CuBox Project X

[Kunter]

Welcome to the project guys...

Looking forward to your comments...

Rufus,

You may be much better of with a Cubox like hardware, since it has much less electrical noise going on inside... especially from the power supply...

Antoine,

I will also try Volumio soon, but I am waiting for my new small power cable since the one that I did myself from an unused USB Cable is so fiddly, I am afraid to even touch the system now...

Cheers.

[Antoine]

Today the Cubox i4Pro has been delivered so I had to brush up on my Linux skills again! Since I have no active Linux systems running I downloaded a Fedora Live CD image and setup a USB stick to boot from that on my regular PC. After that I followed the instructions on the http://mubox.voyage.hk/cubox-i website and all is up and running now. I of course installed the real-time kernel.

I cut the end of the DC power cable from the power brick of my PicoPSU clone since it has a 2.1x5.5mm DC plug (and a ferrite core) and soldered the +5V and ground wires to the red and black wires of a shielded USB cable. For now I power the Cubox using a USB output of my music server but when my Anker batteries arrive (should be tomorrow) I can plug it into one of those since these have USB outputs as well.

It's too late now for critical listening but of course I wanted to test the Cubox and I do already like what I'm hearing at low volumes.

I'm playing music over ethernet for now from my NAS PC. It's advised to use the E-SATA connection for the best quality possible, so later I will copy the music to a SSD and install that in the Akasa X21 ESATA enclosure that's currently on route to me as well.

Here's a picture of the Cubox, for now lying on a central heating radiator behind the set. Of course I'll move it later to a nice and better spot inside my rack. Only connections you see are the Vodka USB, no-name CAT 7 ethernet cable and my home made power cable.

edit: tip for Kunter and any future owners of the Cubox. The real time tuning settings (http://mubox.voyage.hk/realtime_kernel_cuboxi) are not persistent and thus lost after a reboot. I created a script and call that from rc.local to reapply these settings after every reboot.

Code:

for IRQ in /proc/irq/* ; do echo 1 > $IRQ/smp_affinity ; done
for PID in $(pgrep ci_hdrc) ; do taskset -pc 1 $PID ; done
echo 2 > /proc/irq/72/smp_affinity
echo 2 > /proc/irq/75/smp_affinity
taskset -pca 2,3 $(pgrep mpd)
chrt -f -p 49 $(pgrep cifsd)
ps -eLo pid,group,lwp,rtprio,priority,time,cmd | egrep "cifsd"

[Kunter]

Today the Cubox i4Pro has been delivered so I had to brush up on my Linux skills again! Since I have no active Linux systems running I downloaded a Fedora Live CD image and setup a USB stick to boot from that on my regular PC. After that I followed the instructions on the http://mubox.voyage.hk/cubox-i website and all is up and running now. I of course installed the real-time kernel.

I cut the end of the DC power cable from the power brick of my PicoPSU clone since it has a 2.1x5.5mm DC plug (and a ferrite core) and soldered the +5V and ground wires to the red and black wires of a shielded USB cable. For now I power the Cubox using a USB output of my music server but when my Anker batteries arrive (should be tomorrow) I can plug it into one of those since these have USB outputs as well.

It's too late now for critical listening but of course I wanted to test the Cubox and I do already like what I'm hearing at low volumes.

I'm playing music over ethernet for now from my NAS PC. It's advised to use the E-SATA connection for the best quality possible, so later I will copy the music to a SSD and install that in the Akasa X21 ESATA enclosure that's currently on route to me as well.

Here's a picture of the Cubox, for now lying on a central heating radiator behind the set. Of course I'll move it later to a nice and better spot inside my rack. Only connections you see are the Vodka USB, no-name CAT 7 ethernet cable and my home made power cable.

edit: tip for Kunter and any future owners of the Cubox. The real time tuning settings (http://mubox.voyage.hk/realtime_kernel_cuboxi) are not persistent and thus lost after a reboot. I created a script and call that from rc.local to reapply these settings after every reboot.

Code:

for IRQ in /proc/irq/* ; do echo 1 > $IRQ/smp_affinity ; done
for PID in $(pgrep ci_hdrc) ; do taskset -pc 1 $PID ; done
echo 2 > /proc/irq/72/smp_affinity
echo 2 > /proc/irq/75/smp_affinity
taskset -pca 2,3 $(pgrep mpd)
chrt -f -p 49 $(pgrep cifsd)
ps -eLo pid,group,lwp,rtprio,priority,time,cmd | egrep "cifsd"

Thanks and Kudos Antoine...

I had to go back to the stock power supply when something went wrong with the USB cable I was using (long story). But I should say the power supply is very important on Cubox sound quality. My shipment with cables, enclosures and everything should be here next week and I am restless waiting for them to see the effect.

