I didn’t have time yesterday, but I wanted to be more specific about the Roon and HQP settings I was using for comparison. In both cases, all source material is upsampled to DSD256. Basic details of my setup are in my profile, but in the comparisons, I’m switching between using the PlayPoint as a RoonReady endpoint and as an HQP NAA. When in Roon mode, the iMac is out of the picture (which is a big plus for me).
Roon DSP settings:
Headroom adjustment: –5
SRC filter: Smooth, minimum phase (linear for large ensembles)
SDM: 7th order (CLANS)
SDM gain: 0dB
Parallelize SDM? Yes
Enable native DSD processing? Yes
Other Roon DSP settings disabled
HQP settings:
Vol max: –5.0dB
SDM oversampling: poly-sinc-shrt-mp (poly-sinc-shrt for large ensembles)
Modulator: DSD7 256+fs
Multicore DSP? Yes
SDM pack: None
Auto rate family? Yes (don’t think there’s an equivalent setting in Roon)
For whatever reason — mostly dumb luck, I think — these two sets of settings sound very similar to me, in my system. Reading posts subsequent to my original, and on reflection, there’s no question that I could get Roon and HQP to sound more different by varying the settings, so on balance, I think @Audiogeek’s overall characterization of “different rather than better” is more accurate.