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@Em2016 I had a struggle with generating or even finding impulse responses for utilizing crossfeed within HqPlayer very recently, too.

In the end (after some research) I used a combination of a tool called Voxengo Deconvolver and Audacity with Bauer Crossfeed VST plugin.

From listening and comparing my resulting filter to other Bauer implementations I'm pretty confident with my approach:

  1. Creating Mono 176 KHz 32 Bit Sine Sweep with Voxengo Deconvolver.
  2. Loading it into Audacity and making it Stereo by adding channel containing silence.
  3. Applying Bauer crossfeed effect to the Stereo clip using Chu Moy settings.
  4. Splitting Stereo back to Mono and exporting the two files not touching sample rate or bit depth.
  5. Using Voxengo Deconvolver to deconvolve each of the Mono files against Sine Sweep created in step one.
  6. Trimming some silence from both resulting IRs with Audacity, of course keeping the relative time relation of both files intact.

Now the two IRs is all that is needed to put into the pipeline setup from HqPlayer.

  • Channel 1 => 1 and 2 => 2 using IR originated from original sine sweep.
  • Channel 1 => 2 and 2 => 1 using IR originated from silence channel.
  • For all four pipes I use -6 dB gain.

I'm no professional, it was just what I thought to be logical for me right now.

I attached my filters for others to try out; they might even be more trimmed but I didn't wanted to be too aggressive with that.

The archive contains 'direct.wav' and 'cross.wav' where 'direct' has to be used for Left to Left and Right to Right and 'cross' for the channel mixing from Left to Right and Right to Left.

One more thing is that one might raise the amplitude of both IRs by the same amount as for me I have a bit lower volume output from HqPlayer now. I adjusted my headroom setting from -6 dB to 0 dB after enabling the pipeline setup; even then I have to turn the preamp volume up a few more steps than before. I'll stick with it because the crossfeed filter now does apply crossfeed and enough headroom at once.

chu_moy_ir.zip

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi Jussi,

 

I encountered a regression with version 4. I'm not able to use the closed-form filters family (with PCM), there is almost no listenable output except some weird clicks. The 'limited' counter is steadily counting up clipped samples also. As with version 3 I upsample everything to SDM, so currently I am only able to listen to my DSD files.

I use up to date Windows 10 and up to date Nvidia/CUDA drivers with CUDA offload enabled, no setting has changed going from version 3 to version 4 of HQPlayer.

 

Otherwise everything is smooth and good sounding with the new version :)

 

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41 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

If you can run it, can you try without CUDA offload? Because that filter implementation is exactly the same between Desktop 3.25.3 and Desktop 4.0.0, only difference being update of CUDA framework from 10.0 to 10.1...

 

 

It does indeed work after disabling CUDA offload. My CPU is still able to do the closed-form-16M upsampling on its own so I'll keep this setting now.

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  • 2 months later...

@sdmarquartThis is a complicated topic, since I found out myself that digital audio takes more effort (and money) to get right.

In the past I thought digital should be simpler than analog audio, but now I would say it is the other way round.

First off, just try different filters of HQPlayer and take the one you like most, I'm 99% shure your piercing highs don't come from HQPlayer in any way. There are filters that make the music "softer", but you would just be masking the real problems of digital audio with HQPlayer's filters then. What are the real problems, to me at least:

  1. The Computer or Laptop where all starts and HQPlayer works, is an immensely noisy environment.
  2. Electrical noise gets transferred over the USB-Cable to your DAC and has a large impact on the sound quality.
  3. Digital audio needs good clocks to sound best.

Okay, I would say 1. - 3. are ordered by priority. What can one do about point one? HQPlayer offers a NAA (Network Audio Adapter) endpoint.

This is supposed to run on an isolated machine which doesn't need to be powerful but should be optimized to be electrically silent.

Your desktop version of HQPlayer takes on all the workload and sends the upsampled audio stream data over Ethernet to a NAA device, which just receives the data and transmits it further to the DAC. With that you have separated the ultra noisy audio workstation from your DAC and even added galvanic isolation by using Ethernet. I would also suggest to insert a network switch inbetween which further helps to reduce noise.

What can one do about point two? There are several USB regenerators available which help isolate/clean and reclock the signal before it gets to the DAC. This kind of touches point one and three as well. I would suggest you try to get rid of computer noise at first, which should solve you're problem with the highs. Better clocking helps to refine the sound further but is not as important as isolation in my experience. There is also a software tweak for Windows called Fidelizer which is offered in three different versions. The starter version is free and you can just try if it helps already. The software bundles optimizations which can be done to tune Windows to get out of the way of audio processing, by offering a one-click optimize "everything" solution. It can be configured to run on startup or on demand, either way it is fully reversible and worth a try.

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I have the 1950X too and I could not even get DSD5EC -> DSD128 running without hiccups. Regardless of the oversampling filter. I also use convolution, but very basic and for stereo. Otherwise I use a GTX 1080 Ti and have CUDA offload enabled. Running Windows 10.

I also tried to change the multicore option from greyed to enabled, but the result is the same. Normally I run closed-form-16M -> AMSDM 512+ -> DSD512. I guess it could be an optimisation issue with the 1950X, since most people seem to get DSD7EC -> DSD256 with (lesser) Intel CPUs.

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  • 1 month later...

I can report that I can get the asdm5ec modulator -> dsd256 to work, with version 4.1.1.1, CUDA offload set to convolution only and multicore DSP set to fully enabled. I have a Ryzen Threadripper 1950 with SMT disabled, so 16 real cores only and overclocked to 4 GHz.

CPU cooling is very much under control and everything else is up to date, latest Win10 and latest Nvidia drivers, latest BIOS etc.

 

If I enable full CUDA offload for instance, I get stuttering. Multicore DSP to auto is not helping me either. The configuration in the first paragraph seems to be the best for my hardware and one of the new modulators. Asdm7ec -> dsd256 will still stutter though.

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  • 2 weeks later...
26 minutes ago, Quadman said:

I just installed HQP 4.  I was then resetting AO 3 and with service tool I was trying to do a shell replacement, Roonserver and HQPlayer.  But AO gives me message HQP cannot be found.  I have it (HQP) installed in the default directory.  So I then tried to set just HQP as default shell and got this message  "Install HQP in the default directory: C:\Program Files\signalyst\HQPlayer Desktop 3\"

 

Well it is in that directory, but it is now HQPlayer 4, not 3.   How can I change this so AO can see it?  Any ideas?

 

You could use the custom shell for that. I would copy the content of the roonserverhqp_shell_x64 file into the custom_shell file, modify the HQP path there and use the custom shell. AO 3.0 has HQP3 paths preconfigured, but it does not offer the path for the new HQP version.

 

Old one is C:\Program Files\Signalyst\HQPlayer Desktop 3\HQPlayer-desktop.exe

New one is C:\Program Files\Signalyst\HQPlayer 4 Desktop\HQPlayer4Desktop.exe

in your case.

 

Further help and instructions can be found here: custom shell as shell replacement

 

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