Hi everyone ,
i’m using the trial versions of roon and hqplayer which i run on an intel i7 12560 , 32gb ddr4 with a hugo2 dac.
I can easily get to dsd512 x48 and qobuz sound quality is generally better than my streamer.
However, I notice a decrease in dynamics. Is it just my impression? Are there any recommended settings for hugo2 ?
thanks everyone for the replies
Well, first since you are playing to a Chord, I would suggest only outputting PCM. Chord Dacs (except for Dave), decimate the incoming DSD back into PCM. So, by feeding it DSD you are forcing an additional conversion in the Chord BEFORE it starts it’s own processing of the digital stream.
Also, I think, with Chord there is no way of bypassing their own processing, so with HQPlayer you are having it process and then Chord is redoing all the work. That is not a DAC I would use with HQPlayer.
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I didn’t know about dsd to pcm conversion. Thank you
This is partially true, all of the modern chord DACs are setup to work with the Mscaler. So if you input 16x PCM it behaves the same way as it does with the Mscaler and bypasses the internal up-sampling. (There is still a second stage up-sampling as part of the pulse array output, and there’s no way around this.)
FWIW, the Chord USB implementation isn’t very good. You can get static in one channel from time to time (pretty random). And it can be very annoying at high volume.
Something to look into if you want to get into hqplayer up sampling into Chord DACs is the SRC-DX from AudioWise. It converts USB into dual bnc (same format as Mscaler). Then you can use a dual bnc adapter into the Hugo2. I use this with Hugo2 and Qutest, and it works great.
It’s a bit of an investment, but an hqplayer setup running 16x PCM up-sampling into the SRC-DX works very well. I almost daily drive this.
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Yes this is almost an essential buy for HQPlayer + Chord users
Else better to stick to digital coax or optical (upsample to PCM192kHz) - still very good results but not the best you can get
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