HQ Player

[Miska]

21 minutes ago, bobflood said:

True so there must be something going on. But, in the end the separate I2S box approach merely takes what should go on inside the DAC and moves it outside in an attempt to do it better.

 

From my point of view, the whole NAA functionality should be inside a DAC. There are only couple of DACs with such functionality at the moment. Absolutely cheapest such device is RasPi with HifiBerry DAC board (works with the RasPi NAA image), no USB audio involved...

 

Another option are devices like Merging ones with RAVENNA, that don't have a NAA, but instead a different network procotol.

 

[ted_b]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

From my point of view, the whole NAA functionality should be inside a DAC. There are only couple of DACs with such functionality at the moment. Absolutely cheapest such device is RasPi with HifiBerry DAC board (works with the RasPi NAA image), no USB audio involved...

 

Another option are devices like Merging ones with RAVENNA, that don't have a NAA, but instead a different network procotol.

 

So Jussi, are these dacs then the ones with internet inputs, or is there something else inherent in your examples aside from "simply" having internet inputs?  Thx

[DancingSea]

1 hour ago, zerung said:

Do you know how to use this? 
I can only input one...i.e. the upgrade redeem coupon and not the black19 together, implying get only one of the discount....

thanks for any help....

 

Please ignore. Managed this. Needed to reset the cart and apply the generated upgrade code instead of the black19

 

Yes, it’s was a little confusing for me as well.  Apparently the upgrade coupon that you get off the Signalyst website link generates the 25% off, no need for the black19 code.   I thought it was interesting that I was charged 6% sales tax for a transaction processed in Germany with funds going to Finland.  Taxation without representation!

[juanitox]

5 hours ago, DancingSea said:

 

Yes, it’s was a little confusing for me as well.  Apparently the upgrade coupon that you get off the Signalyst website link generates the 25% off, no need for the black19 code.   I thought it was interesting that I was charged 6% sales tax for a transaction processed in Germany with funds going to Finland.  Taxation without representation!

 

the 6% tax must be transfered to the http://anti-troll.org/ ,  😂

[Hammer]

Hi, is there a version of HQPlayer that will output to more than one device at the same time? 

[Miska]

8 hours ago, Hammer said:

Hi, is there a version of HQPlayer that will output to more than one device at the same time? 

 

No, that is more to do with audio drivers, with some audio devices you can do that.

 

Otherwise you will need as many HQPlayer instances as you have output devices. Since HQPlayer engine is tightly coupled with the output device, and HQPlayer instance == HQPlayer engine instance. (for example available settings depend on output device capabilities, etc)

 

[dctom]

On 11/29/2019 at 9:49 PM, dctom said:

Recently purchased HQplayer and enjoying the sound quality - however when I load a very large playlist ,although it plays fine, if  go into the settings menu it freezes. Wondered if anyone else had experienced this.

 

I asked this question earlier

 

would be grateful if anyone knows - does HQ player struggle with large playlists/

[Miska]

On 11/30/2019 at 3:44 AM, DancingSea said:

I thought it was interesting that I was charged 6% sales tax for a transaction processed in Germany with funds going to Finland.  Taxation without representation!

 

ShareIt/MyCommerce is subsidiary of Digital River, which in turn is a multinational company based in US.

 

For comparison, also Apple charges Finnish VAT and has a Finnish VAT registration id, although they don't have a presence in Finland and they perform sales from Ireland. IIRC, here the threshold for where taxation legal entity is required is >= 100 000 EUR/year sales to Finland.

 

Tax regulations vary from country to country, market places like Apple iTunes/AppStore, Google PlayStore and Digital River's MyCommerce know how to deal with complexity of such.

 

[Miska]

8 minutes ago, dctom said:

I asked this question earlier

 

would be grateful if anyone knows - does HQ player struggle with large playlists/

 

Settings dialog is not related to a playlist. If it gets stuck at that point, likely reason is problem with one of the audio device drivers. When returning from the Settings dialog, the previous playlist is reloaded, which in turn means loading metadata for all the tracks on the playlist. That may take some time depending on speed of the computer, storage media and amount of free RAM.

 

But overall, there shouldn't be a reason to frequently open the Settings dialog. For normal use, I almost never need to open it.

 

[DancingSea]

7 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

ShareIt/MyCommerce is subsidiary of Digital River, which in turn is a multinational company based in US.

 

For comparison, also Apple charges Finnish VAT and has a Finnish VAT registration id, although they don't have a presence in Finland and they perform sales from Ireland. IIRC, here the threshold for where taxation legal entity is required is >= 100 000 EUR/year sales to Finland.

