HQ Player

[Hensema]

With my R2R dac I enjoy trying all the different kinds of oversampling. Poly sinc HB and closed form are my favorites. However, in the end i always go back to NOS. It literally sounds the least processed. Is it possible to develop a “oversampling light” which has some light filtering (not steep)? I don’t care that it will measure bad, as long as it’s a bit better than NOS.

[Hensema]

With NAA on a Raspberry Pi3 i’m very surprissed that the buffer setting has a hig impact on the sound quality. A smaller buffer sounds much better. 250ms sounds dull with low detail, and 5 ms is detailed with a lot of PRAT. Anyone else who shares the same experience?

[Hensema]

On 2/27/2019 at 6:45 PM, Miska said:

You could also compare against poly-sinc-mqa which begins to roll off earlier, but not as steep and doesn't have as much attenuation. But gives relatively very short impulse response in time domain.

 

I never tried poly-sinc-mqa-mp because I don’t have mqa files. I was interested in how a less steep filter sounds. Very natural and easy listening to me!  It is my new favorite! PCM 44.1 to 352khz on a R2R dac.

[Hensema]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, it is sometimes useful, as one could want to use slower roll-off filters for hires. Since there is less high frequency content on 2x and especially 4x rates. So for example poly-sinc-mqa or poly-sinc-short, even if some steeper like poly-sinc-ext2 is used for 1x rates.

Poly-sinc-mqa-mp has the most timbre and warmth on high res recordings. I suspect this is due to the slow roll-off. Not as impressive as for example sinc-m which has lots of detail, but it’s a more natural sound to me.

[Hensema]

On 10/8/2019 at 10:45 PM, StreamFidelity said:

I'm very liking poly-sinc-mqa-mp.

Still my favorite after months. Not only for high res, but also for RB. No dither or noise shaping. MQA-mp sounds amazing on my Audio GD Dac-19.

[Hensema]

19 hours ago, Miska said:

You should always use dither, because otherwise the needed reduction of resolution at the output ends up with distortion... In this kind of case, TPDF dither is good starting point.

is dithering needed when 32 bit is selected? I can understand why it’s beneficial when 16 bit is selected. The noise of the dac itself will “dither” on that high bitrates?

[Hensema]

I like to oversample 1x together with LNS15 noise shaping. However, when Nx is selected without filtering (NOS), is the LNS15 in that case also automatically disabled? 

[Hensema]

4 hours ago, Miska said:

 

No, dither/noise-shaper is completely separate and always active as selected. Why are you not using oversampling for higher PCM rates? Any content below 352.8 kHz badly needs oversampling...

 

High res recordings sounds very good on my pcm1704 r2r dac in NOS. However, most of the time I use mqa-mp.

[Hensema]

8 hours ago, Miska said:

 

It still doesn't remove the fact that reconstruction quality is not so great at 352.8/384k rates, and even worse at lower rates. If there is sufficient analog filter, it causes problems in audio band, with less than sufficient analog filter is causes strong correlated images in ultrasonic band.

 

I thought that 8x oversampling is sufficient in general. How much improvement can be expected with oversampling to 1536khz? Denafrips and Holo Audio make that possible with their new usb interfaces. The new Holo May might take it even further , but it is untested. I think HQplayer is a this moment limited to 1536khz? 

[Hensema]

I would like to upsample all pcm to pcm768, but leave dsd sources untouched. Is bypass mode possible for only dsd sources? I don’t have the processing power for dsd resampling to dsd256 or dsd512.

[Hensema]

3 minutes ago, ericuco said:

Try this:

 

Setting menu - set Default Output to Source .... PCM stays PCM, DSD stays DSD

Setting menu - set PCM defaults, max sample rate to 768

DSD source menu - check the DirectSDM Box

Thanks! That was exactly what I was looking for!

[Hensema]

4 hours ago, Joerg D said:

My system is now very high resolution, I would like a little more warmth.

