[Chopin75]

i don’t see why not to use the same PC for video/movie. But the Euphony OS has to stay in a separate Sata SSD drive. I don’t think u can run both euphony and the video software within the same drive. U might have to take the drive out and then put another drive in for movie. Though perhaps One can put 2 different drives in and somehow can choose to reboot from either of the drive. U might need to ask Arthor from EuphonyUSA about it. I presume u need a dedicated video Pcl card too?
BTW somehow the euphony OS sounds so much better on DSD256 than any other software I tried on my Mac.

 

[project86]

I can play DSD256 flawlessly with euphony OS from a bootable external Samsung Sata drive and I am booting into macbook Air 2011. 4 G RAM. I don't know what gen the Intel chip it has. But I think it is i5. PCM upsampling is fine but PCM to DSD is not working well. DSD upsampling also does not work well. The Zotac Buggy from Europe is i5 7th gen though u can also get the same zotac PC separatelty and DIY by putting the Sata drive in.

The i3 in the Euphony PTS is significantly more powerful than an i5 from the 2011 era, so perhaps that's what makes the difference - PTS has no trouble upsampling as long as you keep it reasonable.

But yes, one could buy or build a potent small form factor system and run Euphony on it. A few years back I built myself a silent rig using an i7-6700T with 32GB RAM andSSD storage in a silent fanless Akasa case. That would have enough grunt for most power user scenarios.

I'm checking an idea to DIY with HDPLEX H3 V2 Fanless PC Chassis, it has many possibilities for motherboard, asked Larry which one will right for audio with Euphony.
But meanwhile I've got an Idea of using this configuration also for movie streaming instead of Popcorn that I'm using now, I know that here is not right place for asking this, but maybe some one know about existing software for this purpose? the question is if it'll be possible to use Euphony and video soft simultaneously...

Euphony doesn't do video at all. So you'd have to do some sort of dual boot configuration, and choose upon startup which OS you'd like to use. That is theoretically possible but I can't say I've tried it for sure.

 

[project86]

Forgot to mention, Black Friday sale giving 10% off for Euphony PTS, Matrix Audio, and Keces gear. Good time to replicate the setup I originally reviewed in the original post for a decent savings.

 

[genvirt]

Yes thank You !
Meanwhile I downloaded trial version and tried to run it.... unfortunately couldn't boot form DOK (tried a couple) - it's all time searching for network connection and can't find it.
I'm connecting with ethernet cable as suggested. win 10 runs OK after.
Arthur (from Euphony) said that it can be possible because I've a new version of Lenovo Thinkcentre tiny m720q but in time in some update it'll be set.
So till I not try it at home - no buying

 

[Chopin75]

I really like euphony, relatively simple to use. But does require ethernet to control remotely which is convenient and also should not affect sound much. Occasionally the ethernet causws interferences so ideally ir should be far from the USB boot drive and USB audio output.
The library management is not that great. I have difficulty getting the album covers to download automatically. Need to manually do it. For some reason I cannot download the files as a folder from file manager directly into the euphony drive via ethernet. Only individual tracks can be downloaded. So in general I can’t “sink”the music easily like J River or Audirvana. But then it actually sounds better with all the music loaded into the Euphony OS drive but has to be manually done slowly esp with large files.
I guess there some sacrifice of convenience in order to achieve the best sound possible.
It also plays M-ch easily and nicely. Only thing it cannot play SACD iso files.

 

[dcguy73]

I saw that HQPlayer was on sale for 15% off on Cyber Monday, so I snapped it up. Seemed like a good idea at the time. HQPlayer works really well with Stylus, though I'm not in love with Euphony's latest effort there. However, when I try to use HQPlayer with Roon, I get a lot of drop outs and pauses, even when I'm only upsampling to 32/384k PCM. When I check the CPU temp on the Euphony PTS while upsampling to 32/384k PCM, one of the cores is always wigging out, going into the red, while the rest of the cores seem to be doing okay. This may be due to the Singxer SU-1 I have inserted between the PTS and my DAC, the Holo Spring 3 -- or maybe it's the DAC itself? I'm puzzled why the Euphony PTS seems to be running out of steam even without upsampling to DSD.

Edit: I'm upsampling locally-stored (on an SSD drive) files, not streaming from Tidal.

 

[Chopin75]

I saw that HQPlayer was on sale for 15% off on Cyber Monday, so I snapped it up. Seemed like a good idea at the time. HQPlayer works really well with Stylus, though I'm not in love with Euphony's latest effort there. However, when I try to use HQPlayer with Roon, I get a lot of drop outs and pauses, even when I'm only upsampling to 32/384k PCM. When I check the CPU temp on the Euphony PTS while upsampling to 32/384k PCM, one of the cores is always wigging out, going into the red, while the rest of the cores seem to be doing okay. This may be due to the Singxer SU-1 I have inserted between the PTS and my DAC, the Holo Spring 3 -- or maybe it's the DAC itself? I'm puzzled why the Euphony PTS seems to be running out of steam even without upsampling to DSD.