 

 

Not that it matters very much, but Digital River charged 6% tax while in my state it’s only 4%.  In the US, it goes by the specific state sales tax.  But I understand, it must take an extra 2% to get it all the way to Finland 😇

[Miska]

Just now, DancingSea said:

Not that it matters very much, but Digital River charged 6% tax while in my state it’s only 4%.  In the US, it goes by the specific state sales tax.  But I understand, it must take an extra 2% to get it all the way to Finland 😇

 

You can ask them about it. If there's something wrong, they can fix it. I have only very vague idea how such things work in the US...

 

[Miska]

On 11/30/2019 at 2:09 AM, zerung said:

Please ignore. Managed this. Needed to reset the cart and apply the generated upgrade code instead of the black19

 

Yes, they don't support multiple coupon codes, that is why it is done this way. The price gets updated to either code depending on which on is entered.

 

[Miska]

On 11/30/2019 at 3:44 AM, ted_b said:

So Jussi, are these dacs then the ones with internet inputs, or is there something else inherent in your examples aside from "simply" having internet inputs?  Thx

 

Ethernet instead of USB. Not related to internet though... The way these work from interfacing point of view is different in many ways compared to USB. From fundamental principles, to electrical and logical level. Also for example NAA and RAVENNA protocols have a huge difference in the way they work since they are designed with different kind of use cases in mind, although from fundamental and electrical point of view they are the same (differences are only in the upper OSI layers).

 

[ted_b]

Sure oops I meant Ethernet input (not internet). So “all Ethernet dacs” have this advantage in your opinion?

[Miska]

11 minutes ago, ted_b said:

Sure oops I meant Ethernet input (not internet). So “all Ethernet dacs” have this advantage in your opinion?

 

From electrical point of view, Ethernet has isolation as long as devices are designed according to the specs and the cable is correct type (UTP) if using copper. Optical Ethernet of course has even more isolation due to the optical nature, so it is natural opto-isolator. From that point of view, the protocol doesn't matter. Of course WiFi has similar isolation properties as well.

 

Protocols come into play on top of this, having different kinds of properties. But that doesn't change the electrical aspects.

 

[Hammer]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

 

No, that is more to do with audio drivers, with some audio devices you can do that.

 

Otherwise you will need as many HQPlayer instances as you have output devices. Since HQPlayer engine is tightly coupled with the output device, and HQPlayer instance == HQPlayer engine instance. (for example available settings depend on output device capabilities, etc)

 

Thanks...I’m trying to link my Hue lights to my music and there is a windows 10 app from Philips which will “listen” to the computer audio output and sync the lights to the music.  I use Roon as a front end, but Roon cannot link another zone with HQPlayer and so I thought if my HQP instance can output to both NAA and the pc system audio device, then I can accomplish what I want.  Any ideas on how I can do this?  Thanks!

[Miska]

11 minutes ago, Hammer said:

Thanks...I’m trying to link my Hue lights to my music and there is a windows 10 app from Philips which will “listen” to the computer audio output and sync the lights to the music.  I use Roon as a front end, but Roon cannot link another zone with HQPlayer and so I thought if my HQP instance can output to both NAA and the pc system audio device, then I can accomplish what I want.  Any ideas on how I can do this?  Thanks!

 

I've used LightDJ app on iPad for that purpose, it listens using iPad's microphone.

 

Problem with Hue is the control latency, so it is not so great. So in the end I went and just purchased regular DMX controlled lights that also have built-in microphone and sound control when not controlled through DMX.

 

[Hammer]

Yeah, I tried LightDJ, and yes, the lag is a problem and so I thought directly tying to the audio chain instead of using the mic would be better.  And it is much improved using the Hue desktop app which I tried using Spotify, but of course, then I can’t use Roon and HQP.

 

I’m now trying to use virtual audio cable and it works in the sense that I can play to it, and the lights blink, but no sound is coming out of HQPlayer.  I selected Virtual Audio Cable as input under settings, and selected 192 kHz from the drop down box on the main screen and hit play, but the time stays at 0:00 and does not increase.  And thoughts?

[Yviena]

Does anyone know which filters in HQPlayer are intermediate phase?

[Miska]

3 hours ago, Yviena said:

Does anyone know which filters in HQPlayer are intermediate phase?

 

"asymFIR" and "poly-sinc-long-ip"

 

[Yviena]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

"asymFIR" and "poly-sinc-long-ip"

 

Oh I thought ps-long was linear phase, so it's actually intermediate phase as described here: http://archimago.blogspot.com/2018/01/musings-more-fun-with-digital-filters.html?m=1 ?

