Audiolense Convolver: Issues with 'clipped words' and audio playing at an enhanced speed with cutouts

[mccarty350]

I am trying to diagnose an issue with audiolense convolver. Here's my use case:

1. Broke out my LX521.4 8 channel speakers.
2. Set them up in audiolense, took measurements, applied filters, built an audiolense convolver file.
3. When I play back audio from jriver directly to audiolense convolver using ASIO I get all manner of skips and the audio is coming out at a rapid speed i.e. playback speed is somewhere between 1.5 and 2x the speed.
4. I tried maxing out all the buffers, had jriver load the entire file decoded, etc. etc. to reduce playback system load as much as possible.
5. In audiolense convolver the entire time this is occurring I see that 'clipped words' is incrementing rapidly during plackback.
6. This is a lower horsepower lenovo minipc core i5-4570 @ 3.2 ghz that's likely running a laptop-type motherboard inside of it.

Is the root cause of this behavior just a general lack of horsepower on the machine i.e. does 'clipped words' really mean 'i can't keep up with your 8 channels of 96/24 audio'?

Any other mitigation strategies or is this just a matter of needing more horsepower?

Thanks,

John

 

[whoareyou]

With JRiver, I've had weird stuff like this (without convolver), but usually mostly stuttering, when DSP output tab is misconfigured.
Assuming output channel configuration is correct, you could use JRiver to downsample from 96 to 48 and see if that helps on the convolver side..

 

[juicehifi]

Yes, horsepower may be a factor here. You could try to increase the latency in the convolver. More latency leads to less work.
And dialling back to 44.1 or 48 kHz will reduce the workload substantially too. Half the filter length and half the speed...

 

[mccarty350]

I tried some slimmer audio players (foobar, winyl) and piped them out to audiolense and still had dropouts but far less so which also confirmed to me that my lack of processing power + jriver's heavy footprint were factors. I also maxed out all of my buffers and latency prior to posting but it didn't bring me any relief.

Most of my media is SACD or 96/24 so I didn't try downsampling, I was concerned that the CPU it would take to change the sample rate would be more than the CPU necessary to send out the 8 streams in 96/24 but I'll give it a shot.

I've already started hunting for a more powerful HTPC as a more permanent solution, I just wanted to verify that it indeed was likely CPU related before gong down that road.

Thanks all!

 

[juicehifi]

You could check the work load on your current pc too.

Ctr+alt+del. Then choose the Task Manager. There you can examine memory usage and cpu load overall as well as in detail.