Roon and HQ Player

There are also several threads on Roon's community site about HQPlayer. Questions get answered very quickly and Jussi does participate.

I have no idea what you mean about "stops working". HQPlayer may require settings to get its best, but once setup it has never "stops working" for me, other than once when there was an update to Roon. That was figured out fairly quickly and that was the old version of HQPlayer, long after v4 was released.

Also, you can indeed reinstall both Roon and HQPlayer (and Windows for that matter) with your original license key. I have done this before without issue. I have in fact moved to a new server box and all of my licenses work just fine.

Also, if you are using Linux, in any flavor, it is in fact open source. That is exactly the reason that most people who use Linux are using it.

I certainly understand that when things don't work correct getting frustrated and posting. I do ask that if someone wants assistance, they would be better served by posting what is happening, instead of "stops working". It may very well actually not be HQPlayer that stopped working, but instead a flavor of open-source software, OS or otherwise (my experience is that if someone uses open-source OS they are probably "playing" with other open-source products), or a computer issue, a connection issue, etc., for that matter.
 
kennyb123 said:
No, they can’t. But HQPlayer isn’t a best-in-class player either. It’s a real-time DSP engine that is best-in-class in terms of the number of filters it offers. The designer, Jussi, has said that he doesn’t want people to use his player as a pass through. To him it’s all about the processing.
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Just curious - if HQ Player isn't a best-in-class player, then what is?
 
To be clear about stopped working: I was simply listening to music on hqplayer and it stopped.

But anyway I will give reinstall it on the same machine with Windows as OS.

I don’t know if it is true, there are opinions that the windows wasapi/asio driver sounds better then linux alsa, so i will give it a try on that first, especially when using audiophile optimizer.

For me linux sounds pretty well by the way.
 
Randy Myers said:
I never questioned Linux sound quality. I know a lot of people use it and like it, I simply have never had a reason to try it :).
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Me neither, a few of these high end pc buiders have doubts about that linux alsa driver, interesting background about these things at jcats forum: jplay.eu are all of these settings explained, and I know from another high end builder, who used to do everthing on linux went to windows.

What confuses me, linux sounds for my ears pretty ok. And the nucleus, roon rock, euphony stylus,all use that alsa driver. And to think further: streamers are also a kind of computer. What kind of software and driver do they use?
 
W9TR said:
Just curious - if HQ Player isn't a best-in-class player, then what is?
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For me to call it a best-in-class player, it would have to have the best sound quality. Squeezelite easily sounds more transparent than HQPlayer - and it's not subtle. Squeezelite sounds far better than Roon too. So it gets my vote for best-in-class player.

Jussi refuses to provide HQPlayer with a pure passthrough that has no added processing as he doesn't want his product used that way. I think that's because he hasn't tried to optimize it to sound the best when just simply passing the data on. That's unfortunate.

Squeezelite can't be used on its own. It is just a player. LMS is needed to provide library management features. The best-in-class library management application is Roon. Nothing else comes close.

Roon has it's own player, but it can also stream to either HQPlayer or Squeeze and allow them to take over as the player. Both sound better than Roon's own player, but neither sound as good when paired with Roon as they do when standalone.
 
Obviously, the entire process is important. A playback engine and the user interface are both important. User experience has a hands down winner in my view, and that is Roon. HQPlayer can actually be used on its own, however it is best to use a good GUI tool like Roon. Not familiar with Squeezelite, but it cannot be used on its own, it is 100% dependent on other GUI tools such as Roon.

HQPlayer is designed around its filters and up-sampling capability. If it were simply a pass through, then I could see no value in using it. I would simply use Roon by itself, which is actually very acceptable (read pretty darn good) on its own.

Squeezelite appears to be, from my short research, from Logitech and it appears that it was mainly intent on the open-source community, linux etc. Yes, there is a Windows version... info seems a bit sketchy. Not sure if it does up-sampling or DSD for that matter. I simply could not find the info on a quick search this morning. It may very well be out there, but those links were not abundantly obvious. I am not sure it is supported any more. I did find one article that stated it has not been developed since 2016... but not sure that is accurate or not.

Let's just say it in not mainstream like Roon and HQPlayer are and leave it at that.
 
Randy Myers said:
HQPlayer is designed around its filters and up-sampling capability. If it were simply a pass through, then I could see no value in using it. I would simply use Roon by itself, which is actually very acceptable (read pretty darn good) on its own.