Edit: I'm upsampling locally-stored (on an SSD drive) files, not streaming from Tidal.

I can’t remember if it is actually not possible to use upsampling with room or NAA. It should work with embedded. U may have to ask Arthur or Richard or others in Europe. U can also just use Stylus to upsample PCM.
I just see that u are using SsD locally. Richard did state PTS is not powerful enough for upsampling/conversion with HQplayer. U need a i5 7h gen or something similar

 

[dcguy73]

I'm thinking about getting a new computer to act as an HQPlayer server that does the heavy lifting for the Euphony PTS, which in turn sends the upsampled signal to my DAC. Does anyone have this particular setup? Could you explain how to set this up? I've been scouring the Web for an answer, but can't find any documentation from Signalyst or Euphony Audio that answers my question.

 

[project86]

I sometimes use Roon in that way - running Roon Server on my beefy Xeon setup (6-core/12-thread CPU, 64GB RAM, etc) and then using the Euphony PTS as an endpoint. It works quite well. I haven't used HQPlayer in this way though so I can't speak to that, sorry.

 

[dcguy73]

I sometimes use Roon in that way - running Roon Server on my beefy Xeon setup (6-core/12-thread CPU, 64GB RAM, etc) and then using the Euphony PTS as an endpoint. It works quite well. I haven't used HQPlayer in this way though so I can't speak to that, sorry.

Are you running HQPlayer in addition to Roon?

 

[dcguy73]

I thought that buying HQPlayer was a mistake, but if I stay within the boundaries of what the 7th gen i3 processor is capable of, everything sounds great. Arthur suggested I restrict HQPlayer from upsampling above 192k PCM or DSD64, so I set it to upsample 44.1k to 176.4k, and 48k to 192k. Now my music sounds fantastic. The i3 processor is up to the task (a few hiccups when streaming Tidal) both with Stylus and Roon.

 

[dcguy73]

Happy new year! I got a 2018 Mac Mini to handle HQPlayer upsampling duties. I tried to boot it into Euphony Stylus with a Euphony Audio-imaged thumb drive, but it won't recognize the drive as bootable. I already dual-boot between MacOS and Windows 10, but the Euphony drive wouldn't work with either operating system. Any suggestions?

 

[Chopin75]

Happy new year! I got a 2018 Mac Mini to handle HQPlayer upsampling duties. I tried to boot it into Euphony Stylus with a Euphony Audio-imaged thumb drive, but it won't recognize the drive as bootable. I already dual-boot between MacOS and Windows 10, but the Euphony drive wouldn't work with either operating system. Any suggestions?

Unfortunately the new macbook or macmini have high security that won’t allow external boot at all! Except it can reboot from MacOS that same or higher version as the original fzctory OS I tried many methods including windows running in my macbook 2018 and it won’t work. I think Macmini 2018 is having same issue now as the macbooks. I abandoned the mac and just got myself a HDplex PC, arrived today and will test sometime this week. U should ask Apple genius about it. Also I presume u formatted it as for Mac OS?

 

[dcguy73]

Unfortunately the new macbook or macmini have high security that won’t allow external boot at all! Except it can reboot from MacOS that same or higher version as the original fzctory OS I tried many methods including windows running in my macbook 2018 and it won’t work. I think Macmini 2018 is having same issue now as the macbooks. I abandoned the mac and just got myself a HDplex PC, arrived today and will test sometime this week. U should ask Apple genius about it. Also I presume u formatted it as for Mac OS?

Thanks for letting me know about this! I looked up this issue online and found out that you can change this setting (and allow booting up from an external drive) if you boot the Mac into recovery mode and go into the Startup Security settings, as explained here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208198. I'll give this a try tomorrow and report back.

 

[project86]

Yes I've heard lots of complaints about this as well. Thanks for the info about changing the settings, I was not aware of that (but I'm not a big Mac user anyway).

I thought I was having issues with my Euphony PTS dropping out every couple minutes while using Roon. It kept losing connection for about 1/2 second, which is just enough to interrupt playback. Playing music from the internal SSD in Stylus was fine though.

I was troubleshooting left and right, no solution presented itself.... gave up, swapped in a different streaming audio device, and experienced the same issues - worked fine in native playback mode with internal music but dropouts as a Roon endpoint.

The culprit? Ethernet cable went bad. Same quality cable that had been in use for a year with zero issues. Just sitting there, not being manhandled or moved around at all. How did it fail? No idea. Interesting that both systems could play natively without issue, which I guess only required the network connection when browsing music etc. Once I hit play it didn't matter if the signal dropped for a moment. Roon, however, needs a constant connection. Or maybe I was pulling music from Tidal or my NAS, I don't recall. Either way, it's all good now, but that was no fun to try and figure out.

Computer audio can be frustrating at times.