HQPlayer's Network Audio Adapter

1 hour ago, Xoverman said:

ChatGBT :

In typical ChatGPT style it spits out total utter BS in a very self-confident tone.

First of all, there are no sample clocks involved anywhere here. All transfers are block based.

Please use the Client to see fill level of the FIFO. You can see that higher you set the "Buffer time", more variation you will have on the fill level, but it should never fall below 50%. Since the FIFO input and output are both block based, never single sample at a time. Also USB transfer is block based, data packet is sent every 125 µs and in asynchronous feedback, the DAC tells the sender if it should be sending more data or less data due to it's FIFO fill level trend.

Compared to network clocks, there are much more variations in the fill level due to other reasons such as OS latencies than a network clock could have.

1 hour ago, Xoverman said:

Even with a fully asynchronous FIFO, non-idealities in clocking, power supply interaction, or network timing could still lead to audible changes. The FIFO decouples the data streams but does not eliminate all potential influences from the upstream components, especially if there are secondary paths through which the clock changes can affect the audio chain.

If your NAA is isolated properly from the source (using U/UTP copper, or optical), and the DAC is properly isolated from the NAA, then yes there certainly won't be any influences.

But I would be interested to see such things demonstrated through measurements from the DAC analog outputs. I personally do a lot of measurements all the time as part of the development.

4 minutes ago, Mops911 said:

why is one buffer (in or out) empty?

What is the source media? Sometimes it is not relevant and then shown empty. For example if you play a local file natively. For streaming or realtime (input) sources it is usually shown.

4 minutes ago, Mops911 said:

it shows samples in my NAA window (2048). I can set this with a control app for my DAC. So this is the HW buffer of the DAC? There is also a line "ASIO output buffer size with 524288. What is that number?

 

 

Short buffer: unticked, grey, ticked. what's the difference?

 

"Buffer time" = "Default" means "use the one suggested by the driver" which would be 2048 samples in this case.

"Short buf" setting adjusts size of the FIFO that is between HQPlayer and the audio driver. This is the one of which you also have that bar indication in HQPlayer Client (the lower one). The upper one is input side FIFO level when source is hardware input. And if it is for example a streaming source, it is fill level of the streaming buffer.

So we have two different buffers in play here. One is the low level hardware DMA buffer owned by the audio driver. And another one is the FIFO buffer at HQPlayer or NAA side that is between all the playback operations and the hardware buffer. The hardware buffer is much smaller one. Hardware buffer deals with just bare low level OS timing inconsistencies (delays). While the higher level FIFO can handle much bigger delays due to badly behaving applications within the OS or network traffic inconsistencies.