My advise is to download it and try the 30 day trial and then you can hear the difference by yourself.
But for me the first thing I noticed is that everything sounded more “in time”. Not sure how to explain but going back made everything messy sounding and slightly out of sync.
But overall timber and separation has improved together with other things that I am still trying to put my finger on.
I am not sure if this is because I had jitter issues or something like that maybe someone else can elaborate if this makes sense.
HQPlayer has made more of a difference in my audio journey than many amps/dacs have.
Loving HQ player I think it needs to get more praise to be honest very underrated piece of software worth every penny.
I found some threads regarding the DAC Bits in Roonlab’s forum. Looks like reducing the DAC bits to 20 is recommended for R2R DAC but the general instruction was to leave it as default for Delta-Sigma DAC. I’m going to play around with this setting and see if I can hear the difference.
Also ZMF headphones, also Holo DACs (location 1: May KTE; location 2: Spring 2 KTE), both solid state and tube amps (location 1: ecp DHSA-3F amorphous, Eddie Current Aficionado; location 2: ecp DSHA-3F nickel, DNA Stellaris). HQPlayer Embedded (i9-11900, Ubuntu Server 22.04) on location 1; HQPlayer Desktop on Mac Mini M1on location 2. Both locations: poly-sinc-gauss-xla (1x), poly-sinc-gauss-hires-ip (Nx), ASDM7ECv2, DSD256. Genres mostly modern jazz and small ensemble classical, some West African, Mediterranean, and North Indian music as well.
I occasionally get clipping or what sounds like a pop noise and it is totally random. Mite be afte 15 minutes or mite be twice in 30 seconds. Does anyone else get this? I do have volume set to -3db on hqplayer.
Tried changing DAC bits to 19 like Goldensound suggested but this didn’t help with the popping/clipping noise.
Also tried different filters but again still clips/pops.
Clicks, pops, or spurious noise when using HQPlayer is usually a result of drop-outs caused by the device running HQPlayer not being able to keep up with the processing demands of the settings being applied and/or latency in data output, combined with a DAC using a naive error-handling implementation.
On Windows machines, even ridiculously powerful setups, something as simple as excessive DPC latency can cause this - which has little to do with overall compute capacity (I’ve seen it on 64-core machines with half a TB of RAM due to shitty drivers).
For trouble-shooting, try:
Reducing the level of oversampling/bit-rate you’re going for.
If you’re on Windows (which it looks like you are), evaluate and fix your DPC latency (see this article).
This sort of issue is why technically-better DACs MUTE on drop-outs rather than play the spurious crap in their buffers. It makes it much easier to diagnose the cause of such issues.
I only have an i5 6700K with integrated graphics. I will get that maybe once randomly out of the blue but never has it ever been an issue or noticeable in a certain time frame. I have Multicore and Adaptive unchecked, but highlighted. Cuda off as I have none.
May I ask some basic questions on HQ Player? I’ve read some here, some on their site, and some on ROON and find it somewhat baffling. Probably because most of the posts are from people who have used it for some time or who are tweaking it.
I think I get some of the high-end use case. I’m not there, I’m not thinking about what I wish were different with my M-Scaler.
I do use ROON. And Qobuz. And Apple Music. Also headphones and speakers in quite different systems.
So questions - what’s with the supported DAC list? Is support for HQ player supposed to make me more likely to spring for an iFi Gryphon? Why?
What about DACs I have. Bifrost2. I guess there is no use case for a portable DAC, or is there? I mean I run ROON at home and listen not just at the main station but at ROON endpoints - my phone or an iPad - or Sonos - or Sonos Port to my speakers.
With HQ Player running alongside ROON on my M1 Pro MacBook, do I get benefits coming off a ROON endpoint like an iPad attached to a Dragonfly Cobalt or iFi xDSD or Audeze LCDi3 with Cipher Cable, or apple Dongle and Koss PortaPro?
If I’m not running ROON, but am running HQ Player - I gather this is possible with say,Apple Music? What does it go out to?
I see stuff about room correction. Does it act as some sort of DSP with speakers? Do I have to measure my room with a calibrated mic and then go through software?
