XXHE is the endgame for music players if SQ is top priority.
Firstly, the base player itself is superb in terms of resolution.
I do find it sounds oddly veiled sometimes but its the complete opposite to other players that all have some degree of glare/harshness. so it can feel lacking in clarity or crispness but actual detail and timbre is the best youll get.
There are tons of settings to mess with, it can be very confusing but isnt something to worry about, once you get more comfortable you can start experimenting and get some further slight improvements to SQ.
Now thats the just the player, XXHE comes with a plethora of features that tweak your PC to sound better. memory tweaks, CPU tweaks, disabling services automatically , dramatically reducing background OS tasks, completely shutting down GUI during playing.
It is already a great player compared to most but when you utilize all these features it is on a whole other level to other software.
The UI is pretty horrible looking but not too difficult to used to, I actually find HQPlayer to be less ergonomic and fluid to control even though it looks better but dont expect anything as comfortable or customization as jriver or foobar.
A huge drawback compared to other players is no native DSD support (but you can actually encode DSD as DoP in a PCM package and it will play)
A benefit over HQplayer is lossy file playback
it has a free trial so Id highly recommend trying it out, the full version has most of the extreme SQ tweaks though.
Firstly, the base player itself is superb in terms of resolution.
I do find it sounds oddly veiled sometimes but its the complete opposite to other players that all have some degree of glare/harshness. so it can feel lacking in clarity or crispness but actual detail and timbre is the best youll get.
There are tons of settings to mess with, it can be very confusing but isnt something to worry about, once you get more comfortable you can start experimenting and get some further slight improvements to SQ.
Now thats the just the player, XXHE comes with a plethora of features that tweak your PC to sound better. memory tweaks, CPU tweaks, disabling services automatically , dramatically reducing background OS tasks, completely shutting down GUI during playing.
It is already a great player compared to most but when you utilize all these features it is on a whole other level to other software.
The UI is pretty horrible looking but not too difficult to used to, I actually find HQPlayer to be less ergonomic and fluid to control even though it looks better but dont expect anything as comfortable or customization as jriver or foobar.
A huge drawback compared to other players is no native DSD support (but you can actually encode DSD as DoP in a PCM package and it will play)
A benefit over HQplayer is lossy file playback
it has a free trial so Id highly recommend trying it out, the full version has most of the extreme SQ tweaks though.