Huh???

I understand why you might want extra cores to help with loading in the music-PC... to transfer across to the audio-PC. But this has nothing to do with SQ.

I think we need to be ultra consistent with the terms we're all using:

- music-PC = music server (should have no affect on SQ)
- audio-PC = PC connected to DAC (ideally runs RAM OS in minOS mode)

Peter, I know you follow this (you monitor the use of these terms more than anyone), but perhaps you haven't had your morning coffee yet?

Mani.

Haha... an Alfa 4c! You won't believe this but I test-drove the 4c spider only 2 weeks ago. Loved the car, but three things stopped me from placing an order:

1. the lower switch-gear (knobs and controls) are very low quality
2. on cr*ppy UK roads, the steering is simply too difficult to control (the car follows every camber, nook and cranny - and there are loads of those here in the UK on our back B-roads)
3. I don't have the money sitting around spare :-(

If point 3 were not the case, I would go out and buy one today. Simply a fantastic car:

- carbon fibre monocoque tub
- non-assisted steering (phenomenal on the track)
- sweet 1.75 litre 240bhp engine (plenty of power for a sub-1000kg car)
- totally, totally gorgeous on the outside (in both coupe and spider form)

VJ, yours looks stunning. I hope you drive the hell out of it, and not have it become a garage queen.

You obviously have good tastes!

Cheers, Mani.

This is how I have things set up (replace tablet with laptop). It works really, really well.

Mani.

Hi Juan, in your previous setup did you have a lot of other devices connected to the switch at the same time? I suspect this is where most of the improvement (decrease in noise) would come from.

I have to say, I still can't quite get my head around the level of improvement over here. Certainly, I'd urge everyone to go for a direct connection between the music-PC and the audio-PC. No problem if you only have one ethernet port on your music-PC mobo - just buy a PCIe card.

Mani.

Nah... I was right in the first place! (For sure, Q5 makes a difference, but not to the extent that I'm hearing.) With a few days of intensive listening, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the SQ has taken a massive leap forward with the new music server. I'd say the improvement is close to that of the RAM-OS!

OK, so what exactly is going on? I remember a few years ago now trying HQPlayer's 'Network Audio Adapter' and finding that the sound changed depending on whether the music was stored on the player PC's HDD or on an external Synology NAS via a network switch. I just couldn't understand why. Jusssi (HQP developer) seemed to dismiss the possibility that the sound could have changed at all. But now, thinking about it, I think I was hearing the affect of noise coming through the LAN to the DAC via the NAA.

My current thinking is veering towards the network switch as being the culprit. I mean, there are all those 'high-speed' digital connections that the switch has to contend with. The noise must be high. Of course, ethernet connections are galvanically isolated by design, but this has nothing to do with stopping noise getting through (something I think a lot of people don't understand). The 'digital die-hards' will tell you that noise in a digital system doesn't matter - that's the whole beauty of digital. But they don't know how digital music works - if the noise finds its way through to the DAC, it will produce jitter, which will kill the sound.

Soooooooo... we've now got to not only contend with the USB connection from the audio-PC to the DAC, but also the bloody ethernet connection into the audio-PC. Isn't this hobby just wonderful?

On the bright side, I now have the best sound in my room that I have ever heard... anywhere 

Mani.

Thanks Peter.


True. But where would we be if we took the same attitude with XX all those years ago?

I've decided to just transfer all the files from my NAS onto the 3TB HDD in the music server (NTFS) and stick with ReFS for the Storage Space for now - I like the idea of self-repairing and low maintenance disks. I have backups of everything on NTFS disks so am pretty relaxed about things potentially going wrong in the future. Never thought I'd be OK being a guinea pig for Microsoft...

Mani.

Haha... just when things are working so well, something else comes up!

I've got my music server all up and running:

- Supermicro mobo (with IPMI ethernet port & 4x ethernet ports)
- i3 6300T CPU
- 16GB ECC RAM
- Win10 on 128 SSD
- 4x 4TB WD Red Pro HDDs (~7.5GTB mirrored Storage Space in ReFS format)
- 1x 3TB WD Red Pro HDD (for temp backups)

I went for Storage Space and ReFS instead of RAID after doing a bit of research online - Storage Spaces beat RAID in many performance tests and ReFS is considered to be the NTFS successor. But I've now got a problem transferring some of my music files from my Synology NAS to the Storage Space. Some files transfer no problem and others not at all. It seems that either a whole album will transfer OK, or not at all (the jpg and pdf files always transfer OK). If not, I get the 0x80070299 error. Hmm... I wonder if some of my CD rips added some meta-data that is not compatible with ReFS?

