Signalyst HQPlayer - Is it worth the upgrade?

@milpai 

Noted and good to know. I absolutely will try HQplayer and DSD 512 and 1024 and report back my results.

Best,

I have found, and now addicted to, HQPlayer desktop running on Mac Mini M4, upsampling Roons files natively, installed and playing on the same Mac mini, over Ethernet to my Holo Audio Red transport, over i2s to a Gustard R26, was the largest leap in sound quality since buying an SFP network switch, galvanically isolating my system, and externally clocking my DAC and switch. Truly incredible depth and width in soundstage, and the texture transformed into something completely different, and favorable. Like liquid honey in the mids, the voices had more definition and authority but somehow floated to your ears on a stream of liquid instead of beaming to them. Bass became velvety! I am now on the hunt for any and all accessible, upsampling DSD DACs. PS audio DirectStream perfect wave mkii and Meitner audio MA3 are in my sights. 
 

So to answer your question yes, it is WELL WORTH the 2 or 3 evening tearing your hair out with Mac OS and HQplayer preferences. I’d be happy to lend an hand or advise, but Grok Ai app got me through the whole process in a few evenings. Then  if you’re able to separate the Roon program and Hqplayer on separate components. Say a Silent Angel Rhein Z1C with 10mhz clock input running Roon, Roon operates much much better on Linux, hands down less glitches and dropouts. The engineer at AfterDark told me this ‘seperatizing’ is the best next leap in sound quality.

Hi @jbuddha882 - your post is great!  Liquid Honey!!  My experience with HQplayer upsampling to DSD has been great as well - so far I have been very budget limited and have been using the trial version on a laptop that's not very powerful, so I'm limited to low bit rates.  I have also preferred using Jplay as opposed to Roon.  You can try Jplay on a free trial and can control bit rate, modulator and filters from Jplay.  My plan is to find a mini pc with a Core i7 or similar and use HQplayer embedded and hopefully get this done for well under $1000.

I am puzzled by your comment that you are looking for upsampling DACs.  I believe one of the great benefits of HQplayer is that it does the upsampling work so the DAC doesn't have to.  So I think you should be looking for a DAC with "NOS Mode".

I too I have found that using AI (Chat GPT, Google Gemini, etc.) has made understanding the various HQplayer settings and their effect much easier to navigate.

HQPlayer's UI is less than desirable especially on Mac.  I bought it for the filters, integrators, modulators and PEQ.

I agree a DAC that takes HQPlayer's upsampled output and then does its own upsampling seems counter productive.  I'm using a one bit DSD stream with Direct DSD mode turned on bypassing all the digital processing of my DAC.  Would be the same for PCM using NOS.  So finding a DAC that supports that is key.  Some DACs don't allow that.  I believe the Meitner DACs fall in that category.

It is hard to summarize all the best practices because the developer posts on forums.  I used Gemini to summarize his recommendations since I did not have time to read through all those posts.  The filters, modulator and other configurations can impact the sound significantly so finding ones that work with my system and align with my preferences took some time.  Very happy with what I have now.  I have 3 preset configurations.  One for DSD sources and 2 for PCM sources all based on recommendations from the developer and my listening comparisons.

@boulder_bob i think you can do it for less than a 1000 usd. Finding a NUC running Linux or windows for Roon, would be easy, it’s finding the Mac mini that will be difficult. They were 700 but now very scarce and marked up

And I’m looking for a DAC that takes care of the DSD upsampling but will first try a Silent Angel Rhein and see if that fixes the dropout and connection issues between Roon and HQP