2. pc-audio
  3. 158817-1604

Audiogon Is Noisy

I use my 5 year old cheapo PC (DELL Optiplex 790), that I picked up from the trash heap and fixed, to stream ROON to my DAC. Now my streaming sounds pretty amazing because I use a Sonore microRendu. This eliminates the noise in my computer from getting to my DAC. I still have the Ethernet network noise getting into the DAC but that is not that much. For, another $1K I will upgrade to the "OpticalRendu LITE for ROON Only" and that noise goes away too (for the most part).

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/how-to-optimize-digital-streaming-with-optical-fiber/

So I thought I should be in good shape once I get the opticalRendu. However, recently this audio office computer with ROON was starting to have CPU usage that averages 45%. At this rate of CPU usage, my computer fans come on and my machine is no longer silent. A real bummer for audio. So I am thinking I need a new more powerful processor for my mostly audio only PC. Normally my CPU usage is around 10%. I also do some remote desktop via this machine but that hardly uses any CPU.

Well after a bit of testing today I find out it is AUDIOGON.COM that is making all the noise on my computer. With my browser opened up to A’gon the site’s advertisement JavaScript (likely written by monkeys) is jacking up the CPU. I killed the browser running A’gon and CPU is back to my beautiful 10% range and silence again.

So the moral of the story is don’t keep a browser open to A’gon while streaming.
yyzsantabarbara
yyzsantabarbara OP
4,805 posts
 
Posted the following on ROON Support forum.

When the ROON application client is maximized my GPU hits 100%, when the application window is set to restore (not maximized) the GPU is around 50%, and when the application window is minimized the GPU is very low (which is great). My CPU follows the same usage pattern with highest on maximized and lower on restore and lowest on minimized.

What this means is that if I am playing music with the ROON application window maximized my GPU and CPU are working extra hard and my cooling fans come on. Which is noisy. If I minimize the ROON application window my GPU and CPU have very little work to do and the fans shut down and the computer is silent.

Seems like a bug to me and not a feature.


Seems like this is a known problem on Macs, I am using Windows.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/high-cpu-and-gpu-usage-on-macbook-pro-2020/114416

yyzsantabarbara OP
4,805 posts
 
GPU issue is now solved with the help of some stranger in London, UK. Likely a ROON engineer.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/gpu-100-on-roon-client-maximized/115316/9

I reinstalled the display drivers and the GPU is no longer going crazy. It seems Windows updates sometimes replaces OEM drivers with their own. I had an update to my OS done on the 15th of July. That seems like when my ROON when crazy.
auxinput
2,920 posts
 
Try downloading Adaware and running a full scan. It is an anti-spybot product. I have found that Adaware will find a lot of things that normal antivirus programs miss. A lot of web-based trojans. These can actually affect web browser performance on many sites.

That being said, I have not found Audiogon forums to be that noisy on ads and performance. In my experience, avsforums had gotten really bad. It was so bad that it would take just about 30-45 seconds for a web page to load because there was so much crap all over the place. I think they cleaned up a lot of it because it’s not so bad now, but a year ago it was absolutely unusable.
yyzsantabarbara OP
4,805 posts
 
I think I may have been wrong to blame audiogon. It was 100% ROON as described in the 3 posts above. I did notice some CPU craziness with Audiogon but that may have been in conjunction with the GPU issue tied to ROON.

Anyways, anybody else having Auto-Updates set on the operating system where ROON runs may want to check this issue out if they run a the ROON client on the same machine.

The resolution is to reinstall the video driver to fix the GPU usage. In my case I have a NVidia video driver.
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