HQ Player

[JTS]

7 hours ago, Miska said:

I can also add it as display to the main window, that is not a problem. 

 

+1 on this. I use ROON with HQP and loved having the ability to work with the filters in on the main interface of Desktop 3.x. It made it quick to run through filter/modulator options with minimal clicks.

[LoryWiv]

8 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

 

Hi Miska,

 

A certain thing I miss in 4x is the window which made possible to set filters without opening preferences. Even not to set or change, just for the info during playback, to be aware what filters is set at the moment without stopping playback and opening preferences would be nice. I understand, you streamlined the outlook of the player, but this info was pretty useful. Thank you.

That information as well as a change settings menu is available in client.

[JTS]

8 hours ago, Miska said:

 

RME has just one type of DAC inside, AKM's DAC chip that is SDM converter. So it cannot be really compared in PCM/DSD sense to Holo Spring or Denafrips.

 

Understood. I think the thing I am responding to is my perceived sound quality differences between the the AKM chip and the R2R technology of the Ares/Holo Spring.

 

8 hours ago, Miska said:

With ADI-2 it is important to check that the DSD Direct is enabled. If you are using 7th order modulator in HQPlayer, you could try setting the DSD filter in ADI-2 to 50 kHz. Alternatively you can try 5th order modulator in HQPlayer with ADI-2 filter set to either 50 or 150 kHz.

 

Yes. I have DSD Direct enabled. I've tried both 7th order and 5th order modulators. I am slowly working my way through filter and modulator combinations. Currently I'm circling around using the DSDx 256+fs modulators in combination with straight up Polysinc-mp and polysinc short-mp.

 

8 hours ago, Miska said:

With these comparisons you may find the character you are looking for. Another thing to pay attention to is selection of reference level in ADI-2 to avoid clipping in preamp on loud peaks, for my preamp +13 dBu is suitable. 

 

 

Yes! When I first dropped the RME it sounded HORRIBLE, because had it running at +13dBu BAL into a Schiit Freya>Neumann KH120As. I had to full attenuate my Neumanns, timpot and all, to get a reasonable volume level on the Freya when using SS or Tube gain. I think I was getting a ton of clipping in the Freya, too.

 

 In the end, I am now running the RME at +1 dBu with the trimpots on the Neumanns at 0 and it sounds much better.

 

8 hours ago, Miska said:

T+A DAC8 DSD is also one, but the PCM side is based on TI DAC chips which are really SDM converters, so it doesn't have pure PCM like the RME doesn't either. But DAC8 DSD has a discrete pure DSD DAC for the DSD side. However, rates higher than DSD128 require Windows, or replacing the USB interface firmware and use of Linux.

 

I am going to sit with the RME for another month or so and see where I end up with it. It is growing on me. I will take a look at the T+A dac and also drag the holo spring to the studio and see how it feels there.

 

Thank-you for your input, Miska.

 

- Justin.

 

[Eugene Muzychenko]

On 5/8/2019 at 8:31 AM, Miska said:

Maybe they didn't want to bother creating DLL/DPLL to generate proper virtual sample clock for the audio and thus don't support event driven WASAPI mode at all.

What exactly do you mean by the "generate proper virtual sample clock"? Kernel Streaming drivers don't need to expose internal clocks directly. They must respond to current stream position requests, VAC does that. VAC also generates notification events if requested, so event-driven mode is fully supported.

 

The only thing that could affect stream timing precision is that VAC reports position change only after the appropriate data portion has been actually transferred. For example, if event period (ms per int) is 3, stream position is updated every 3 milliseconds. Within this period, repeated position requests will return the same value.

[LoryWiv]

8 hours ago, Miska said:

 

When you click a track in the playlist, playback is started immediately from that track and is also highlighted. Please check that client says it is version 4.0.2 in the splash screen when it is starting up...

Yes, I'm on 4.02. You're right about clicking track, it does highlight and initiate playback, it's just that it can take as long as 3-5 seconds to do so. I've determined that this takes longer with certain filters than others, not a big concern now that I've settled on poly-sinc-xtr-mp-2s.

 

Unfortunately I'm unable to reproduce the CPU load problem, not sure why it would happen for you. If the load is 100% on all cores, there's one component used in HQPlayer that could do that, but HQPlayer is already internally setting it's sleep timeout to one millisecond...

 

I'm on latest Windows feature update.

This doesn't happen on each playback --> stop event, and when it does I can clear the CPU load by entering settings menu from desktop then closing it. Strange. I'll see if I can pin down the specific scenarios in which it occurs then report back.