[Miska]

5 hours ago, Yviena said:

Oh I thought ps-long was linear phase, so it's actually intermediate phase as described here: http://archimago.blogspot.com/2018/01/musings-more-fun-with-digital-filters.html?m=1 ?

 

There are three versions, -lp (linear phase), -ip (intermediate phase) and -mp (minimum phase). This is documented in the manual/help...

 

Of course otherwise totally different kind of filter than what he was using there.

 

[Yviena]

8 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

There are three versions, -lp (linear phase), -ip (intermediate phase) and -mp (minimum phase). This is documented in the manual/help...

 

Of course otherwise totally different kind of filter than what he was using there.

 

Yeah i see it now, the i, and l looked the same before i got my new glasses today, first time i tried the ps-long i thought the first entry was a bug as it froze Hqplayer for way too long

[Miska]

25 minutes ago, Yviena said:

Yeah i see it now, the i, and l looked the same before i got my new glasses today, first time i tried the ps-long i thought the first entry was a bug as it froze Hqplayer for way too long

 

All the three poly-sinc-long filters take about the same time to initialize. But it takes insanely long if you try to initialize it for something like 44.1 kHz -> 768 kHz rate conversion unless you have a lot of fast CPU cores... So here the adaptive output rate is your friend really.

 

You are not the first one to say about the 'i' and 'l' difference. I just didn't want to start redoing the naming scheme due to this case.

 

[pcmchild]

On 11/20/2019 at 7:55 AM, Miska said:

 

Maybe it would work, but testing in that respect with ASIO is still a bit incomplete. Not so easy to find things that actually support the spec. For those cases you can put 0 as samplerate, but otherwise same as you normally would. 0 means detect.

 

Since ASIO conceptually doesn't support accessing multiple devices separately, I've been using ASIO for output and WASAPI for input. So no auto-detection. Way to have ASIO for both input and output would need another computer and NAA for the output side.

 

 

That is then another limitation of the loopback software. Setting sample rate is not much of an issue for me in most cases, because sources like Spotify are always 44.1k.

 

 

The list is automatically filled up with the rates the input hardware reports to support.

 

 

Thank you very much for the extensive reply. I took some time to reply because I have been doing testings with both SW and HW loopbacks.

The Chord USB Driver works with both ASIO and WASAPI Exclusive. So I can output from HQP both ways, and therefore can also use both ASIO or WASAPI for input as I need.

I am now using HW loopback connecting the SPDIF-OUT to SPDIF-IN of my motherboard (Realtek ALC889):

    MPC-BE -> wasapi-exclusive -> spdif-out -> spdif-in -> asio -> HQP -> wasapi -> usb -> Chord DAC

Unfortunately I still can't get automatic rate detection (0) to work, I need to specify the rate in the audio: statement.

In practice it is the same as using another PC as source, also because spdif is unidirectional. So I am now only focused on the input part.

How can I input from any external physical source to HQP and get (without resampling) the source original sample rate (automatically detected, without having to to set manually that rate on HQP)? Any method is ok for me, WASAPI, ASIO, etc.

I understand that this not working may be fault of the input port device/driver, so can you tell me any input port devices+drivers you tested and works for this purpose (for windows)?

I was hoping to be able to use the Realtek spdif input, but if that does not work, and there is another PCI or USB input device that works fine with HQP, I may buy it.

I am using Realtek driver 2.82. And as I don't find realtek asio drivers, for asio I am using ASIO4ALL. I am suspecting ASIO4ALL may be the culprit here. Did you ever use ASIO with Realtek chips? What asio drivers did you use?

With WASAPI input to HQP, HQP can receive any sample rate (it seems windows is resampling to the requested rate), but HQP does not accept to play 0 rate, althoug it accepts ENTER and lists it in the playlist. However I am not sure if Windows is first resampling the original to Windows configured rate, and only then from that to HQP requested rate. So I am not sure if windows is not resampling twice.

 

With ASIO input to HQP, HQP  can also receive any sample rate it specifies. The 0 (auto detect) sample rate value works, but not with the file sample rate, but with that last specified sample rate in the audio: statement.  So if before the 0 statement I enter an audio:default/48000/2 statement, then the 0 statement will use 48000. Note I do not have to play the audio:48000, just press Enter so that it goes to the playlist, and if then I enter an audio:0 statement and play it, the used rate will be the 48000. This is valid for any value not only 48000. And this value is kept even after I restart the PC, so it is permanently stored somewhere. So somewhere it is resampling to the rate I specified. Who do you think is doing the resampling and why?

Also I am not getting the pulldown list filled with available sample rates as you mention. But probably the problem is the same as above, and if I get the automatic rate to work, this will likely work ok as well.