HQ Player zone with Roon Bridge device?

Audio Gear Talk HQ Player
1

Is it possible to install HQPlayer on my the same computer as my RoonCore and send that stream through a RoonBridge device? I would like to use a rasberry Pi in my main listening room, but would like to use the HQ player (and convolution engine) from the core just streamed through the Pi. Is this possible

2

Hi,

RoonBridge supports the RAAT protocol; HQPlayer support NAA; so in order to use HQP outputting to bridge type device than that bridge device needs to support NAA.

The SonicOrbiter SE is a good choice as it supports both protocols.

Sorry I don’t know how well the Pi supports NAA, I’m sure others with chip in here.

Hope that help.

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3

So, the device DOES need to have Roon Bridge on it to be controlled? Is there any documentation on using HQPlayer with Roon? From what I read on here, Roon sees HQ player as a zone?

4

Hi Shayne,

Yes, Roon sees HQ Player as a network zone and audio distribution then occurs from HQ Player. You don’t need Roon Bridge on a device in order for it to be a Roon HQP zone or an HQP NAA. It can be convenient to have it, if you want to distribute directly to the device using RAAT instead of through HQP.

The Raspberry Pi can be an HQP NAA and Jussi has published bootable images for the Pi as well as daemons for Debian and Ubuntu. The Debian daemon will run on Raspbian. There is a thread in the HQP section where people set out their use of the Pi as an NAA.

There is an issue with the Pi as an NAA handling DSD. The Pi uses a common bus for Ethernet and USB and this can get crowded with DSD resulting in soft pops or clicks. I have experienced this with DSD 128 and other users have said it becomes much greater with DSD 256. Rene ( @rbm ) has found that the Pi3 handles this issue better.

If you are planning on using DSD via USB output I would suggest looking at a Cubox-i as an NAA instead of the Pi. Again, you will find threads about using the Cubox as an NAA in the HQP section of the forum.

For commercial solutions the SonicOrbitor SE has both Roon Bridge and HQP NAA, as does the recently released microRendu.

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5

thank you!