M Scaler vs. HQPlayer

[atxkyle]

For those who’ve tried both with a Chord TT2 or DAVE, did you prefer M Scaler or HQPlayer for upsampling music streamed from Tidal/Qobuz?

 

Please respond to the poll and feel free to add further color to comments below. Thank you!

 

(Note: this question is specific to streaming. For owned music I’ve trialed PGGB and its fantastic!)

[atxkyle]

22 minutes ago, dmance said:

From a purely number crunching perspective of Sinc filters and noise shapers, both MScaler and HQPlayer are very close ...with HQPlayer's SINC-L PCM filter at 2M taps (vs MScaler 1M taps) and LNS-15 15th order noise shaper (vs MScaler 11th order) being able to retrieve more details at 16fs upsampling, IMO.

However that is not the entire story. If you are using USB to get the bitstream to your DAC, any RF noise accompanying the digital signal gets into the DACs clocking and small-signal processing. So a comparison of PC+HQP->DAC vs PC->MScaler->DAC also includes the variation in RF emissions from the PC doing the heavy lifting vs the MScaler. 

If you want a revelation in sound quality from your Chord DX DAC, your chain should be: PC+HQP->SCR-DX->DAC or, if you have the funds, PC+HQP->SRC-DX->OPTO-DX->DAC with OPTO-DX on battery power. Yes, its a chain of black boxes and wires that needs to be tucked away ... but it gets you a pragmatic solution to the elimination of RF noise (at least in the signal!).

Thanks for the reply! What does "SCR-DX" refer to?

[atxkyle]

1 hour ago, kennyb123 said:

M-Scaler brings a greater improvement to my TT2.  Despite that I have moved to HQPlayer as I found that the music server matters even more.  My M-Scaler is up for sale now to help fund my music server upgrade.

 

Passing PGGB-processed files through M-Scaler degrades sound quality - even in bypass.  That’s another reason I no longer use M-Scaler.

That's cool of you to be transparent and share knowledge on this, even though you're currently selling your MScaler.