 

 

 

 

[AnotherSpin]

34 minutes ago, LoryWiv said:

That information as well as a change settings menu is available in client.

 

Of course. My question to Miska was about possibility to return it to HQP desktop, for those who do not use/need Client.

[JTS]

I just updated to 4.02 and I am experiencing an issue with the volume control in DSD mode. With the volume up full in the desktop interface, I get a very quiet output when using DSD.

 

If I change the Vol Min settings to -3dB in the preferences everything works fine - the volume is fixed at -3dB. Here is a cap of the settings with which I am experiencing this issue.

 

This issue does not happen in PCM, nor did I experience it in 4.01.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DancingSea]

11 hours ago, Miska said:

 

You could both talk to Swinsian developer to see what he/she thinks about the idea of adding support for HQPlayer as playback engine. The HQPlayer control API is open, with client example source code available. So anybody who wants can do front-ends to HQPlayer.

 

 

I have written the following to Swinsian and am awaiting a reply:

 

"Aloha,

 

Swinsian has come up for discussion on the Audiophile Style website (formerly Computer Audiophile) in the HQPlayer thread.  As I assume you know, HQPlayer is a very high quality sound engine for Mac and Windows.  However, HQPlayer has a very rudimentary and much maligned GUI, yet continues to thrive despite this limitation, owed in part to Roon which allows HQPlayer to take over the sound processing for the Roon front end.  And in part because Jussi, the developer of HQP, is a genius.

 

The Roon/ HQPlayer combo functions well.  However, Roon is super expensive and incorporates many features we don’t need.  At $500 for a lifetime license, or $120 per your in perpetuity, Roon is distasteful to many.  HQPlayer itself costs $240, thus $740 is a lot to spend on audio software.

 

And so, we at the HQPlayer thread on Audiophile Style would like to nominate Swinsian to allow the option to incorporate HQPlayer as your audio backend.  The link below takes you to the thread.  The Swinsian reference begins with “SuperDad’s” post, he’s John Swenson, the owner and chief engineer of Uptone Audio.

 

 

 

Miska (aka Jussi), the developer of HQPlayer posts daily on that thread and said the following in regards to Swinsian becoming a HQPlayer front end, he’s responding to SuperDad and me:  

 

"You could both talk to Swinsian developer to see what he/she thinks about the idea of adding support for HQPlayer as playback engine. The HQPlayer control API is open, with client example source code available. So anybody who wants can do front-ends to HQPlayer.?”

 

On the Mac side, Roon is our only choice for a HQPlayer front end.  I have no idea what’s involved adding that functionality to Swinsian, or even if you want to, but I can say there are many HQPlayer users who’d happily ditch Roon and buy Swinsian if you did incorporate HQPlayer.

 

And if you could create a functional iOS remote as well, you’d enter our hall of fame!

 

Hopefully you will answer our plea!  If you get it to function at a Roon level in terms of stability, we’d happily pay $40 - $50 for Swinsian.  With Roon, we just set HQPlayer and then live in the Roon front end, only returning to HQP periodically for sound tweaks.

 

Mahalo From Maui,

John

[lucretius]

2 hours ago, Eugene Muzychenko said:

 

 

Thanks for stopping by! Much appreciated!

[Superdad]

23 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

I have written the following to Swinsian and am awaiting a reply:

 

Hi John:

Thanks for writing that letter!  It is near perfect, though myself I would have heaped in more praise for how feature-rich yet intuitive Swinsian is. Let us hope for a positive reply from them.  I have not been able to figure out what country the Swinsian developer resides in nor his name.  

 

Since you mentioned me in your letter: Just to clarify, @Superdad is me, Alex Crespi, owner of UpTone Audio, and @JohnSwenson is my dear friend and engineering partner (shared also with Sonore).

 

Again, thanks for reaching out to Swinsian.  Do let us know if you receive a reply.

And mahalo to you too! 

[Le Concombre Masqué]

SQ remark : 4 reveals 64 rather than 128 as the sweet spot in my context that is (on WS 2012)

 

full range convolving (save)

26 rather than 36% cpu charge with DSD64 source

TEAC 501

 

it's true of 3 too but, like ext2, I had to experiment it through 4 to dig it for it's much more pronounced. With 3, I thought : Ok, more air more micro details. But 128 yields a thiner more (comparatively) projected sound.

