This morning I finally got around to trying HQPlayer. I have to be honest, I was not really looking forward to this. It is not a case of not being interested in HQPlayer's goodness, it's just that I loathe hassle with new software, and hassle with software in general. I am not an IT specialist but I do spend a vast proportion of my life using computers at work, so I'm pretty competent with these things, it's just when things do not work and you get into the diagnosis and debugging phase that I tend to get very frustrated and loose patience. Hence my irrational fear of new software. I have also been following the HQPlayer thread on CA, and I do not think reading endless posts about other folks problems have helped my enthusiasm much.
Anyway, this morning I armed myself with a large mug of coffee, downloaded HQPlayer, a bit of faffing around with settings to get Roon to talk to HQPlayer and HQPlayer to talk to the mR, and I had music playing before the coffee was finished. In typical bloke style I had not even looked at the instructions. So all pretty straight forward in the end.
I sat down for a quick listen with HQPlayer simply set the whatever it was set to as default, it was working, so I listened. Very interesting! I did notice that per the default settings HQPlayer was upsampling to 196kHZ. I was picking up some extra detail and could see some positives but at the same time I cannot say I was particularly enjoying the experience. At some level I did not like it, but for sure there was something different going on. The Blades are pretty unforgiving with treble and the Pro transparent to everything, it was almost like there was too much detail and too much happening in the high frequencies that it was not a pleasant listen and almost appeared to be upsetting the overall tonal balance. After a quick read of the HQPlayer manual, I thought I would try minphaseFIR / NS1 / poly-sinc-2s. This I could listen to all day, much better. So far so good. It works, and clearly the settings are doing something that my ears and brain are reacting to. Due to this early result and the fact that set up and use are far easier than I anticipated, I think I have already decided that I will be continuing with HQPlayer after the 30 day trial. In fact, looking at the number of options I think it will take more than 30 days to work out what all the options do in my system and what suits best. Looking at the settings, if you multiply out all the options and combinations there are literally 1000's to choose from, so a little bit mesmerising. I think I need to do a bit of quiet reading up on this stuff to assist with honing in on that perfect combination of settings. I don't want to spend the rest of the year experimenting! Anyway, having said all that, I am getting what appear to be good results in the first couple of hours, and this without really knowing what I am doing! So a good start, I wonder where all this will end?
Anyway, this morning I armed myself with a large mug of coffee, downloaded HQPlayer, a bit of faffing around with settings to get Roon to talk to HQPlayer and HQPlayer to talk to the mR, and I had music playing before the coffee was finished. In typical bloke style I had not even looked at the instructions. So all pretty straight forward in the end.
I sat down for a quick listen with HQPlayer simply set the whatever it was set to as default, it was working, so I listened. Very interesting! I did notice that per the default settings HQPlayer was upsampling to 196kHZ. I was picking up some extra detail and could see some positives but at the same time I cannot say I was particularly enjoying the experience. At some level I did not like it, but for sure there was something different going on. The Blades are pretty unforgiving with treble and the Pro transparent to everything, it was almost like there was too much detail and too much happening in the high frequencies that it was not a pleasant listen and almost appeared to be upsetting the overall tonal balance. After a quick read of the HQPlayer manual, I thought I would try minphaseFIR / NS1 / poly-sinc-2s. This I could listen to all day, much better. So far so good. It works, and clearly the settings are doing something that my ears and brain are reacting to. Due to this early result and the fact that set up and use are far easier than I anticipated, I think I have already decided that I will be continuing with HQPlayer after the 30 day trial. In fact, looking at the number of options I think it will take more than 30 days to work out what all the options do in my system and what suits best. Looking at the settings, if you multiply out all the options and combinations there are literally 1000's to choose from, so a little bit mesmerising. I think I need to do a bit of quiet reading up on this stuff to assist with honing in on that perfect combination of settings. I don't want to spend the rest of the year experimenting! Anyway, having said all that, I am getting what appear to be good results in the first couple of hours, and this without really knowing what I am doing! So a good start, I wonder where all this will end?
1000 Pro - KEF Blade - iFi Zen Stream - Mutec REF10 - MC3+USB - Pro-Ject Signature 12