Looking forward to hear your comments on sound quality...

One more thing; using the web gui, I assigned a fixed IP to the Cubox which makes it easier to get everything back together after every reboot (MPaD connection and all)

Cheers.

Kunter

[Kunter]

And one more thing...

use some aluminum foil from your kitchen to wrap Cubox (except for the face which has the connections) and if possible, ground it. Connect a thin wire to the foil, and connect it either to a grounding device (Entreq is good here) or your rack if it has chunky metals. Even to the ground of Devialet near the phono input.

[Antoine]

Thanks Kunter! I will for sure let the forum know my thoughts on the sound quality after some days of listening and perhaps A/B/A comparing with my music server PC.

My Anker batteries came in today so I can switch to full battery power. I'll use the Astro E4 2nd gen for the Cubox as this battery can supply 3A to all USB ports. The other Astro E5 1st gen has a 2.1A and 1A port and I'll use that one to power the SSD in my music server PC.

I was indeed planning to both fix the IP address and shield the Cubox as well using both aluminum and copper tape foil I have lying around here for shielding. The grounding is a good tip as well as this allows the shield to drain away the absorbed EMI. I had already bought a cheap schuko plug for this purpose that I will insert in the one empty socket of my P3 Power Plant.

[Antoine]

Done, it's now 'shielded'.

And like Kunter mentioned before, the Cubox is tiny indeed! (see picture with CD for reference, the black thing on the right is the Anker battery)

[Rufus McDufus]

Incidentally I'm not sure if this is an issue with the Cubox but it was a problem I mentioned earlier with my Eeebox which has a number of USB ports. If using MPD the default mpd.conf file shows a device name of 'hw:0,0'. Now the problem I found is the major device number can change on each boot so you could find the one with the Devialet plugged in be either hw:0,0 or hw:1,0 depending which way the wind is blowing. The cure isn't difficult (and if you've seen it you've possibly worked this out with a bit of googling) but a device alias can be set. There's probably other ways of figuring out the alias but I have the 'alsa-utils' package installed on my Voyage box which provides the command 'aplay'.
A section of sample output shows:

Code:

root@voyage:~# aplay -L
...
default:CARD=D20
    Devialet USB Audio 2.0, USB Audio
    Default Audio Device
sysdefault:CARD=D20
    Devialet USB Audio 2.0, USB Audio
    Default Audio Device
front:CARD=D20,DEV=0
    Devialet USB Audio 2.0, USB Audio
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=D20,DEV=0
    Devialet USB Audio 2.0, USB Audio
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
...

So I used the default entry above so my very basic audio_output section in /etc/mpd.conf looks like:

Code:

audio_output {
        type            "alsa"
        name            "My Devialet"
        device          "default:CARD=D20"
        dsd_usb         "yes"
}

No problem with reboots as the device alias follows the major device number of the USB output. Just including this snippet for completeness if anyone comes across it.

[Antoine]

Thanks Rufus, the Cubox doesn't show this issue (or hasn't yet here) although it does have two USB ports.

[lmitche]

Today the Cubox i4Pro has been delivered so I had to brush up on my Linux skills again! Since I have no active Linux systems running I downloaded a Fedora Live CD image and setup a USB stick to boot from that on my regular PC. After that I followed the instructions on the http://mubox.voyage.hk/cubox-i website and all is up and running now. I of course installed the real-time kernel.

I cut the end of the DC power cable from the power brick of my PicoPSU clone since it has a 2.1x5.5mm DC plug (and a ferrite core) and soldered the +5V and ground wires to the red and black wires of a shielded USB cable. For now I power the Cubox using a USB output of my music server but when my Anker batteries arrive (should be tomorrow) I can plug it into one of those since these have USB outputs as well.

It's too late now for critical listening but of course I wanted to test the Cubox and I do already like what I'm hearing at low volumes.

I'm playing music over ethernet for now from my NAS PC. It's advised to use the E-SATA connection for the best quality possible, so later I will copy the music to a SSD and install that in the Akasa X21 ESATA enclosure that's currently on route to me as well.

Here's a picture of the Cubox, for now lying on a central heating radiator behind the set. Of course I'll move it later to a nice and better spot inside my rack. Only connections you see are the Vodka USB, no-name CAT 7 ethernet cable and my home made power cable.

edit: tip for Kunter and any future owners of the Cubox. The real time tuning settings (http://mubox.voyage.hk/realtime_kernel_cuboxi) are not persistent and thus lost after a reboot. I created a script and call that from rc.local to reapply these settings after every reboot.