[Le Concombre Masqué]

Loopback Help still needed : (macOS Mojave). My story today :

 

Qobuz playing : a Pass thru was automagically created and it worked like a charm (but I had to launch HQP without convolution first and click convolution later)

 

Great I thought ; let's do IINA (better than VLC as far as IQ is concerned IMO) had to dub IINA the instance created in Loopback while IINA was playing ; selected IINA/LOopback as output in IINA, relaunch, then the Pass thru became active and I could select the Loopback instance dubbed IINA in HQP as input. Odd ! Very low level ; however, the diode showing activity of my tweeter amp (4 ways active loudspeakers) was brightly lit indicating a loud but inaudible to my ears activity in the treble range.

 

Went back to Qobuz and... nothing never were able to make it work again or automagically recreate a Loopback for Qobuz instance even after reboot...

 

Couldn't get Safari to get a working Pass -Thru...

[Le Concombre Masqué]

14 minutes ago, Le Concombre Masqué said:

oops

 

 

[DancingSea]

9 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

Hi John:

Thanks for writing that letter!  It is near perfect, though myself I would have heaped in more praise for how feature-rich yet intuitive Swinsian is. Let us hope for a positive reply from them.  I have not been able to figure out what country the Swinsian developer resides in nor his name.  

 

Since you mentioned me in your letter: Just to clarify, @Superdad is me, Alex Crespi, owner of UpTone Audio, and @JohnSwenson is my dear friend and engineering partner (shared also with Sonore).

 

Again, thanks for reaching out to Swinsian.  Do let us know if you receive a reply.

And mahalo to you too! 

 

Aha, good points!  I even googled “John Swenson SuperDad” and somehow concluded they were one in the same.  I will clarify with Swisian about who is who.  Yes, it would’ve been better to add praise for Swisian, I haven’t honestly used it so I don’t personally know, I was just excited to find a Mac based possibility for a HQP front end.  

 

There’s a certain Princess Leah quality to this scenario “This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.”  Jussi will not budge, so we must turn to The Force 😂👏

[LoryWiv]

3 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

 

Of course. My question to Miska was about possibility to return it to HQP desktop, for those who do not use/need Client.

Makes sense, apologies if I answered hastily before fully understanding your request.

[perpetualapprentice]

2 hours ago, Superdad said:

I have not been able to figure out what country the Swinsian developer resides in nor his name.

 

Swinsian was originally developed by James Burton, a UK resident. He was once quoted in an article regarding user frustration with iTunes. Ownership could have changed hands since - it was quite a few years ago

[Bob Stern]

10 hours ago, Bob Stern said:

To enable a front-end program to display the elapsed time while playing a track, will it slow down HQP if the front-end sends a status query to HQP once or twice per second...

Read more  

8 hours ago, Miska said:

It doesn't really have noticeable impact. Roon is doing that. But you can also subscribe to status queries like my Client does, then you don't need to poll, but instead HQPlayer itself sends you updates.

 

Thanks.  I'm currently using the polling method, and since you say that's OK, I won’t bother you with questions on how to subscribe to notifications.

[Le Concombre Masqué]

13 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Don't set either to none. You can use same filter for both to have same behavior v3 had.

 

HQPlayer will automatically select between the two choices  depending on your source. For RedBook and 48k sources, 1x filter is used, for any source rates above these, Nx filter is used.

 

I don't dig this logic. If there's one thing I know for sure it's that Closed Form won't play with 48 and my DAC while I have just enjoyed Closed Form 16M with RB and maybe I'll love it also with the few 88.2 and fewer 176.4 albums I have when I'll feel like playing them.

Why not a setting per resolution ?

would be nice if it could be xtr2s @48 polysinc-short@96 and mqa@192 etc (actually that might well be what I would set with some occasional different choice ie I just preferred xtr2s rather than sinc short to navigate the too opulent low end of Kate Bush's 24/96 50 words for snow...)

[Miska]

7 minutes ago, Bob Stern said:

Thanks.  I'm currently using the polling method, and since you say that's OK, I won’t bother you with questions on how to subscribe to notifications.

 

If you look at the sample source code there's attribute called "subscribe":

<Status subscribe="1"/>

 

[Miska]

7 minutes ago, Le Concombre Masqué said:

Why not a setting per resolution ?

 

Because size of the set is unbounded. Now the diving rate between 1x and Nx is 50 kHz.

 

HQPlayer is not limited to rates like 44.1k and 48k. It is equally fine to have a file at 123456 Hz sampling rate.

 

I would also like to avoid adding too much complexity to the already complex GUI.