Squeezelite appears to be, from my short research, from Logitech and it appears that it was mainly intent on the open-source community, linux etc. Yes, there is a Windows version... info seems a bit sketchy. Not sure if it does up-sampling or DSD for that matter. I simply could not find the info on a quick search this morning. It may very well be out there, but those links were not abundantly obvious. I am not sure it is supported any more. I did find one article that stated it has not been developed since 2016... but not sure that is accurate or not.

Let's just say it in not mainstream like Roon and HQPlayer are and leave it at that.
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I was asked to give my opinion and I did. I’m not trying to engage in a competition. I have the ability to run Roon, HQPlayer, LMS/Squeezlite and MinimServer/MPD on my Antipodes server and can switch between each with a single click. So my opinion is based on actually using each and listening to each.

I was also careful to say that I was only speaking about the “player”. These are applications. HQPlayer is a DSP engine plus a player plus a library manager. If we are assessing the best-in-class application the the entire package should be assessed. These aren’t all apples to apples so I think it’s important to clarify what it is that we are talking about.

HQPlayer is by far the best-in-class DSP engine, as I’ve already stated. Not everyone needs this, but Roon and Squeezelite also provide the ability to upscale. Their DSP engines aren’t as good, but they do the job.

Yes Squeezelite is open source. It’s actually used commonly in purpose-built music servers. Both Innuos and Antipodes include it as an option, as do many others. By that measure I consider it mainstream. Purpose-built servers tend to sound better - and in some cases a heck of a lot better than this same software running on a general-purpose computer. The harm done by using a general purpose computer might not allow one to hear differences in these players. It’s exactly why HQPlayer recommends using an NAA.

My point about pass through is that the only way to assess the players sound quality is to hear how they each sound without applying any processing. I can accomplish this with every other player except HQPlayer. I mentioned that as it’s important to note caveats. What I can do with Roon is assess the transparency of their DSP engine simply by turning it on and off with a DSP configured. Most users including myself have found that the DSP degrades sound quality. I can’t do this same comparison with HQPlayer as DSP is always turned on.
 
IME trying many of the usual suspects HQplayer is the best player out there in terms of sonics. For me - I do no upsampling, no filters and it's the most natural / best. ROON handing off to HQPlayer is very good. HQPlayer stand - alone is outstanding. Drag in a song via Windows or remote control via HQPDcontrol (I know it's clunky) is unbeatable (again IME).
 
Always been interested in HQPlayer but had until recently been using an Ethernet DLNA connection to my Bricasti DAC. With the recent addition of an Antipodes K50, I am now using its AES/EBU output and can now run HQPlayer. My question is - perhaps to Kenny - if I am not going to do any upsampling, does ROON/HQ Player provide any SQ advantage over ROON/Squeeze?
TIA
Craig
 
crwilli said:
Always been interested in HQPlayer but had until recently been using an Ethernet DLNA connection to my Bricasti DAC. With the recent addition of an Antipodes K50, I am now using its AES/EBU output and can now run HQPlayer. My question is - perhaps to Kenny - if I am not going to do any upsampling, does ROON/HQ Player provide any SQ advantage over ROON/Squeeze?
TIA
Craig
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Both Roon and HQP can do upsampling. However, HQP has literally dozens of filters that you can chose from to listen to your music. Roon only has 3 or 4 filters from what I remember. Some filters work better with certain kind of music (jazz, classical, rock, etc.) so you can explore and pick what sounds best to you.

Also, both Roon and HQP allow you to incorporate DSP files to make corrections to the speaker/room time/frequency response. IME, if used properly, that feature alone will give the listener the most bang for the buck.
 
crwilli said:
My question is - perhaps to Kenny - if I am not going to do any upsampling, does ROON/HQ Player provide any SQ advantage over ROON/Squeeze?
TIA
Craig
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No, not to my ears. But Roon/Squeeze is limited to 192K and DSD64. Since you are using AES, I’m not sure that matters.
 
crwilli said:
Antipodes have told me not to bother with HQPlayer if I didn’t intend to do any upsampling.
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It depends on your intended use case. For example, if you want to stream you can do so via HQPlayer Client app which does not require ROON. Depending on your system and network setup this can yield the best streaming in terms of sonics versus ROON -> HQplayer or ROON -> Squeezebox.
 
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