Code:

for IRQ in /proc/irq/* ; do echo 1 > $IRQ/smp_affinity ; done
for PID in $(pgrep ci_hdrc) ; do taskset -pc 1 $PID ; done
echo 2 > /proc/irq/72/smp_affinity
echo 2 > /proc/irq/75/smp_affinity
taskset -pca 2,3 $(pgrep mpd)
chrt -f -p 49 $(pgrep cifsd)
ps -eLo pid,group,lwp,rtprio,priority,time,cmd | egrep "cifsd"

Thanks and Kudos Antoine...

I had to go back to the stock power supply when something went wrong with the USB cable I was using (long story). But I should say the power supply is very important on Cubox sound quality. My shipment with cables, enclosures and everything should be here next week and I am restless waiting for them to see the effect.

Looking forward to hear your comments on sound quality...

One more thing; using the web gui, I assigned a fixed IP to the Cubox which makes it easier to get everything back together after every reboot (MPaD connection and all)

Cheers.

Kunter

Hi Kunter. Many thanks for this post. I am curious. The Cubox has a 5MM power supply input. Why are you using the USB for power? What am I missing?

---

Today the Cubox i4Pro has been delivered so I had to brush up on my Linux skills again! Since I have no active Linux systems running I downloaded a Fedora Live CD image and setup a USB stick to boot from that on my regular PC. After that I followed the instructions on the http://mubox.voyage.hk/cubox-i website and all is up and running now. I of course installed the real-time kernel.

I cut the end of the DC power cable from the power brick of my PicoPSU clone since it has a 2.1x5.5mm DC plug (and a ferrite core) and soldered the +5V and ground wires to the red and black wires of a shielded USB cable. For now I power the Cubox using a USB output of my music server but when my Anker batteries arrive (should be tomorrow) I can plug it into one of those since these have USB outputs as well.

It's too late now for critical listening but of course I wanted to test the Cubox and I do already like what I'm hearing at low volumes.

I'm playing music over ethernet for now from my NAS PC. It's advised to use the E-SATA connection for the best quality possible, so later I will copy the music to a SSD and install that in the Akasa X21 ESATA enclosure that's currently on route to me as well.

Here's a picture of the Cubox, for now lying on a central heating radiator behind the set. Of course I'll move it later to a nice and better spot inside my rack. Only connections you see are the Vodka USB, no-name CAT 7 ethernet cable and my home made power cable.

edit: tip for Kunter and any future owners of the Cubox. The real time tuning settings (http://mubox.voyage.hk/realtime_kernel_cuboxi) are not persistent and thus lost after a reboot. I created a script and call that from rc.local to reapply these settings after every reboot.

Code:

for IRQ in /proc/irq/* ; do echo 1 > $IRQ/smp_affinity ; done
for PID in $(pgrep ci_hdrc) ; do taskset -pc 1 $PID ; done
echo 2 > /proc/irq/72/smp_affinity
echo 2 > /proc/irq/75/smp_affinity
taskset -pca 2,3 $(pgrep mpd)
chrt -f -p 49 $(pgrep cifsd)
ps -eLo pid,group,lwp,rtprio,priority,time,cmd | egrep "cifsd"

Thanks and Kudos Antoine...

I had to go back to the stock power supply when something went wrong with the USB cable I was using (long story). But I should say the power supply is very important on Cubox sound quality. My shipment with cables, enclosures and everything should be here next week and I am restless waiting for them to see the effect.

Looking forward to hear your comments on sound quality...

One more thing; using the web gui, I assigned a fixed IP to the Cubox which makes it easier to get everything back together after every reboot (MPaD connection and all)

Cheers.

Kunter

Hi Kunter. Many thanks for this post. I am curious. The Cubox has a 5MM power supply input. Why are you using the USB for power? What am I missing?

Sorry, wasn't thinking. You are talking about the other end of the wire. Got it.

How are you connected to your NAS? SMB or Minimserver?

[Kunter]

How are you connected to your NAS? SMB or Minimserver?

I briefly used minim server from my macbook. There were some problems of finding the right music information, showing same album multiple times, etc, so I did not bother. Currently using a USB stick, waiting for my eSATA connection...

Cheers.

---

<cut>

Does anyone yet if the Devialet's USB input needs the power pins connected?

<cut>

I can answer my own question since I've tested it using my new motherboard for which you can configure to cut the +5V power in USB. It doesn't work so the Devialet needs the +5V power active.

Antoine, and others who may chip in...

This is your posting on the USB thread a while back...

Have you tried powering the USB cable with an external battery supply? You have to use a split USB cable in this case of course, but is this effort worth pursuing?

I have very little experience on USB cables and would like to get the best out of this little box...

Thanks..

Kunter