The HQPlayer thread

Recent Mac Mini will do DSD256 easily with MANY filters. What’s GPU-bound are only the very heaviest of filters and honestly, they are of questionable sanity.

Only thing I can think of with DAC correction is linearity compensation. ESS hump? What else it could be, I’d also be interested to know.

 

Do you reckon the same is true for a decent spec Mac Mini running DSD512? I forgot that Holo DACs seem to like DSD512.

The huge GPUs definitely seem like overkill, but, then, I'm kinda curious to play Baldur's Gate 3 at some point, and a new Mac Mini and, say, a PS5 puts me in the $$ territory of (maybe) an okay spec gaming PC, which could do both at a higher level. But I also like stuff that just works....

 

Couldn’t say personally. The Audiophilestyle would be the forum to read up on.

 

I doubt the Mac Mini would have the horsepower, but then again with Apple Silicon it might do okay.

 

I'd say the new Mac Mini M4 is likely to be a good candidate for HQPlayer. Someone should try it out! HQPlayer may need some updates and optimizations to work well with the new silicon but I am confident they would make good use of the new chips. I've been using HQPlayer for a year and I have seen great optimizations coming over the past several updates. I do not do any GPU offloading anymore. I've been able to run on an AMD 7950X3D with ease.

I just ordered a second Holo Red, but if the Mac Mini M4 can run HQPlayer then that is a really compelling Roon endpoint.

 

What exactly is Miska's secret sauce in his dac correction profiles is anyone's guesses. He mentioned something about calculated analog output signal, correction of timing...

Anyhow the overall impressions from Holo dac users are very positive with the DAC correction, to a point I have not heard anyone going back to no DAC correction (myself included) if their system is capable to run the correction.

It seems to have brought an added slam in bass and added clarity to the mids/vocal without impacting the soundstage, which is very welcomed for DSD512. Prior to DAC correction, DSD256 excels in midrange clarity, vocal is a touch more forward compared to DSD512, which in comparison, the vocal is a bit more distant but the soundstage is wider and deeper, there's more 3 dimension to the soundstage.

With the correction DSD512 has gain some clarity in the mids/vocals while maintaining that wider and deeper soundstage.
Now I don't know if perhaps someone can do some EQ to boost the mids and highs and might be able to come up with something similar to the DAC correction?

The upcoming M4 mini will likely have no issues running most filter, modulator settings at DSD256 with correction but likely will fall short on DSD512 with DAC correction. I am looking at the M4 mini as well as I have since sold my Cyan 2 and none of my dacs will have DAC correction, so I only need to run DSD512 without correction. (DAC correction takes a lot of processing power to run.)

 

Really helpful, thanks.

I was wrong above. Went back through the thread and several people reporting DSD256 preferable for the Holo DACs. Though maybe the May likes DSD512? Anyway, the May is sort of overkill for my purposes.

 

Before the dac correction. My preference was dsd256 with the cyan 2 because of the cleaner vocal especially when you listen to pop/rock/metal.

with the dac correction I prefer dsd512 with dac correction because the correction brought the vocal a bit more forward and cleaner.

My friend with a spring 3 kte also have similar impressions re: correction and dsd rates

 

Some good discussion on M4 Mac and HQPlayer happening here. Jussi seems to be tempering his expectations on the M4 Mac Mini. There is no doubt the M4 Mini will work, but it will certainly have limitations on its capability. We won't know until someone tries it and reports.

I also seem to recall Jussi himself stating DSD512 had very few pragmatic benefits over DSD256, and may have suggested that DSD512 had some inherent problems on the Holo DACs compared to DSD256. I'm trying to find the post but I remember reading this a while back and it had me drop down to DSD256 on my Spring 3.

 

Actually quite the contrary. Miska prefers DSD512 with his Holo Spring as well as his DAC 200 and he does not really use DSD256. However, Miska did confirm DSD256 is a few db better in audible band noise compared to DSD512, but pushes ultrasonic noise floor further out with DSD512, perhaps that explains why I heard DSD512 sounding a bit distant with a bigger soundstage with the added noise.

 

I remember him writing somewhere that DSD256 is the sweet spot with anything above not delivering much extra or even being detrimental to the sound. I don’t think that was very recent, though, his opinion may have changed.

Regarding DAC correction: For my iFi Neo iDSD, not much is happening at all. The differences are so minuscule that I switched it off again because to my ears, it didn’t bring about any meaningful changes.