I've tried some of the files that won't transfer to the ReFS Storage Space, and they transfer perfectly to the (NTFS) SSD.

Ultimately, if I have to reformat the Storage Space, I will. But before I do this, does anyone have a quick fix? (Not a lot on the internet related to 0x80070299 and Storage Space and/or ReFS.)

Mani.

I'm not sure what the best advice is, but feel that as long as performance isn't being affected (too much), why not have extra security? But having said that, I never use any virus protection programs (but happy to leave Defender on nowadays for my work PC and work laptop).

Mani.

No, I wasn't imagining it... or at least not totally. The sound definitely changed, but not necessarily for the better. It was sharper and more edgy than earlier. But nothing to do with the new music server - just me forgetting to set Q5 back from 0 to 1.

Lesson? If you feel your sound is a tad too sharp, check your Q5.

Mani.

Maybe it's too early to tell, but everything really does seem to be working fine now.

Thanks to KnB for starting this thread, and Juan and Alain for sharing their thoughts. And of course Peter for encouraging us to go down this route. I'm now really looking forward to loading XX on the music-PC (OK, perhaps "looking forward" is over-stating things a bit) and getting 'pre-fetching & preparing' working correctly. This should open up the world of Tidal for me...

Cheers, Mani.

PS. Call me completely crazy, but has the SQ improved? Must be imagining it.

Nah... nothing to do with W10 drivers... on this occasion anyway.

SOLVED!

I noticed that when I was trying to transfer 500MB or so, the transfer would start and stop for a few seconds, and start again - sort of staccato. When it was going, it was obviously very fast. It seemed that something was interfering with the transfer.

So I just disabled the firewall for public networks in the music-PC. I think this is totally OK because the firewall for my public network is still up and running, and only this is connected to the internet. Maybe it would be safer to keep the firewall for private networks and try to make an exception for XX. If anyone knows how to do this, please let me know.

In any event, everything seems to be working just fine now. I'll do a bit of testing and will report back, in case anyone else has this issue in the future.

Thanks for all the help everyone.

Mani.

But then why are things working super fast between my music-PC and my work PC (both Win10)?

Mani.

Thanks Peter.


Just tried this and... nah... it's exactly the same speed as the direct connection. This now points to the audio-PC as being the culprit. Why? Because transfers to my work PC in my office from the music-PC are super fast. Therefore, there can't be anything wrong with the music-PC or the LAN.

I'm going to go back to booting from disk and then NormalOS - of course, this is exactly what I did when I first connected the music-PC to the audio-PC, but I didn't check file transfer speeds in NormalOS on disk.

Will be back...

Mani.

Thanks for your thoughts everyone... really appreciate it.

Peter, just FYI, I haven't touched the audio-PC. It has been working perfectly with my Synology NAS via the LAN (and still does). But there seems to be something amiss with the direct connection with the music-PC (Win10). (Although RDC works perfectly between the music-PC and audio-PC.)

I'm going to connect the audio-PC to the LAN (which already uses a a gigabit switch, Juan) to see what happens. I suspect Juan is correct and that the speed will increase dramatically - it should be on-par with the transfer from the music-PC to my work PC in the office.

But the root cause of this issue will remain - why is the music-PC throttling the output to the audio-PC? Maybe it's the Firewall or Defender in the music-PC? When I look at the 'Network and Sharing Centre', it is referring to the direct connection to the audio-PC as an 'Unidentified public network'. Does this seem right?

Mani.

I've just built a new music server (music-PC, with 4 ethernet ports) and have configured things exactly as in KnB's schematic, with a direct ethernet connection between the audio-PC and the music-PC (and a separate ethernet connection between the music-PC and the LAN). All the RDCs work perfectly and I really love this whole configuration. But I've got a bit of a problem with the network speed between the directly connected audio-PC and the music-PC.

I've measured the time it takes to transfer a 460MB album of music (5 wav files plus jpg):

1) 5 seconds from music-PC to my office PC SSD (via the LAN)
2) 21 seconds from music-PC to audio-PC RAM (MinOS)
3) 323 seconds loading music in XX in unattended (MinOS) before music starts

Something is obviously throttling the speed. It can't be an issue with the ethernet port, or the HDDs in the music-PC because of 1) above. I will play around with a few things myself (e.g. connect audio-PC to the LAN, though I'd rather not have this permanently), but thought I'd just ask if anyone has some obvious things that I should try.

Cheers, Mani.