HQ Player

[craighartley]

5 hours ago, tedwoods said:

You are spot on!

ext 2 really caught me off guard! 

The combination of the updated DSD5 modulator and ext 2, is the best sound I ever got!

Cheers, @Miska

 

What are you upsampling to, and with which DAC?

[craighartley]

14 hours ago, Miska said:

 

And as news, I just tried and first time I can run poly-sinc-xtr from 48k source to 44.1k x512 DSD, so single stage xtr with conversion between rate families! This is notable because number of DACs don't support 48k-base DSD rates.

 

 

Will it run poly-sinc-xtr from 44k source to 48k x 512 DSD?

[craighartley]

11 hours ago, Miska said:

 

No, that combination doesn't work, probably runs out of memory bandwidth. That case eats over 300 MB more RAM on the GPU. Would be interesting to hear if some GPU with HBM (Titan V, etc) would work for that case.

 

But that's quite rare thing, because there are so few DACs that work properly in 48k x512...

 

Could you pls expand slightly on your last comment? Is the T&A 8 one of the few?

[craighartley]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

It may or may not work, but you may get periodic ticking with it at 48k x512 rate.

 

Then there's iFi micro iDSD and Pro-Ject PreBox S2 Digital, both only under Linux. YMMV, etc...

 

I’ve never had problems with ticking at 48k  x 512 on the T&A8 with family rate upsampling; I’ve never tried 44.1to 48k x 512 as I’ve never had powerful enough processors to achieve it. 

[craighartley]

41 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Yeah, there was long discussion on this topic in the past, I was able to reproduce it with mine. It is apparent in long quiet passages. I think in the end I used 440 Hz low level sine to test it. It sounds like very small dust particles on vinyl.

I do remember now hearing that some time ago (when I thought it was the processor struggling to upsample) but not recently. Do you have the latest firmware, and if so, have you tested it since updating?

[craighartley]

10 hours ago, Miska said:

 

It will eventually get going if you wait it to get initialized, but it cannot keep up with the audio...

 

Will it do 44.1 to 512x 48k with polysinc (not xtr)?

[craighartley]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

No, that quite doesn't work, but it is close to working. Possibly it would work on 2080Ti. poly-sinc-short works though.

 

Thanks, that’s very helpful

[craighartley]

15 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Modulator choice depends primarily on the DAC, while filter choice is more depending on one's preferences / focus areas.

 

With DAC8DSD you are good with any of the modulators. When running at DSD512 I'd start with ASDM7 and ASDM5  and then maybe DSD5 or something else. Same should go fine for DSD256 too. If one drops to DSD128, then maybe start with fifth order modulators first, or at least switch to "narrow band" analog filter. With ASDM7 and DSD256 I would also maybe keep "narrow band" analog filter (the wide mode off), but it is also quite system dependent.

 

Miska, 

 

Any specific reason why you don't mention AMSDM7 512+fs modulator here?

[craighartley]

14 hours ago, Miska said:

 

For long time I've been using poly-sinc-short-mp for rock/pop kind of music and poly-sinc-lp for classical. And ASDM7 as modulator.

 

Now recently I've been running quite a lot with newer poly-sinc-ext2 and ASDM7.

Do you tend to use poly-since-ext2 with all types of material, or stick to poly-sing-lp for classical?

[craighartley]

35 minutes ago, louisxiawei said:

One of the main SQ difference between DSD256 and DSD512 on T+A DAC8 DSD is airiness. DSD512 gives more realistic and 3-dimensional with a lot of “air” around instruments and voices while DSD256 by comparison sounds quite flat. It's very easy to tell the difference with good wide-frequency range headphones like HD800 or T1.

I agree. And I assume this is partly because it is only when you feed it 512 that you are taking full advantage of the T+A DAC8 DSD’s filterless DAC. As I under stand it, when you feed it 256 the DAC has to do extra processing. So anyone preferring 256 to 512 using the same filter in HQPlayer is actually preferring the effect of the DAC’s extra processing. 

[craighartley]

44 minutes ago, Miska said:

AFAIK, the DAC8 DSD is bit-perfect at all DSD rates. I would say it is matter of taste whether one prefers it at DSD256 vs DSD512... In that respect it is a bit like Holo Spring too.

 

That’s interesting. I can’t remember where I read about it’s different behaviour with 256 vs 512, but I’ll try to find it. It was either on one of these discussion threads or in a review soon after it first came out. 

[craighartley]

7 hours ago, Miska said:

AFAIK, the DAC8 DSD is bit-perfect at all DSD rates. I would say it is matter of taste whether one prefers it at DSD256 vs DSD512... In that respect it is a bit like Holo Spring too.

 

There is similar difference also with choice of analog filter, "Clean" vs "Wide".

