I am a relatively new user of Roon and have been enjoying it. I have now ventured into setting up HQPlayer integrated in with Roon. Have installed Roon and HQPlayer on a Windows 11 PC. I have a Cambridge CXN100 as my endpoint device and it has been working well with Roon (it is a Roon Ready device). After configuring HQPlayer as a zone in Roon and playing around with HQPlayer settings I was finally able to play something in Roon and output it from HQPlayer to my PC speakers. Now I am trying to configure my CXN100 as the output device but I am not sure how to do that. I believe there is some “NAA application” I am supposed to run in order for HQPlayer to discover it but not entirely sure. In any event, when I go to Settings in HQPlayer and the Output tab I run through all of the various dropdown choices under Backend and my CXN100 doesn’t appear in the Devices dropdown. How do I get HQPlayer to recognize my CXN100 and configure it as the output device?
It doesn’t have NAA.
If you don’t want to plug it into the PC (because it’s too far away), you will want something like a Raspberry Pi 4 as an endpoint to plugin to the CXN100 over USB. That can be running Jussi’s mini OS or something like Ropieee where you can use it with other systems as well.
I use Pi 4’s with multiple devices with Ropieee to give me HQPlayer, LMS and PlexAmp output. They work extremely well, especially for the price
Thank you very much for your reply. As I understand from this there is no way for HQPlayer to “discover” the network connection of the CXN100 and I would have to USB tether it off of a host computer. Please let me know if there is another way.
There are some devices like the iFi Zen Stream (and some other’s) that natively support HQPlayer NAA discovery network protocol, but there is no way to do this for a device that doesn’t already support NAA.
That’s why I suggest a Pi as it is the easiest (but not only) way to make it work over USB. You could also use a Pi with a HAT which i do for another of my DACs where I have a free Toslink port.
There are some user’s that use cheap mini PCs for this running Windows or Linux, but this is effectively the same as a Pi, for devices that might need a specific device driver.
I hope this is making sense to you, if not feel free to ask other questions as hopefully someone can help answer them.
Thank you Michael. So the Pi would essentially be functioning as a network gateway for my streamer. Are there limitations on sample rate conversion with using a USB connection to my streamer (i.e., can a USB connection inhibit the ability to do DSD512 or DSD1024)? My streamer natively handles up to DSD512.
Is another option for network discovery using a UP Gateway? Just exploring a few of the options.
Up gateway was the name of the PC machine that I could not remember. It will depend on whether your DAC support’s connection without an additional driver and without running over DOP protocol which limits the effective rates.
With my MA Mini-i 4 and a Pi I am able to run DSD512 with HQPlayer (but my computer is not quite fast enough to sustain it). The Pi handles this without any issues as the Mini-i 4 supports direct DSD without an additional driver being required.
RPi4 is good and inexpensive HQPlayer NAA (network endpoint) device. There are other options too. If native DSD doesn’t work at the moment (and thus being limited to DSD256 over DoP), it may be possible to add support for it.
Thanks for all of the comments. I did get HQP up and running by connecting my network player to the host computer via USB and then running networkaudiod and installing a network player specific driver. HQPlayer then recognized my output device. One thing I have experienced in the few days I have been running HQP…seems HQP doesn’t require as much CPU resources with upsampling and filtering as Roon’s DSP, or at least is more efficient with CPU resources. When running Roon DSP (upsampling to DSD512) with no filters I am experiencing clipping. However, when I run HQP’s DSP, upsampling to DSD512 along with filtering, I experience no clipping. I don’t even see the “Processing Speed” indicator in the Signal Path which usually indicates the processing speed is greater than 100x. Interesting. I did enable Multicore DSP as well as CUDA Offload in HQP, which both combine to split and optimize the processing burden. Maybe that makes a substantial difference. I know Roon DSP has the option also to enable the parallelization of SDM which enables the multicore function and I have enabled that when using Roon upsampling but it doesn’t seem to eliminate the clipping. Lots more to play with inside of HQP and I have much yet to learn.