his network via the lynksys router with wifi we played a lot of music with HQP and up sampled to DSD512 with no issues. The music HDD is inside his core machine. When we tried DSP with roon, HQP was not open, we got the same issue as I described with his upstairs zone, music plays for 3 seconds then silence (my guess about 20 or so seconds) then roon jumps to next track, 3 seconds of music then silence then jumps to next track (we also got the track is loading slowly msg, but the track was on his local HDD). This same track was played with HQP up sampled to DSD512 on the exact same core machine with no issues. So my question does Roon handle the DSP processing and track loading differently than HQP does which seems to have no issues on his core machine up sampling to 512.
This is an old thread, but FWIW, I had the same issue and turning off exclusive mode in audio device settings resolved the issue. It could be that some other program or windows itself is contesting the same resources.