I had a very strange experience with HQPlayer over the last weekend. Much listening to all sorts of music on Friday evening, but I was having one of those slightly paranoid sessions where audiophilia nervosa was taking hold, and nothing sounded quite right. Very strange, but the system just did not sound right, a slight digital edge to everything that I was finding quite disconcerting. OK, you get these things sometimes, maybe mood, some might blame inconsistent electricity supply, but there was something that irritating me, not that it was a straightforward task to identify exactly what it was that might be causing the issue.
One culprit came to mind, HQPlayer. The reason for this was that when I started HQPlayer that evening, it seamed to take a very long time to load and then work with Roon, I was with friends that evening and so did not want to spend time messing about with computer audio related stuff, but I did try a quick and simple switch to iTunes, and curiously things seamed to be a much better listen, so I parked the possible HQPlayer issue for investigation at a more convenient time.
On Sunday I had some quiet time on my own to investigate HQPlayer and it took me about 3 minutes to discover the issue, both the filter and dither settings had changed. I flicked these back to my preferred settings, and everything sounded fine again. I am thinking back now to try and work out when or how this has happened. One possibility relates to the fact that there have been a couple of HQPlayer updates recently. When doing these updates I had checked the settings were still as they should be, so I remain puzzled. I will certainly keep a watchful eye on this one in the future, maybe one day I will work out how the 'self changing' filters come to occur. Meanwhile, I have to say it was an interesting experience. It is a kind of blind testing, when your system changes itself without telling you! I'll be honest here, I cannot quite remember what the 'rouge' settings were. It was a case that I easily spotted the settings were wrong, selected the correct settings, played some music, it sounded great, I then thought, what settings was it on? I might be wrong, but I think the filter setting was FFT, something very obviously visually different to poly-sinc-ext, this could be my memory playing tricks though.
The key point here is that I have stated previously that the effects of HQPlayer's filters are very subtle, but this experience has demonstrated to me that these subtle differences can make the difference between sitting down and happily listening to music or sitting down and being hit with audiophilia nervosa, which is no fun.
One culprit came to mind, HQPlayer. The reason for this was that when I started HQPlayer that evening, it seamed to take a very long time to load and then work with Roon, I was with friends that evening and so did not want to spend time messing about with computer audio related stuff, but I did try a quick and simple switch to iTunes, and curiously things seamed to be a much better listen, so I parked the possible HQPlayer issue for investigation at a more convenient time.
On Sunday I had some quiet time on my own to investigate HQPlayer and it took me about 3 minutes to discover the issue, both the filter and dither settings had changed. I flicked these back to my preferred settings, and everything sounded fine again. I am thinking back now to try and work out when or how this has happened. One possibility relates to the fact that there have been a couple of HQPlayer updates recently. When doing these updates I had checked the settings were still as they should be, so I remain puzzled. I will certainly keep a watchful eye on this one in the future, maybe one day I will work out how the 'self changing' filters come to occur. Meanwhile, I have to say it was an interesting experience. It is a kind of blind testing, when your system changes itself without telling you! I'll be honest here, I cannot quite remember what the 'rouge' settings were. It was a case that I easily spotted the settings were wrong, selected the correct settings, played some music, it sounded great, I then thought, what settings was it on? I might be wrong, but I think the filter setting was FFT, something very obviously visually different to poly-sinc-ext, this could be my memory playing tricks though.
The key point here is that I have stated previously that the effects of HQPlayer's filters are very subtle, but this experience has demonstrated to me that these subtle differences can make the difference between sitting down and happily listening to music or sitting down and being hit with audiophilia nervosa, which is no fun.
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