I never tested it with DSD512, though, so YMMV. I also didn’t switch it on again since I have the Holo Red which brought quite a bit extra clarity. I’ll do that in the coming days and report back in case my opinion changes.

 

Mac Mini M1 16GB can do DSD256 and DAC corrections for Holo Spring 2 (and I'd guess Cyan 2) with some filters and modulators (in my case: 1x=poly-sinc-gauss-xla, Nx=poly-sinc-gauss-hires-lp, modulator=ASDM7EC-light).

Nothing really better than Apple silicon for <$1k. To go beyond DSD256 and a subset of filters & modulators you need RTX 4070 Super 12GB or something like it, and good cooling. More like $2k.

I'e not seen M4 HQPlayer benchmarks but I bet there will be some soon, I'd wait until they start showing up to decide. A refurb 16GB M1 from a reputable vendor will definitely be cheaper, probably around $500.

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/m4-pro-mac-mini/284772/31?u=deric_chan

even in Jussi’s last message from 10 hours ago, he stated his typical playback being dsd512. Honestly tho, it doesn’t really matter what he prefers, his preference is just his preference. it’s more for the individual’s budget on a computer system to run hqp. If budget permits, try both 256 vs 512, with and without correction and make the call.

 

I get the feeling that maybe those DAC corrections were added because he found problems with Holo DACs at DSD512? That’s just speculation, though.

@wbass Another option I just remembered: It seems that HQPlayer runs very fast on AMD CPUs. There are Mini PCs from Beelink around € 600/700 that seem to be well suited for the task. The guy I bought the D-6 from told me he had found a Beelink SER6 Max for cheap, an older model with a Ryzen 7 7735HS, and could run DSD512 with ASDM7EC-super on it—don’t know which filter he used, though. (He used a Gentooplayer Linux installation with Roon on the same computer.) These are small fanless (I think?) computers that could be used in the living room, too.

Unfortunately, I find the different Beelink models very confusing, especially of the old SER6 series, where there were Pro and Max models and sometimes different Ryzen CPUs under the same model name. But that’s something I myself am thinking about again, now that I found that the old NVIDIA 2060 I bought gives me almost everything at DSD256 with my i3-6900, but nearly nothing at DSD512.

 

Just a heads up: I asked the guy with the Beelink SER6 (Ryzen 7 7735HS). While he can run all modulators at DSD512 with poly-sinc-gauss-long, it doesn't necessarily work with all filters. I asked him to test DSD512 with ASDM7ECv2 and sinc-MGa (my favorite for my system at DSD256), and that didn't work.

 

I tested a bit with DAC Correction again, and I have to correct or at least amend my opinion from above:

It definitely does poly-sinc-gauss-long a favour, removes the little shoutiness it has with my DAC (which I would never have detected without the direct comparison) and makes it even more detailed and exact. With poly-sinc-ext3, it’s also an improvement, again with a little more detail.

All those differences aren’t huge, but worth it for poly-sinc family, IMHO.

With my favourite sinc-MGa, however, it’s not an improvement, but worse to my ears. The sound becomes too dark for my taste, and kinda washed out, a bit like when a printer isn’t good at reproducing the small differences in near-black tones of a photograph and they drown in each other.

And I found that especially poly-sinc-gauss-long is probably more “perfect” than sinc-MGa. The details and exactness of the reproduction it delivers on my system are breathtaking and at least one step ahead of sinc-MGa. When I first switched to it after a few months now, I thought I should maybe change back.

But when I then returned to sinc-MGa, I immediately felt a lot more emotional connection to the music. It might not be as perfect, but at least to me, it delivers much more feeling, which is even more important.

 

Is anyone here not using Roon with HQPlayer? I've been experiencing increasing issues with Roon's performance lately. Additionally, I've been trying to get the HQPlayer Qobuz integration to work, but while I can view albums, I'm unable to play any content. Has anyone successfully resolved this or encountered similar problems?

 

i don't use roon and never will. In HQP desktop, did you enable the "allow network control" icon, The last icon to the rightt? That looks to be the reason why client not controlling playback. HQP client for Qobuz has been rock solid since HQP 4 actually

 

https://imgur.com/a/fAecCta

 

Quick tangent, you generally wanna copy the actual image URL, not the album URL, and insert them via the "image" function on here along the top of the reply box: