In my chain, (Mac mini > Roon > HQPlayer4 > Holo Red > Holo May > Holo Bliss > Susvara) I’m losing, to my understanding, roughly 14.0dB worth of gain along the way.
-6.0dB due to sending DSD (instead of PCM) to the May
-5.0dB due to EQ adjustments to the Susvara (Oratory’s suggested curve)
-3.0dB due to constant output volume in HQPlayer
On a headphone as hungry for power as the Susvara, this is a huge loss! I try to make up for it by using the Bliss and XLR, but there are still plenty of tracks where I wish I had more headroom.
@jussi_laako Is there a way for me to compensate for this loss at all? Like increasing the HQPlayer volume output because of my Pipeline setup for EQ?
Yes, going to PCM would be an instant boost, but DSD does sound better to my ears, and I don’t want to lose out on that.
You are not necessarily losing any. What is your volume setting in Bliss? Instead you could be winning lower distortion and noise.
This is hardware property of the DAC implementation. Set PCM gain compensation in HQPlayer settings to -6 dB and you are on level with PCM.
No loss here at all, since you have 0 dB level at some frequency since there seems to be some +5 dB peak boost there somewhere.
No loss here either, you are just making up headroom for inter-sample overs that would be otherwise hard clipped (like many DACs do). Hard clipping those would just generate distortion.
Having headphone amplifier with enough gain. There’s no way you can exceed maximum digital output value range. If you need more gain, it needs to be in analog domain after the DAC output.
That is just 6 dB of extra analog gain, which could be just as well be in the headphone amplifier…
Have you considered trying for example Ferrum Oor? It has 0, +6 and +16 dB gain settings for balanced output and -10, 0, and +10 dB gain settings for unbalanced output.