HQ Player on Roon Nucleus?

Audio Gear Talk HQ Player
1

What is the function of HQ Player on a Roon Nucleus. Having activated it as a new zone music cannot be played as to the other zones generated.

3

HQ Player is third party DSP software published by Signalyst which can operate as an audio distribution ā€œbackendā€ with Roon. An HQ Player zone is only active if you have downloaded the HQ Player software, installed it on a computer connected to the network that your Nucleus is on and directed Roon to the IP address of that computer. See here.

You can read more about HQ Player in threads in the HQ Player category of this Forum. This is my view about HQ Player.

4

Thanks, Andrew. I studied this before activating HQ Player via the Roon App on my Nucleus. But when pushing the play button in the HQ Player Zone (a radio station is selected) I get the message that no connection could be created!??? Could it be that theHQ Player is hidden behind the DSP button of a zone selected and that there is no need to create the HQ Player Zone if there is no additional component in the network which runs this third party software???

5

There is no occasion to create an HQ Player zone unless you have downloaded and installed the HQ Player software on a computer. If you have not done that then there is nothing for an HQ Player zone to connect to.

Have you downloaded and installed HQ Player ? If not, stop worrying about this type of zone. If yes, then follow the instructions in the KB article.

6

HQPlayer is separate software that needs to go on a separate PC. The function within Roon allows you to connect to and use that additional PC as an output. It does nothing on its own as you have discovered.

7

Thanks Henry. If I understand things correctly HQ Player isnā€™t automatically installed on my Roon Nucleus where I selected ā€œlocal hostā€ when activating the zone. Thus I wonder why HQ Player should be installed on a Roon Nucleus.

8

HQ Player cannot currently be installed on a Roon Nucleus. The Nucleus runs Roon OS as an operating system and Roon OS only runs Roon Server.

If you want to use HQ Player with a Nucleus it must be installed on a separate computer. You can only use ā€˜localhostā€™ when Roon Core and HQ Player are on the same computer, and that is not currently possible with a Nucleus.

Roon does not come with HQ Player installed. If you want to use it, and it is by no means necessary, then you must download and install it separately and, other than the trial version, pay an additional licence fee to Signalyst.

If you want to know what HQ Player does, read this. If that sounds like a lot of complicated gobbledygook, then you are unlikely to want it.

9

Paragraph two above.

Nucleus is Roon only. You can share machines in Windows, Mac and even Linux but not Nucleus. And in the primary use case for Nucleus, HQPlayer introduces levels of complexity that takes it away from the original plug and play appliance type vision of the device.

10

Thanks to all! I had never heard of HQ Player before. WinAmp, Audirvana, JRiver, foobar2000 were known players/renderer I used before. I think the Roon player is much better.

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12

Exploring HQPlayer sounds fun, but I am hoping I can be clear on whether or not it can work with my configuration:

Room 1:
M1 iMac on network with local music files on external HDD connected to the iMac.

Google WiFi connects toā€¦

Room 2:
Roon Nucleus+ connected to Schiit Bifrost 2/64 via USB in the main system.

Question is if I can install HQP on the iMac in Room 1 but listen to local files on the main system in Room 2.

13

You would need to connect the DAC to something else, that is HQPlayer NAA capable.

Additional thing to take note of, is that data would need to travel from Roon Nucleus to the M1 iMac and then back after processing in HQPlayer. So there is some amount of network bandwidth consumption to take into account, especially in case it is wireless. Not a problem for modern wireless in good environment, but it dependsā€¦

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14

Thanks, Jussi.