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On 2/12/2021 at 5:03 PM, Miska said:

 

I don't know about that (or very interested either), but they do accept DSD1024. Which is the same from USB point of view.

 

 

Jussi, is there a fix yet for PCM 1.536 and DSD 1024?  I just received a Holo May and I'm only getting PCM 768 @ 24 bit.  No 32 bit either.  While HQPe has options to select those settings the NAA isn't supporting it.

 

2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output connect to 192.168.1.6:43210 [ipv4]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network endpoint: Holo Audio UAC2.0 Gen2 Enhanced: USB Audio (hw:CARD=Enhanced,DEV=0)
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output discovered 1 Network Audio Adapters
+ 2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output connect to 192.168.1.6:43210 [ipv4]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 44100/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 48000/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 88200/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 96000/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 176400/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 192000/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 352800/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 384000/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 705600/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 768000/24/2 [pcm]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 2822400/1/2 [dsd]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 3072000/1/2 [dsd]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 5644800/1/2 [dsd]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 6144000/1/2 [dsd]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 11289600/1/2 [dsd]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 12288000/1/2 [dsd]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 22579200/1/2 [dsd]
2021/04/17 20:03:04 NAA output network format: 24576000/1/2 [dsd]

As you can see, it is your NAA that only supports 24 bit and only up to 768000 PCM.

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1 hour ago, Johnseye said:

As you can see, it is your NAA that only supports 24 bit and only up to 768000 PCM.

I would think it is YOUR NAA, not Jussi's code.  The May needs the correct firmware (3.0.12) and the correct driver on your NAA.  Jussi's software does way above what you are looking for.

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16 hours ago, Johnseye said:

Jussi, is there a fix yet for PCM 1.536 and DSD 1024?  I just received a Holo May and I'm only getting PCM 768 @ 24 bit.  No 32 bit either.  While HQPe has options to select those settings the NAA isn't supporting it.

 

Did you remember to flash USB firmware that has those rates enabled? I believe by default the DAC nowadays ships with the highest rates disabled.

 

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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On 4/18/2021 at 12:57 PM, ted_b said:

I would think it is YOUR NAA, not Jussi's code.  The May needs the correct firmware (3.0.12) and the correct driver on your NAA.  Jussi's software does way above what you are looking for.

 

10 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Did you remember to flash USB firmware that has those rates enabled? I believe by default the DAC nowadays ships with the highest rates disabled.

 

 

It wasn't the NAA, it was the firmware.  Zeljko at Euphony thought it might have been the NAA.  After "downgrading" the May dac's firmware everything works as expected.  Thanks Jussi for pointing me in that direction.

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On 3/21/2021 at 2:20 PM, Miska said:

 

Yes. poly-sinc-ext2 is also totally different filter from poly-sinc-ext. I like ext2, but never really the ext. So I expect large differences.

 

 

I disagree about this. Since it is non-apodizing it is not very good for uncolored sound, because it leaves the high frequency aliasing mess in place. So cymbals and such will have some unnatural glare and sheen around them due to the aliasing components. It will also put out about million times more (120 dB) ultrasonic noise than ext2 or sinc-S.

 

I'd say sinc-S is the "most resolving" filter, but may have too much edginess and hardness in the sound for many albums.

 

@Miskathis post shied me away but I took an interest in Sinc L  nevertheless after reading the PGGB thing about mining CDs overnight with 64 Gb RAM machines. @ my limit of SDM 128 7EC it matches the description of PGGB mined PCM. Based on the few records I played so far @44.1 piano was disturbing with raised levels of metal strings resonances that might be consistent with sitting next to the piano in a church but not with ie Pollini heard live in a nice venue. But @88.2 I found Savall's Battuta, Bezuidenhout's Mozart or Rachmaninov/All Night Vigil/Hillier quite gorgeous with both density (have to lower the bass volume with my tone control ; might be a benefit the other way round for some)and details enhancements. So, is you condamnation of Sinc L ubiquitous or does it make sense with excellent classical recordings at a rate of 88.2 and above?

