Roon/HQplayer vs Hqplayercontrol for SQ

[Miska]

5 hours ago, cpcat said:

My priority is sound quality.  Roon seems to be very popular and @Miska uses it -or has.  Hqplayercontrol provides a direct /native connection to hqplayer/hqpe and there is a theoretical

advantage.

 

I use HQPlayer Client (the official control application) mostly, since I also use Qobuz quite a lot. I do have Roon and HQPDcontrol too, but I don't use those as much. If I want to listen Tidal, now I can also use mConnect Player more, since there is more pure non-MQA content available again. Roon is useful in combination with Tidal, since it can decode MQA before passing it to HQPlayer.

 

5 hours ago, cpcat said:

For SQ only, what are thoughts/impressions of either Roon/Hqplayer or Hqplayercontrol?

 

With HQPlayer Client and HQPDcontrol, HQPlayer server has direct optimized access to the content and the control applications just do control. With Roon, also all content data passes through Roon. In some cases this may make the difference.

 

5 hours ago, cpcat said:

Also, if using Roon, does it make a difference if your library is local to hqplayer or on NAS, network, other PC?

 

Depends more on how the content is relative to Roon server, and how Roon server is relative to HQPlayer.

 

For example in my case, Roon Server is running on headless Debian 12 server with it's own local copy of library content. And HQPlayer server is running on some other machine, thus the Roon server machine is running only Roon and nothing else. HQPlayer Embedded servers are running only HQPlayer Embedded and nothing else. While my HQPlayer Desktop instances are usually on computers I use for many other things as well, except one single Windows based installation which is Windows 11 Pro with only HQPlayer Desktop and nothing else.

 

[Miska]

4 minutes ago, cpcat said:

BETTER with the library on NAS vs using the library on the HQPe PC (both via Roon).

 

Which way you use library on HQPlayer Embedded if not through Client or HQPDcontrol? The web interface? But from playback perspective all the three ways are the same, playback itself happens the same way. Regardless where/how you control the playback, when source is HQPlayer's library (which is the case for HQPlayer Client or HQPDcontrol).

 

4 minutes ago, cpcat said:

Would you consider HQplayercontrol equivalent to HQplayer client in regards to SQ?  It would seem so, but I don’t use client much.

 

Since both use the control API same way, there's no difference.

 

4 minutes ago, cpcat said:

The other question that arises is , from reading your response describing your setups:

When using HQplayercontrol (or client) and HQPlayer embedded, do you prefer the library local to the HQPlayer embedded  PC, or elsewhere?

 

Except for one server, I have the library mounted as SMB share from "NAS" which is Intel Xeon based server running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I just have too many servers to bother maintaining that many copies of the library.