This exchange is what I was remembering imperfectly:

 

 

Posted April 11, 2016

  Superdad said: 

Hi Ed:

 

John hypothesized to me the other night that part of the reason the T+A DAC sounds so much better at 512 is that is run at the frequency of the clock. The act of dividing down the master clock itself produces additional jitter.

 

Oh that's right! That would actually make sense as to why its so disproportionally better. Dsd64 to dsd128 to dsd256, based on noise profiles, sure. But the big step up to dsd512? I think you may have hit the nail on the head here!

[craighartley]

Thank you Miska☺️ Beautifully explained: I finally begin to grasp the range of filters. 

[craighartley]

37 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

This feature is already in HQPlayer Embedded where you can select different filters for "1x" and "Nx" rates.

 

Miska,

Will you be bringing this feature to HQPlayer Desktop, as that would be wonderful?

[craighartley]

1 minute ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, eventually it will land there too...

 

Thank you!

[craighartley]

15 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.

 

This feature is already in HQPlayer Embedded where you can select different filters for "1x" and "Nx" rates.

 

Miska,

Can I just check the definition of hi-res that we are using in this discussion is purely about sampling rates, and not the number of bits? So 24 x 44.1 and 24 x 48 recordings are not high resolution in terms of choice of filters?

Thanks.

 

[craighartley]

17 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, exactly.

 

I don't even count those as real hires...

Thanks. 

 

I’ve just been trying the mqa filter with hires files for the first time. Very nice. I’d resisted trying it earlier through prejudice against anything with the mqa label! You wouldn’t consider renaming it would you?  

[craighartley]

17 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Yes I have considered renaming it, but haven't figured out suitable name for it yet. It is originally designed for playback of folded and unfolded MQA content, but it works pretty nicely with proper hires material as well.

 

Disregarding MQA material 😊, how would you describe the difference between the polysinc mqa and the plain polysinc filter (which is what I used for everything for a long time)?

[craighartley]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

It is closer to poly-sinc-short, while being even shorter. It begins to roll-off a bit earlier on purpose and also trades some stop-band attenuation for even shorter impulse response while maintaining reasonably fast roll-off.

Thank you Miska. I’m not surprised it becomes hard to come up with one- or two -word  names for these filters! Please forgive my further question, but what is it that makes it work well for hi-res files, as has been reported? 

[craighartley]

10 hours ago, sdolezalek said:

 

Jussi:  After a multitude of threads discussing the digital to analog conversion, I still don't think that most visitors to this site understand the three simple principles you have laid out above: 1) If you ears are highly sensitive to time domain response -- choose [these] filters; 2) if your ears are frequency response sensitive -- choose [these] filters; and 3) if your computing  or DAC system allows for conversions to occur far outside the audible band you can have the best of both worlds, but should still pay attention to which modulator you are using, so use [these] filters...(filling in the [these] designations in HQPlayer would also be helpful  )

It also provides a great rationale for why many of prefer using HQPlayer for these conversions -- because we can make the choices that best suit our ears, not those of our DAC designer.    

Yes please could someone fill in the [these]?!🍝🤔

[craighartley]

Much more elegant solution to separate client and server. And thank you for the separate choices of filters for 1-x and n-x; only trouble is makes me want to have separate sample rate limits for each, because the limit chosen for one can limit the use of filters for the other.

[craighartley]

On 9/6/2018 at 10:39 PM, Miska said:

 

They are very different. DSD5 is fifth order and can adapt some of the parameters, but otherwise it is fairly static one. It is in a way closer to a traditional modulator. ASDM7 is seventh order and more adaptive in various ways, I'd call it more modern. ASDM5 is similar to ASDM7 but fifth order. Fifth order modulators are slightly less demanding for DAC's DSD noise filter, while seventh order ones are otherwise better.

 

Miska,

 

Which modulator do you use with T&A DSD DAC 8? Or, in other words, is this a DAC that technically suits 5th or 7th order?

 

thanks

 

Craig

[craighartley]

4.0.0 working nicely for me at the moment, in tandem with Roon. You can also use the Client on a remote PC to change the Mode/Filter/Modulator/Max sampling rate settings while Roon/HQP are playing, then pause the music in Roon, and the new settings will take effect when you press Play. It would obviously be better if you could do this inside Roon, but still. Halfway house would be if you could put Client on an iPad.

[craighartley]

18 minutes ago, firedog said:

Is it possible to download and install just the client on your remote PC if you have HQP desktop running on your server? 

Yes, that’s how I’ve got it. The client is on the remote PC along with the Roon ‘remote’. The streamlined server portion of HQP Desktop is on the server PC along with Roon server. 

[craighartley]

13 minutes ago, craighartley said:

Yes, that’s how I’ve got it. The client is on the remote PC along with the Roon ‘remote’. The streamlined server portion of HQP Desktop is on the server PC along with Roon server. 

Or did you mean can you buy the client separately? In which case, no.