HQ Player 4 Mac Mini M1

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Hi guys, I've jumped into the fire to see if I prefer HQP upsampling to my Holo May NOS settings.  And, if I end up liking it enough, I may build a dedicated hardcore Room Core that can handle the highest upsampling.   I have a really powerful PC now that I'm running Roon on, but its not a dedicated system.  Right now with my settings, I don't really get any bug free playing beyond 768K (I have the right firmware on the May that supports higher).  I'd like to figure out the best settings, and also find a guide or something on how to optimize my PC for HQP.  I am technical, I used to build one of the first commercial audiophile Windows servers back in the day.  What I am working with:

  1. Personally built Windows 10 Pro PC:  Ryzen 3900X CPU, 32GB Ram, Asrock 570 Creator mobo with PCIE 4.0, PCIE 4.0 SSD drive, Nvidia RTX 2070 GPU. My music is on an internal SSD drive.
  2. Stack Audio Link II with LPS Ropieee endpoint  For both Roon and HQP NAA.  I have seen it connect @ 1500M and DSD 1024X to May. 
  3. Holo May KTE with Firmware 3.12 (the one that support the higher sample rates).
  4. I use a speaker EQ for my setup with 2  parametric bands that copied from Roon I have added to HQP in the Pipeline setup.  
  5. I use digital volume control via Roon, or HQP 
  6. Direct balanced from May into a VTV Purifi Amp design (my speakers are better than 100db efficient, so I have plenty of gain in this topology, in fact I regularly listen with 20db or more digital attenuation).
  7. I listen to a lot of hi-rez files and DSD.
  8. See my pics showing my current HQP settings  and  a screenshot of my Windows performance monitor while playing a working 768K upsampling 44.1K file (its not sweating).

How can I optimize my PC to get the most powerful upsampling out of it?  What is the bottleneck?

 

What's the most upsampling I can expect from this system?

 

What are the best HQP settings for the May?

 

hqp1.png

Resource monitor.png

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@Miska, I have a hypothethical feature question/request.

 

How difficult would it be to make HQPlayer recognise one or two flags/tags and change settings accordingly?

E.g. 0º/180º phase (this would interest me) or Filter 1/Filter 2 (some users may wish to change filter with different genres)

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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1 hour ago, Jean Paul D said:

But @88.2 I found Savall's Battuta, Bezuidenhout's Mozart or Rachmaninov/All Night Vigil/Hillier quite gorgeous with both density (have to lower the bass volume with my tone control ; might be a benefit the other way round for some)and details enhancements. So, is you condamnation of Sinc L ubiquitous or does it make sense with excellent classical recordings at a rate of 88.2 and above?

 

No, it likely works fine for hires, since at those higher rates there is not so much content energy around Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate - 44.1 kHz in this case). Apodizing filters are needed primarily for 44.1/48 kHz sampling rate content.

 

So your experience pretty much matches my expectation of the behavior.

 

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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1 hour ago, John Hughes said:
  1. Stack Audio Link II with LPS Ropieee endpoint  For both Roon and HQP NAA.  I have seen it connect @ 1500M and DSD 1024X to May. 

 

I think the bottleneck is likely here if you are getting distorted sound.

 

You could try connecting the DAC directly to your computer and use the ASIO driver just to check. Although I'm not sure if the AMD chipset can do those 1.5M rates.

 

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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18 minutes ago, semente said:

@Miska, I have a hypothethical feature question/request.

 

How difficult would it be to make HQPlayer recognise one or two flags/tags and change settings accordingly?

E.g. 0º/180º phase (this would interest me) or Filter 1/Filter 2 (some users may wish to change filter with different genres)

 

It could be done, but it is quite a bit of work. Changing phase is possible with gapless playback and not much different from current ReplayGain support (phase control is part of volume control in HQPlayer). But every filter change would mean a gap at such track boundary. So you'd want to specify same filter for entire album to keep gapless playback.

 

I'll think about it...

 

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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23 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

No, it likely works fine for hires, since at those higher rates there is not so much content energy around Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate - 44.1 kHz in this case). Apodizing filters are needed primarily for 44.1/48 kHz sampling rate content.

 

So your experience pretty much matches my expectation of the behavior.

 

Thank you ; makes 48 fs capable DAC desirable : still T+A DSD 8 or Holo Spring on my short list unless somebody gets crazy scared of the May's heat and gets rid of his or hers  cheap ! More seriously : not sure a Mini M1 8gB of RAM can do L 7EC @256 or 7 @512 with Sinc L which would give a Holo the edge since I would feel playing PCM PCM more kosher OK what have you on a R2R than on the sigma delta T+A

HQ Player 4 Mac Mini M1

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1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

I think the bottleneck is likely here if you are getting distorted sound.

 

You could try connecting the DAC directly to your computer and use the ASIO driver just to check. Although I'm not sure if the AMD chipset can do those 1.5M rates.

