HQP: Roon has lost control of the audio device

When I try to stream Tidal → Roon → HQP, I get maybe 1min of upscaled music before there’s a total dropout and the message “Roon has lost control of the audio device”. Then Roon just sits there non-responsive - I can browse my albums, but can’t play anything at all and a complete reboot is needed to get it working again.

System is a 2017 MacBook Pro, with Roon and HQP running via the standard Roon ‘localhost’ settings via USB into a Chord Qutest. I can play local RedBook and 96khz FLAC files within the HQPlayer Desktop app quite happily in PCM only mode and push the processing hard (sinc-L / LNS15 / 768k) without a hitch, and it all sounds amazing.

I’m running HQP in evaluation mode but these dropouts occur only a couple of minutes after loading HQP up (and only a couple of minutes after a whole system reboot), so nowhere near the 30min time limit. The dropouts happen even if I reset HQP to 384khz and the default settings via the Help → Clear data option. The Qutest is disabled in Roon so there should be no issue there.

Any help gratefully received - HQP sounds amazing and I’d buy it immediately if I could get it working properly.

Some other program may be attempting to use the audio device. Is Exclusive Mode an option for the Device Setup in Roon ? I am not an expert in MacOS but this thread may assist:

In this case, of course, you will be using the HQP Zone and I don’t know if Exclusive Mode is an option there.

Yes, I’m assuming something similar but can’t see any way to force exclusive mode in Roon for HQPlayer. And HQPlayer is feeding the Qutest which I’ve disabled in Roon. Equally the HQP diagnostics log refers to a read timeout at the point at which it all crashes, but can’t work out if that’s the cause or the effect!

The more I play around with this, the more it seems to be a Tidal/network issue rather than a problem with Roon → HQPlayer → Qutest stability.

I can stream local FLAC files while upscaling to 705/768khz using either Roon’s own upsampling or HQPlayer with no issues. However, streaming Tidal files I get dropouts and the ‘lost control of audio device’ message when upscaling via HQPlayer and the ‘Tidal media is loading slowly’ message when upscaling via Roon. There’s no connection issues streaming non-upscaled Tidal files using a direct link to the Qutest or wirelessly via my Stream Box S2 Ultra.

Irritating, as I have a rock solid 190Mbps internet connection to my laptop.

Can you trial Qobuz inside Roon? To compare with Tidal.

Would add another data point.

So I think I may have found the culprit, the beta Private Relay feature in macOS Monterey. Have switched that off and it all seems to be working again without the dropouts for the last hour or so. Hopefully that’s sorted it for good.

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