Looks like many roon enthusiast using HQ Player.
Visit there website but dont get the point of benefits using it with roon.
Main reason is the DSP engine, to provide various upsampling algorithms and other DSP features. You can also use Nvidia GPU for offloading part of the work to a powerful GPU. It can be used as an alternative playback/DSP/output engine for Roon.
You can find official instructions here:
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The most valuable thing for me is the latency would reduce significantly if using GPU offloading. That helps lipsync when upsampling the audio part of streaming video contents.
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many thanks for your help. W’ll give an try
Most video players allow to set video delay against audio so then no lip sync issue occurs. I’m using such video delaying for years without issues.
Unfortunately if you configure a discrete system (means decoder only do decoding thing) and using HDMI passthru to deny any pre-process (including audio delay) for the best audio quality, you must consider the latency of audio processor especially HQPlayer when watching streaming contents and gaming.
I meant playback from a software player on computer, audio goes through virtual audio cable to HQPlayer and video to computer display (may be TV). Software players allow to set audio and video device separately.
Streaming apps for example TV app on macOS it does not have audio delay design. Things you can do is to reduce the latency of DSP as much as you could. Also gaming console. Not only video / audio syncing issue but also the control feedback out of sync would hurt gaming experience.
You could use a suitable media player on macOS for example VLC.
VLC for macOS cannot use HDMI passthru. Only Apple apps (Music and TV) can.