Just trying to figure out the point in a general way. I apologize about asking beginner questions that probably take too much work to answer properly. But I’m idly interested.
When it is, it can be due to drivers, the nVidia card in question not being up to what you’re asking of it, or random Windows DPC issues (which can be a real bear).
Clicks/pops with HQPlayer are almost always down to the system running it not being able to keep up with the demands of it’s processing requirements. That can be the CPU, the GPU, drivers (especially USB drivers), or other system factors that affect DPC latency.
It’s more common to run into such issues when doing large-factor upsampling and conversion to DSD, with high-end modulators and noise shapers, but it does occur with PCM → PCM.
Your best bet for troubleshooting is via “Audiophile Style”, which is where the author of HQPlayer seems to be most present/responsive.
The main point is that it’s an upsampler / downsampler with a choice of filters. By definition that’s DSP, so it’s not suprising that there are some other DSP functions also available. It appeals to the tweaker / analyst in me, and seems targeted for that type of person more than the high-end aficionado.
The website is confusing at several points. Just to pick one:
“All modern DACs employ oversampling and delta-sigma modulation…” We all know this isn’t true, and it makes even less sense when you look at the recommended hardware list. I think the recommended hardware list is just stuff Signalyst / Jussi likes.
In general, HQPlayer works best with DACs that can have their internal upsampling/oversampling and filtering bypassed or disabled.
Sometimes there are settings on the DAC to do this (not very common, especially in the case of filters); more often just the DAC’s internal upsampling gets bypassed when fed data the maximum rate the DAC could upsample to internally.
For example, with a Bifrost, feeding it a 192 kHz signal results in no upsampling occurring in the DAC itself.
You can use a portable DAC with HQPlayer, just as with any other DAC.
However, to run HQPlayer you’ll need a laptop if you want it portable, since HQPlayer itself only runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
It’s a fairly demanding application if you’re using it at high rates of upsampling with the better filters and modulators, and even more so if you start dabbling with high-rate PCM->DSD conversion.
Roon treats HQPlayer as a Zone, and then HQPlayer owns the actual connection to the DAC. So, Roon talks to HQPlayer via an IP connection (which can be to another machine or on the same one you’re running Roon on), then HQPlayer either talks to a directly attached DAC (via USB, or whatever local interfaces you have available) or to an HQPlayer “Network Audio Adapter” (NAA) - in which case the NAA talks to the DAC.
There is not, as far as I know, a way to run one “central” instance of HQPlayer and have it work for multiple Roon end-points (even if only playing to one at a time). You can reconfigure the NAA HQPlayer talks to, but you have to do that outside Roon.
NAAs are pretty simple, and don’t have much processing overhead, as they just receive the already-processed data from HQPlayer and feed it to the DAC. The NAA core can be run on a Raspberry Pi, as well as things like the iFi Zen Stream and a number of other similar units.
I’m not aware of an NAA that runs on an iPad, however.
HQPlayer owns the connection to the DAC, so it goes out to either a local physically connected (local to the machine running HQPlayer) DAC or an NAA.
To get Apple Music (or any other streaming service or player that doesn’t have native HQPlayer support) working with HQPlayer requires using audio routing software (e.g. Blackhole) to capture the audio from the player and route it to HQPlayer.
Apple Music → CoreAudio → Blackhole → HQPlayer → DAC or NAA
It’s a bit of a faff, some audio-routing tools require running the macOS in a lower security mode to let the audio-capture driver work, and won’t necessarily be able to track source sample rates automatically (not an issue with Apple Music, but it would be with Qobuz).
HQPlayer is, as @Lou_Ford mentioned, essentially one big DSP system. It has a convolution engine built in. Thus you can provide it with a convolution filter to do whatever the filter is setup for.
Convolution can be used to do EQ, room correction (which often involves phase/timing and EQ adjustments at the same time), or other effects.
You do have to provide the convolution filter yourself, so generally, yes, you’re going to use something like REW and a calibrated microphone to create the room corrections you want, and then have it export them as a convolution filter which HQPlayer can then use.
Roon can do the same thing, using filters in the same format, using its own convolution engine, without any need for HQPlayer.