MQA-MP is in my opinion the warmest filter

[Hensema]

15 hours ago, CheapSplurge said:

What settings for upsampling is best for thicker, bold mid-range sound. 

You could try IIR, thick warm mid-range. IIR is a bit underrated by my opinion. 

[Hensema]

Indeed, I also prefer normal dithering like TPDF. Noise shaping sounds less analoge.

 

It would be great if there were more options for IIR. Maybe something like IIR-short and IIR-long? If that makes any sense with this type of filtering.

[Hensema]

On 1/17/2021 at 11:01 PM, Iceaero said:

For some reason, IIR simply does not work for me. I think every other filter works, but when I set IIR I get literally no sound out...though HQPlayer acts like everything is fine. Anyone have a clue why this might be?

@Miska Since I updated to the latest version I can confirm that IIR is broken. Other filters are fine, but with IIR no sound. About 4 versions ago IIR was fine. Icearo reports the same issue and it’s also confirmed by a friend of mine. 

[Hensema]

IIR is still broken in 4.9.2. No sound at all, but visually hqplayer seems to play. I reverted back to 4.4.0 and that fixed IIR.

[Hensema]

15 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

OK, found it, I will fix it shortly.

 

Thank you!

[Hensema]

I can confirm that the new Intel Rocket Lake 11700 CPU is capable to upsample to Sinc-M, ASDM7EC, DSD256 without any issue. DSD512 with EC modulators is still not possible as expected.

[Hensema]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

 

If you use volume control and set dither to none, you have a nice distortion generator...

 

Being bit-perfect is not goal of HQPlayer.

 

A bit perfect switch would be very nice. For R2R dacs it would function as a NOS/OS switch. It might be a good idea to be not able to use such a switch with volume below -10 db. That would prevent accidents with blown speakers.

[Hensema]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Why? It would make the whole point of HQPlayer moot.

 

Two reasons:
 

1. It makes switching between internal OS and HQPlayer OS easier, in that way the difference in SQ can be faster compared.

2. NOS is another sound than OS, it’s just fun to listen to it now and then.

[Hensema]

On 4/5/2021 at 6:50 PM, AudioXP said:

 

Interesting, thanks for reporting. Is this i7-11700 without K? Have you also tried since-L?

Just tried with Sinc-L, but that’s too much for this cpu (without K). The total system ram usage explodes also to 20+ gb.

[Hensema]

20 hours ago, OzarkMtn said:

@MiskaRecently received the Denafrips Pontus II DAC. Would you suggest ASDM7EC at DSD256 for the Pontus II? What DAC bits should the DAC be set at?

Thanks Jussi!

The Pontus has no 1 bit hardware. Dsd is converted to 6 bit internally. 16bit to 1 bit to 6 bit are too many conversions. Just upsample pcm to 24 bit with dithering with your filter of choice. If you want to use a noise shaper instead of dithering, I would  set it to about 19 bit and use the highest sampling rate possible.

[Hensema]

Holo Audio ASIO seems not to be in exclusive mode when selected in HQplayer. Windows sounds and other programs seem to mix with the output from hqplayer. Also the volume setting from the windows sound system works. How to set the Holo Spring 3 usb to exclusive mode?

[Hensema]

6 hours ago, kaizaray said:

 

I would like to add → without CUDA offload

Format:88.2k/24/2 → 22.5792M/1/2

11900K with AVX512 + DSD 512 + ASDM7ECv2 + poly-sinc-ext3 + without CUDA offload → go smoothly without dropouts!
11900K with AVX2     + DSD 512 + ASDM7ECv2 + poly-sinc-ext3 + without CUDA offload → dropouts.

 

How do you switch between AVX2 and AVX512?

[Hensema]

My Holo Spring 3 is locking very slowly on spdif. The first lock takes 20 seconds. Because of that I miss 20 seconds of music. Is it possible to have an option for hqplayer to always send a signal regardless if there is music or not?