 

So, I was able to convert a file to a wav 1.5M sample rate using HQP pro.  This file does play using HQP directly through the Stack II. I wanted to see if it would pass that signal through. And it does, the May says 1.5M and sound does come out.  It is super distorted, but I'm not sure if the file itself was distorted when I saved it.  Does this matter or is the Link II just overloaded with a sample rate that high?

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2 hours ago, Miska said:

 

It could be done, but it is quite a bit of work. Changing phase is possible with gapless playback and not much different from current ReplayGain support (phase control is part of volume control in HQPlayer). But every filter change would mean a gap at such track boundary. So you'd want to specify same filter for entire album to keep gapless playback.

 

I'll think about it...

 

 

If it's too much work don't worry about it.

 

I still haven't tried the ReplayGain thing but I will post my impressions when I do...

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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22 minutes ago, John Hughes said:

So, I was able to convert a file to a wav 1.5M sample rate using HQP pro.  This file does play using HQP directly through the Stack II. I wanted to see if it would pass that signal through. And it does, the May says 1.5M and sound does come out.  It is super distorted, but I'm not sure if the file itself was distorted when I saved it.  Does this matter or is the Link II just overloaded with a sample rate that high?

 

Such distortion is expected result if the USB interface hardware has limitations or if the OS doesn't have specific support created for those rates.

 

Depending on the NAA software module version in Stack II, it could start working if you set "DAC Bits" to 16 in HQPlayer settings.

 

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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9 hours ago, John Hughes said:

How can I optimize my PC to get the most powerful upsampling out of it?  What is the bottleneck?

It is not clear to me from your post but IME, and I'm running everything in Ubuntu not Windows, the biggest difference in upsampling was moving Roon away from HQPe and leaving HQPe alone with nothing else running, when you start getting in the EC modulators and high CPU usage in general Roon although it doesn't use much, maybe 3 to 5 percent of overall CPU, these "interruptions" into hqplayer processing and more importantly core distribution / coordination processes will impact as much subjectively speaking as 30 to 50 percent.

 

I'm running a passive Ryzen 5600X with HQPe and moved Roon to an ESXi VM with only 2 virtual cores (the physical is a 3700X) and my system performs flawlessly.

 

You don't have to virtualize of course, you can get a small nuc or industrial small PC or else and run roon there, that's what I will do if I don't want the virtual anymore. I backup the roon vm twice a day with Veeam Community edition free so no worries if I need to restore and no need to go through roons highly inefficient backup.
By the way roon talks to HQPe over wireless and it is perfect, no drops or anything.

 

You can try it with a laptop or small PC as a POC.

 

Ideally IMO I would use Ubuntu or HPOS not windows but everyone has their preferences.

 

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On 4/23/2021 at 7:12 AM, Miska said:

 

Even though PCM begins sounding fairly OK at 1.5M rates, with most of the harshness gone (still a bit left). But mostly PCM still has some of that flat sound character left. And a bit closed-in. Lacking the weight and openness of DSD.

 

For example with PCM bass drums as still a bit like "flap flap" without body, instead of more bodily "thump thump" with DSD.

 

So I keep driving my DACs with DSD from the EC modulators... Detail, smoothness, air and body.

 

I agree, but there are few areas that PCM is better, at least for me: punch, impact, transients and the bass goes a little bit lower!

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6 hours ago, MemoryPlayer said:

I agree, but there are few areas that PCM is better, at least for me: punch, impact, transients and the bass goes a little bit lower!

In my case, DSD needs power in the PC System - most like the VRMS power delivery on the Motherboard. Once you feed that with high peak and transient current low distortion PSU - you get the bass to growl - PCM is flat sounding in comparison.

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10 hours ago, MemoryPlayer said:

I agree, but there are few areas that PCM is better, at least for me: punch, impact, transients and the bass goes a little bit lower!

 

No, that's where in my opinion PCM lacks as I explained earlier. It sounds flat, non-dynamic and shouty. Specifically in those areas you mentioned.

 

Signalyst - Developer of HQPlayer

Pulse & Fidelity - Software Defined Amplifiers

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7 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Are you using R2R DAC for PCM output or something else? Since the this is about the conversion technology used...

 

No, I'm using Oppo Sonica DAC (ESS Sabre) and iFi Diablo BB1793 (most of the time now), with Sennheiser HD800S and Oppo PM-1, both equalized with your pipeline setup and AutoEq:

https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq

I like much more the sound from DSD up, but PCM has more impact and punch, I can't explain why!

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