HQ Player and MQA

[jussi_laako (Jussi Laako (Signalyst))]

@albert_dattolo

the purpose is to leave any decoding to the dacs

And for best quality, purpose is precisely not do that. Especially, if you want to do that, there’s no point in putting HQPlayer on the path at all, it is just going all wasted.

@albert_dattolo

i aslo can agree upsamplig some content sounds better

MQA does that as well.

My take is that the result is better when you do just decoding (that is what Roon can do for you already) and then leave that upsampling part to HQPlayer instead of MQA’s upsampling.

Even more so, because when you do it this way, you can utilize all the headphone/room/speaker correction, headphone cross-feed, dynamic loudness and all other DSP features. While if you leave the decoding/upsampling to the DAC, you cannot do any of this. Which have a huge impact on the overall quality!

@albert_dattolo

but the endless combo settings make it impossible for me to use in its entirety complex state

If you play MQA content, I recommend you choose from the five different filters (poly-sinc-mqa/mp3 and poly-sinc-gauss-hires variants). It is not too complex in my opinion, especially if you use the table provided in latest manual versions as guide.

[danny2]

What they can’t dispute is that their filtering is what is known as “leaky” - meaning lots of aliasing artifacts. That’s been demonstrated. It’s simply a fact.
In general, a leaky filter is considered a poor quality one.

If you or MQA like the sound of those leaky filters, that’s a different question.

[Eminent_One]

I have found I like MX with MQA PCM.
Any downside to that or should I be using an mqa or hires filter?

[jussi_laako (Jussi Laako (Signalyst))]

I’m assuming here Roon is performing MQA decoding. So your filter choice is just fine.

You could as well try poly-sinc-gauss-hires or poly-sinc-mqa/mp3 instead, for Nx.