The HQPlayer thread

I looked into PGGB and tried it out. In short, I am very much turned off by their licensing model and they strike me as a sleezy “used car sales” type of group. $1,050 for what is basically a 1 year sub to the software is complete shit. A departure from the responsiveness and community engagement you get from the dev of HQPlayer for around $300. I am constantly seeing updates from HQPlayer and it is fully featured and delivers everything the dev says.

 

Maybe better here than in my profile post:

I want to play around with HQPlayer a bit more than I can with my current Meier DACCORD that only swallows 192 kHz PCM and no DSD.

I’ll probably buy a Holo Cyan 2 eventually, but that will have to wait until some money is coming in.

I thought I might try an SMSL D-6 meanwhile. What do you think? Does it make sense to try with such a cheap DAC or will the clock be too bad for HQPlayer to even matter? (Seems to measure quite good, though.) Note that this isn’t supposed to be my future main DAC, just for playing around a bit.

Has anyone heard it? Or do you have other suggestions?

 

Agreed 100% and more!!!

I am happy to try my best to convince people to pay for hqplayer. So far I managed to convince a few folks, not willing to pay for years and just using the trial version and finally decided to pay up…

For $300 with the license you get way more than just an upsampler app. Miska is super responsive and will provide support and answer any questions I threw at him even outside of hqplayer.

With the new output correction feature he managed to further improve on any Holo dacs and a few other, and the list is promised to grow and will be including denafrips and others. seriously he makes tweaks to "correct" your dac that even the manufacturer did not come up with

Miska created 1 software that takes care of your entire digital audio system front end. All you need is a computer and you don’t even need any steamers. (In my case, I paid for 1 desktop license and that takes care of all 4 of my systems in different rooms, incorporating audiolense settings for each room, connect me to jplay iOS upnp as a centralized control point…)

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/best-native-dsd-dacs-for-use-with-hqplayer/132298/71?page=4

not me personally but there are a few guys in this thread above that claims to be really good for the price. One person actually did a whole suite of measurements to confirm it performs very well. (But the same guy now got a cyan 2 and never looked back)

 

Perhaps another suggestion in the lower price tier for playing around with hqplayer dsd upsampling may be the new zen dac 3? I believe it has been updated to now support direct dsd to 512

 

Not available yet, it seems, but might be interesting, too, yes, thanks!

 

Found a used D-6 and ordered. Let’s see how good it is.

 

Been ages since I've been back on SBAF (and even longer away from Head-Fi). But I haven't been out of the hobby. Recently I've been quietly listening to PGGB DSD. BTW, it's not a one year sub. It's permanent. (the name of the product is literally 'perpetual'. I keep getting new updates, too, like the recent PGGB DSD upgrade which was free, and frankly, which was revelatory. Other than the free Foobar plugin there are $350 and $1050 options.

https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...d-post-effin-ringing-and-shit-like-that.2627/

Go read the thread above started by @ultrabike. One way to solve for the latency of ultra-long filters is to do it offline- which is what PGGB does.

 

Total novice HQPlayer question here.

Can someone point out a URL link or describe the ideal HQPlayer use case including DAC requirements ?

Does the DAC need to support some over-ridable/bypassable features/settings for HQPlayer to do its thing ?

Does it work better with PCM or DSD DACs ?

Does the DAC need specific sample rates ?

Thanks in advance.

 

Please post in the intro thread. Surprised no one has asked you to do that yet.

https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/new-members-introduce-yourself.11639/

Once we know where you're coming from, we can help you better.

 

Done and done.

 

Generally, the DAC should ideally not do any upsampling of its own. This doesn’t mean that HQPlayer can’t make things better if the DAC meddles with the signal, but you won’t get what HQPlayer intended this way.

Delta Sigma DACs work with signals in the MHz range at the actual D/A stage. If you can’t feed them DSD (also called SDM), the DAC will always upsample internally. Plus, there should ideally be some DSD Direct mode that circumvents the internal signal modification circuits. For the better known chip manufacturers, as far as I know: ESS chips don’t allow a path without signal modification at all. AKM chips have the possibility, but not all DAC manufacturers implement it. Burr Brown chips (at least as implemented by iFi?) can’t modify a DSD signal at all, all DSD input will go to the D/A stage unmodified.

DSD upsampling requires quite some computing power, so especially for higher rates and more demanding filters/modulators, a quite beefy PC and/or graphics card (NVIDIA) is required.

PCM upsampling isn’t as resource intensive by far, but for the reasons mentioned above, it’s best suited for R2R DACs that work at kHz frequencies and take signals with more than a few bits. Ideally, they should provide a “NOS” (no oversampling) mode so that they don’t do additional upsampling internally.

 

Heckuva useful reply here. Well done.

HQPlayer also has a list of recommended hardware on their webpage.

https://signalyst.com/consumer/

I'll paste it in here, too, below. I'm not sure if this list is exhaustive. But some web searching might serve up info on your DAC of choice. In some cases, it's hard (for me anyway) to determine if certain DACs can do DSD direct. (I'm curious about Luxman DACs for example, but have yet to dig up anything definitive, or can't quite read between the lines of the specs.)

Personally, of the below, I'm most curious about the Gustard A26. Plenty of folks seem to be using the RME (older AKM chips only however).