[Le Concombre Masqué]

1 minute ago, Miska said:

 

Because size of the set is unbounded. Now the diving rate between 1x and Nx is 50 kHz.

 

HQPlayer is not limited to rates like 44.1k and 48k. It is equally fine to have a file at 123456 Hz sampling rate.

 

I meant commercially available rates (PCM, that is where filters apply) : 44.1 48 88.2 96 176.4 192, you know...

WOULD BE nice to have settings for each of those. never seen 123456789 Hz offered on any platform but you sure could keep a fall back setting of the 1x Nx type for such oddities

[Miska]

9 minutes ago, Le Concombre Masqué said:

I meant commercially available rates (PCM, that is where filters apply) : 44.1 48 88.2 96 176.4 192, you know...

WOULD BE nice to have settings for each of those. never seen 123456789 Hz offered on any platform but you sure could keep a fall back setting of the 1x Nx type for such oddities

 

In my opinion commercial releases should choose sampling rate more flexibly based on the content instead of sticking to such large rate steps. That's why HQPlayer 4 Pro lets one select output rate freely. In any case, such settings create unnecessary bloat and complexity, and I bet very few would actually use it.

 

But you could of course create your own front-end that implements this with HQPlayer...

 

[Sevenfeet]

I've been experimenting with 4.02 (haven't upgraded for good yet) and I decided to do an experiment to get HQPlayer to play Apple Music.  Yes, I know, not exactly CD quality but we subscribe to it and Tidal and there are times where you need to listen to something not in Tidal.

 

In order to do this, I decided for the hardware approach and hooked up a spare Apple Airport Express to the Toslink input on the Mac Pro that is my current HQPlayer machine.  It took me a while to figure out exactly how to make this work.  Jussi's documentation isn't exactly detailed with many examples of the new Input URI format.  And since I mainly use HQPlayer through Roon, I haven't been playing with the UI much at all.

 

But I did get it to work!  So here were the steps:

 

Hardware: 2008 Mac Pro hacked to run High Sierra 10.13.6

HQPlayer 4.02

Apple Airport Express 2nd gen

 

1. Open System Preferences -> Sound

2. Make sure the Input default is the Digital In input.  Play music through the Airport and verify that the little digital VU meter is seeing music.

3. Launch HQPlayer 4

4. Check the Input setting in preferences, choosing whatever output filter of your choosing and other parameters

5. Click on the URI pulldown and select "audio:default/44100/2.  The list window then shows a single line item for the "input"

6. Double-click the "input" in the list window.

 

At this point, HQPlayer should be playing whatever is playing through the input, or in my case, being provided by the external Airport Express

 

 

[LoryWiv]

8 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Because size of the set is unbounded. Now the diving rate between 1x and Nx is 50 kHz.

 

HQPlayer is not limited to rates like 44.1k and 48k. It is equally fine to have a file at 123456 Hz sampling rate.

 

Related question: if one selects SDM bit rate / limit to 48 x256 but the DAC does not support 48k-base DSD rates, my assumption is HQ Player will send the DAC 48k-base that must then be converted to 44.1k base. if this is correct, is there any advantage to using this setting? Specifically, while this setting does seem to reduce CPU utilization for 48k, 96k and 192k files which is good, if it requires more processing by the DAC (conversion 48k to 44.1k for compatibility) would that additional processing by DAC partly negate taking purest advantage of HQ Players audio engine for best sound quality?

[Miska]

21 minutes ago, LoryWiv said:

Related question: if one selects SDM bit rate / limit to 48 x256 but the DAC does not support 48k-base DSD rates, my assumption is HQ Player will send the DAC 48k-base that must then be converted to 44.1k base.

 

I'm not aware of any DAC that would do such conversion. So either they support 48k-base DSD, or they put out wrong audio or silence.

 

With 4.0.2 onwards, even if you select rate / limit of 48k x256, HQPlayer won't send that out unless you also tick the "48k DSD" check box. I added this to avoid somewhat common problems of falling back to unsupported rate with some filter choices or such.

 

26 minutes ago, LoryWiv said:

Specifically, while this setting does seem to reduce CPU utilization for 48k, 96k and 192k files which is good, if it requires more processing by the DAC (conversion 48k to 44.1k for compatibility) would that additional processing by DAC partly negate taking purest advantage of HQ Players audio engine for best sound quality?

 

Hmmh, 1x/Nx filter selection is not related to that in any way... And DACs don't do such conversion...

 

1x filter -> used for 44.1/48k content

Nx filter -> used for 88.2/96/176.4/192k content