Recommended hardware:
‣ Holo Audio Red NAA, shops: US/EU (also supported by NAA OS)

‣ iFi ZEN Stream NAA

‣ aqua LinQ NAA

‣ T+A DAC 200/HA 200 (Win/Linux/Mac)

‣ T+A SD 3100 HV/SDV 3100 HV/PSD 3100 HV (Win/Linux/Mac)

‣ Holo Audio May, Spring or Cyan, shops: US/EU (Win/Linux/Mac)

‣ Gustard A26 (with DSD Direct firmware fix)

‣ Marantz SA-12SE, SA-KI Ruby, SACD 30n, SA-10 (USB only, 30n network interface is incompatible)

‣ TEAC UD-701N (USB only, network interface is incompatible)

‣ iFi NEO iDSD/xDSD Gryphon/NEO Stream

‣ Ferrum Wandla and Hypsos

‣ RME ADI-2 Pro/DAC AKM chip version (Win/Mac/Linux)

‣ Denafrips Ares II/Pontus II/Venus II/Terminator/Terminator Plus

‣ CAPS Twenty Server and Endpoint

‣ exaSound DACs, streamers and servers (Win/Mac)

‣ EVGA NU Audio US/EU (Linux)

‣ UP Board as a NAA with Linux (using provided bootable image)

‣ Raspberry Pi 4 as a NAA with Linux (using provided bootable image)

‣ CompuLab fitlet2/fitlet3 as a NAA with Linux or Windows

‣ OnLogic CL100 as a NAA with Windows or Linux (using provided bootable image)

 

Just one addition to your so informative post: Holo DACs have custom discrete DSD circuitry in addition to PCM R2R circuitry. They don't use standard D2A chips. For the two I own (Spring 2 and May), HQPlayer upsampling and modulation to DSD256 is the sweet spot, and that can be done without a GPU, in my case on a Mac Mini M1, and on an Intel i9-11900.

 

True. I should have been more specific: Even the old i3 PC I currently use with just onboard graphics manages to do DSD256, as long as I use filters that are not very demanding (the excellent default pair poly-sinc-gauss-long/poly-sinc-hires-lp works) and modulators in the lower range: DSD5 and 7 work, as well as ASDM variants up to ASDM7EC-light (also 5). ASDM5EC works when it doesn’t have to additionally convert between 48/44.1 (the SMSL D-6 I’m currently using doesn’t do 48 kHz multiples). An M2 MacBook Air I tested can do the same for DSD512 and more demanding filters/modulators at DSD256 (though still not everything IIRC).

My son’s i7 gaming PC with a recent good but not TOTL NVIDIA graphics card (I forget which) can do just about everything at DSD512 with next to no CPU load at all, but GPU load near 100%—I think that was sinc-M with ASDM7EC-super at DSD512.

I’ll get a retired i7 Laptop with NVIDIA graphics from work soon. I’ll probably replace my old desktop with it. Looking forward to finding out what it is capable to do with HQPlayer.

 

Okay, so I'm back in the US for a few weeks and thinking about picking up a Mac Mini here (as opposed to the UK, where they seem to be rather more expensive) for HQPlayer use. I believe Mac Mini's, per Jussi, can only hit DSD256, but since that's my target anyway, that's fine with me. (I really don't have the patience to learn a Windows machine and need something small and quiet.)

Here are my candidates thus far, and thanks to anyone with more technical expertise for comments/feedback. It's pretty likely this will be basically a dedicated HQPlayer machine, but I might move it on to general use and, who knows, maybe I'll do some gaming on it down the road.

Apple 2023 Mac Mini M2 Chip / 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD Storage - Z16K000R3 (via Amazon)

Apple Mac Mini Desktop Computer, M2 Chip with 8-Core CPU and 10-Core GPU, 16GB Memory, 512GB SSD, Early 2023 (via Amazon)

Refurbished Mac mini Apple M2 Pro Chip with 10‑Core CPU and 16‑Core GPU (via Apple refurbished)

These run $780, $990, and $1100 respectively, though I might be able to get 15% on the latter via Apple.

Tbh, I was really hoping to spend less than $500 on this, and was looking for an older M1 chip Mini. But those seem to be hard to find, especially with 16GB RAM, and (also per Jussi) 16GB seems recommended for running more difficult filters. I'd rather not go cheap on this and find the CPU grinding to do DSD256, so if I have to spend more, so be it. And maybe the M2 Pro Chip would be of benefit?

[EDIT: I think the only difference between #1 and #2 are hard drive sizes, but maybe #2 has more cores? Goddamn, I find these specs inscrutable.]

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Jussi wrote somewhere that M2 doesn't add much to M1 for HQPlayer. I have a 16GB M1 that works well for DSD256 with poly-sink-gauss-... filters, some ASDMnEC (n == 5 or 7) modulators, and Holo DAC corrections.

 

Yeah, I've read that from Jussi, too, and I was thinking to just get an M1 with 16GB RAM (per his suggestion). But, weirdly, there don't seem to be an M1 with more than 8GB in the obvious places and resellers. (Unless I'm missing something.) It'd be cheaper for me to get an M2 with 16GB, strangely.

Which, at nearly $800, makes me wonder if I ought to go up to M2 Pro chip for a couple hundred more.... I think I read somewhere that Jussi thought the Pro chip might be able to do more filters, etc.

 

The filters I settled on (poly sinc this or that) for PCM > DSD 256 don’t seem to require much memory, but when I try certain others the memory of my 16GB Linux machine gets all but tapped out, so stick with Jussi’s recommendation if you can.

 

If you have a mailing address for a few weeks you can get one on eBay for less, e.g. this one for $550:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204856165060

No idea if there are better deals, how reliable the seller is, etc. More CPU cores are probably better, it probably doesn’t use the GPU on the Mac. A bigger SSD is mostly wasted on an hqplayer specific setup, just get a big usb c external.